Conference Agenda

“But now I feel water is like tears, tears of nature.” So says composer Tan Dun about the exploitation and pollution of the environment which characterize the anthropocene. Unsatisfied with current environmental realities, Tan’s compositional practice is informed by his desire to seek balance between the human and nonhuman worlds. His “organic music” reaches towards this goal by exploring the acoustic range of objects from nature, such as rocks or water, and placing their soundings alongside human instruments. In this paper, I examine Tan’s Water Concerto (1998) through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) concept of becoming, arguing that Tan Dun’s piece creates an aesthetic space where humans and water are presented as one mutually dependent ecology. Engaging with Tan’s own statements, textual analysis, and recent scholarship (Morton, 2007; Gibson, 2018; Von Glahn, 2023), I contend that water’s aestheticization in Water Concerto marks it as an active agent and highlights the often-ignored role it plays in the (musical) environment, symbiotically existing alongside humans and nonhumans alike. The multiplicity of water is placed inside the multiplicity of the orchestra, making rigid distinctions impossible and provoking the audience to consider ecological chains where the human is no longer solely dominant.

D&G’s philosophy has much to offer as ecomusicology works to shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric understandings (Allen, 2021). While recent studies have explored Deleuze’s ecosophic understanding of music (Bogue, 2019), operatic performance art as a Deleuzian/Guattarian assemblage (Tiainen, 2020), and Guattari’s three ecologies in recent sound art (Solomos, 2023), investigating contemporary ecomusicological concerns through D/G philosophical concepts remains relatively under-explored. Adding to this conversation, I use Water Concerto as a springboard to gesture towards the wider relationship between D&G’s heterogeneous, changing rhizomatic systems and Jeff Todd Titon’s “music ecologies” (2023), as well as consider the political possibilities and conceptual limits of decentering the human in (eco)musical(ogical) practices within the framework of D/G territorializations and ethics. By critically attending to claims that music is capable of generating new emotions, knowledge, and affects and potentially inspiring political action, I attend to the potential dangers and outcomes of posthumanistic, ecological art and scholarship.