Difference, becoming and event in women's music : Anne Boyd's Ganba

An event is never in the present in ways that we can understand it and make sense of it. It is always in the past or in the future, and connects the past with the future. In any given rendering of it in the future, the past is always different. A realist, representational interpretation of Ganba, however, would understand the work as a bounded entity, the event for which in the past would be understood as he same in the present. Such an illusion conceives of the music as chronologically sequenced in the linear paradigm of time, suggesting that its moment of composition remains the same in the future at the time its moment of composition is recalled. In the Deleuzian critique of Ganba, I have offered a variety of different ways through which to experience Boyd’s music, viewing it as an animate flow, and a dynamic process of intra-activity. The poststructuralist approach I have adopted shifts the focus from the realist discourse to understanding how the music makes itself differently intelligible to the bodies which intra-act with it. I have used the Deleuzian concept of event for considering how Ganba makes thinking its own event. I have suggested that the event gives rise to a moment of dynamic change in which the work might be understood as a potential immanent, a momentary convergence of multiplicity of forces and flows and intra-actions. I have carved out a space in this paper between the actualisation of Boyd’s Ganba, as an inert object as score, and its virtuality, in which it is imagined as a becoming, a movement through other events, a multiplicity of experiences, and a future that remains elusive and as-yet-unknown.