Research

“For Ildar Khannanov, an ethnographic account is a means to add specificities to one of Deleuze’s own generalizations, the figure of the nomad. He presents the Bashkirs of southern Russia as possessed of a being-in-the-world that has never been subjected to rules of measurement or representation. The Bashkirs speak about music in terms of law, but Khannanov asserts this law is not a taxis —that is, categorical or structural—but a nomos, a topology of customs. He conceives the melodic line of Bashkirian prolonged song through the Bashkirian experience of landscape, as a surface that is resistant to the “depth” of standard metrical and intervallic analyses, and is instead experienced as “gradual changes and fluctuations of intensity” (p. 257).”

Andrew D. Robbie (Harvard University). Music Theory Online, Volume 18, Number 1, April 2012.

“In the final chapter, startling for its striking evocation of the nomadic culture and music of the Bashkirs in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s philosophical figuration of the nomad, Ildar Khannanov deftly analyses Western melodic line related to its sedentary nature, highlighting Chopin’s music for nomadic strategies that ‘transcend’ sedentariness.”

Elizabeth Gould (University of Toronto). French Studies: A Quarterly Review, Volume 66, Number 2, April 2012, p. 272 (Article). Published by Oxford University Press.

“It is here, and elsewhere in essays by Bruce Quaglia and Ildar Khannanov, that the writers do indeed engage with Deleuze’s ideas in a way that helps to create new perspectives from which to view music. [] Similarly, in the final chapter ‘Line, Surface, Speed: Nomadic Features of Melody’, Ildar Khannanov puts forward a set of ideas based on an initial appraisal of melodic form and harmonic development in a Bashkirian nomads’ song and a subsequent analysis of Chopin’s Ballade No. 2, Op. 38 and Mazurka No. 68, Op. 4, in terms of Deleuze’s theories on nomadism and the war machine. As with Quaglia, what makes Khannanov’s work compelling is the manner in which he applies Deleuze to the task in hand. Khannanov initially discusses at length Bashkirian nomadic culture and applies ideas of movement and nonsedentary behaviour to both melodic form as well as to experience and perception more generally. In doing so, Khannanov is able not only to put forward a set of suggestions as to what has informed the nomadic/non-sedentary impulse for the particular melodic fragment that he discusses, but also to go further and suggest that although Western music is very much sedentary (p. 250), in that the codes and processes by which it can be constructed and measured are now the result of a much more stable/altered set of values, it is also, so he claims, based on nomadic systems and drives. This he asserts by way of an analysis of two passages from Chopin, wherein the harmonic progression is compared to what could be called ‘nomadic musical theory’ within which the importance of metric rhythmic and formal harmonic progressions are destabilised/unseated in order to be rebalanced by a nomadic temporal flow that bears more resemblance to what Khannanov has discussed in relation to the Bashkirian fragment. Ultimately, although the appropriation of Chopin feels slightly forced, Khannanov’s real success lies in the way in which he, like Quaglia, is able to theorise music in relation to Deleuze, not simply adopt the terminology and apply it. Khannanov’s approach interrogates Deleuze by analysing the source material for the latter’s own thoughts. The result is a piece of work that makes the comparison of Chopin’s compositional technique to Deleuze’s war machine, the specific articulation of a harmonic progression as a line of flight, and a reading of the passage as an example of non-arborescent thought realised in music, both convincing as well as useful. Another thread in Khannanov’s essay that is also of interest – especially from a musical analyst’s perspective – is the critique of Schenkerian analysis. In this regard, it’s clear that Khannanov, in a similar way to Hulse, is seeking to use Deleuze, or at the very least make use of his radical style of theorising, to unseat established musical-analytic paradigms. Other notable chapters in the book take historiological approaches to reading Deleuze in terms of his own influences. [] In using Deleuze as a starting point for theory and as a reminder of the need to create a new way of thinking rather than simply adopt a pre-given set of circulatory codes, Khannanov fully explores the minoritarian potential of working with Deleuze. Among the successes of Sounding the Virtual – which includes some useful and necessary discussions and explanations, as well as some powerful historical and biographical insights into the roots and antecedents of a number of key areas in Deleuze’s thought – this is perhaps the most obvious, and yet most important achievement.”

Matthew Lovett (University of Wales, Newport and Goldsmiths University, London) Deleuze Studies 5.3 (2011): 425–437 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/dls .

