Brewing dissonance: Conceptualizing mannerism and baroque in music with Deleuze

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari warn us that “all of baroque lies brewing beneath classicism.” The task of the classical artist, they argue, is “God’s own,” namely “that of organizing chaos” into stable relations of form and content. To compose is to lay out a plane of organization on which binary distinctions compartmentalize, centralize, and hierarchize relatively simple forms in relation to one another, such that a raw and untamed matter enters into a well-founded order of succession. In music this order is that of, for example, the sonata, suite, serenade, or concerto, forms in which theme and variation are strictly distinguished. But this confrontation with chaos at the same time leads the classical artist to decompose preexisting milieus of coded sound matter, to separate and harmonize them and to regulate their mixtures by passing from one to the other. Beneath the dominance of homophony, lighter texture, pronounced contrast, and variety of the classical period, there still insists and subsists the more complex polyphony, texture, and confusion of the baroque. [...]