The academic music machine

Is music academia a homogenising machine? Does it privilege particular kinds of music and exclude others? Does it treat music as a discrete category? Is music creation the same as researching music? These are just some of the questions addressed by the three authors in Part I of the book. In the next chapter, McClary sketches the conditions of homogeneity in music academia, unfurling the territorialising processes of the machinic assemblage bound up with Austro-German music and its all-pervasive ideology. Although McClary does not explicitly engage Deleuzian concepts, in what I would argue is nonetheless a Deleuzian mode of thought, she maps a cartography of music academia and opens a space for the becoming of the music academy. In effect, McClary demonstrates the ways in which the conservatory model of training functions as a machinic assemblage. In Deleuze, and Deleuzian-Guattarian thought, the assemblage or the abstract machine is not concerned with what the thing is, or is like" in this case, the intrinsic properties or metaphors associated with institutions loosely labelled 'music academia'" but rather with what makes it function as a machine. McClary's cartography explores the political and social dimensions of the academic music machine. She demonstrates how these are driven by desire, exposing, in particular, their investment in and attachment to the Western art music canon. She shows how the conservatorium territorial assemblage thrives on the power of negative difference: its territorialising mechanisms establish Austro-German music as supremely superior when compared with other kinds of music. But McClary also demonstrates that in each of these machinic operations there is always a deterritorialising impulse, a movement that seeks to undo and challenge the boundaries of the assemblage. She uses the deterritorialising term 'musicking' from Christopher Small to shift the emphasis from what music might mean to what it can do.