[...] it is probably the final five essays that may most appeal to practicing musicians and "analysts," as they most closely pertain to aspects of musical praxis and current musicological discourse: performance studies and the source of expressivity in improvisation (Nesbitt), analytical methodology and metatheory ( Judy Lochhead, Ildar Khannanov), the poetics of music analysis (Bruce Quaglia), and "becoming" as a modality permeating musical meaning in the aftermath of the Deleuzian assault against fixed "signs" and subjectivist "interpretation" (Marianne Kielian-Gilbert). Edinburgh University Press, 2000, and its inclusion in the book title foreshadows what we may understand as a central thesis: that this philosophy not only awakens music theory to an awareness of possibilities of which "the actual" is only a realized instance (via a process Deleuze calls differentiation) but rather-and much more interestingly-that reality is both virtual and actual at once, that as memory, realized and unrealized expectations, as well as potential for divergence and transformation, the virtual is always operative, intertwined with the actual (a process in turn called differentiation).

''... a groundbreaking and exceptionally thought-provoking collection with potential for longstanding and pervasive influence across disciplines, institutions and specializations.' Notes, December 2011

The very conclusion of this article offers the main insight into author's intention: "Intonatsia is the

most universal category of Russian music theory. Such is its ultimate advantage; it can also be

viewed as a deficiency. How metaphorical and polysemic a scholarly term can be and what is the

limit for what music theory must establish as a single universal category? Upon the comparison

with the major terms and categories of the similar function and meaning, provided in this article,

one may conclude that intonatsia stands out as a top-level analytical tool. At least, such comparison

gives a new, revised, meaning to the term that has been introduced more than a century ago." (P.

13)

What about the possibility of intonatsia as "single universal category"? On p. 4 the author

suggests some connections with the English word "intonation" although the meaning of Asafiev’s

term is different from it: "The logical steps of such connection may go as follows: "1) Intonation —

tuning into certain level, instrumental par excellence; 2) Tonos — stretching, tightening of a string,

instrumental par excellence, 3) Intonatio — lat. tuning into the pitch, vocal and text-based chant,

and 4) Asafiev’s intonatsia — tuning into pitch, tuning into the acceptable tone of speech,

communicating via such tone of the voice; fusion of instrumental and vocal, instrument-based and

text-based, of sound and speech." (P. 4)

The author follows the "history" of the term and mentions the contributions of some of the

more recent followers of Asafjev's idea of intonatsia: Ernst Kurth, Eero Tarasti, Kofi Agavu,

Leonard Ratner, Giorgio Sanguinetti, Robert O. Gjerdingen, Nigel Osborne, Vyacheslav

Meduschevsky and Mark Aranovsky.

The main advantage of this study is in the fact that the author is well acquainted with Russian

and English relevant literature and that he successfully keeps this knowledge in the balance, of

course, in favor of the further perspectives of Asafjev's theory. We have to agree with him when he

qualifies the greatest achievement of Asafiev: "[h]e managed to connect, theoretically and

conceptually, the meaning of the natural language with the musical meaning via intonatsia. (P. 4)

Kathryn Kalinak. Music in the Western. The Notes from the Frontiere. New York: Routledge, 2012:

p. 10. In 2009 the Journal of Film Music published a special issue on western film score including a dialogue between Michael Beckerman and the editor William Rozar on the pastoral in western film scoring as well as essays by Beth E. Levy on Copland’s The Red Pony and Ildar Khannanov on the Russian sources for Tiomkin’s High Noon ballad.

p. 17. The title and the author is proposed in the list of Selected Literature

Mariana Whitmer. Jerome Moross's The Big Country: A Film Score Guide. Scarecrow Press, 2012:

p.188. Notes 23,

24, 225. As Khannanov explains, evident in “Do Not Forsake Me” is “a specific Quaker rhythm and a specific melodic shape, typical for Quaker melody”. Tiomkin used the same tune a decade later in Rio Bravo (1959) for Dean Martin’s rendition of My Rifle, My Pony, and Me,” on of three songs featured in that film.

26, Ibid., 228. “Tiomkin’s borrowing of melodic material from Bogoslovsky remains just a possibility, his drawing from Russian and Jewish folk sources is beyond doubt.” Khannanov cites specifically the Jewish folk melody “Dem milners trern” as a specific case, and offers several examples of Russian folk melodies that begin with a triad in the six-four positions (i.e., starting with an ascending fourth from dominant to tonic).

29. For evidence that substantiates Moross’ observation, see Khannanov, op. cit.