For Deleuze and Guattari, music is an exemplary art, providing the clearest practical example of the kind of nomadic thought they seek to promote. A temporal art, it puts the emphasis on the Bergsonian dynamics of flux and becoming; a non-representational art, it puts our perceptual faculties in touch with our intellectual faculties in a way that does not require the mediation of concepts and representation. But above all, they argue, it is nomadic, it brings together different levels of analysis, enabling them to be contained within a single thought. By liberating us from the limitations of representational thought in the Aristotelian tradition, which requires that we work on one conceptual plane at a time, music helps us to understand how, from the interstellar to the sub-atomic level, everything is in touch with everything else. In this sense, we could say that the musical experience described by Deleuze and Guattari involves a postmodern update of the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.

"By placing all its components in continuous variation, music [...] enters the service of a virtual cosmic continuum [...]. This ferment came to the forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molecular material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the cosmos that have always agitated music – a bit of Time in the pure state (Proust), a grain of absolute Intensity [...]. Music is not alone in being art as cosmos and in drawing the virtual lines of an infinite variation. (A Thousand Plateaus, pp.95- 96)"

  • Eric Prieto, Deleuze, Music, and Modernist Mimesis (2005)