This essay develops a framework for thinking about theimprovisational momentin music—the performed event that cuts into the ongoing flow of time, selecting a singular path into the virtual future and thereby actualizing one of its many potentials, creating conditions for the possibility of musical meaning to emerge. It does this first by closely engaging Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, which Deleuze offers as a powerful theoretical model for understanding time and process. It then brings the three syntheses of time into communication with Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the refrain, and acts of territorialization that define the refrain, demonstrating how the two conceptions can mutually reinforce and bolster one another. Ultimately, it challenges reified notions of subject and object, instead defining both as emergent, “eventful” phenomena. The musical work in this sense reflects the emergent nature of object- formation: it is shown to be an ongoing process determined by the actions of individuals in complex embodied, perspectival, and temporally-situated interactions.

The unrestrained brachistochrone problem is to find the path of a frictionless track between two horizontally separated points along which a block with an initial velocity will travel in the shortest time. The track lies in a uniform gravitational field and must be horizontal at its beginning and its end. Furthermore, the block must slide along the track like a block on an inclined plane and it must remain in contact with the track at all times. Although the problem is well posed, the nature of the unusual constraints makes it quite difficult to solve using standard variational techniques, such as those of Euler and Lagrange. We present a solution that avoids explicit reliance on such techniques.

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Communication between music and dance can take many forms. In salsa, this communication begins with and builds upon two simple but crucial criteria: for music, a metric-rhythmic foundation based on clave and other essential performance strata, and for dance, the flow and metric orientation of one of three basic footwork patterns. Most of the rich complexity of music, dance, and their interaction stems from these fundamental gestures. In this article we analyze the basic structures of salsa music and dance, theorize how they interact, and investigate three scenarios where dancers have to make decisions about how to attend to musical features via their footwork orientations.

This chapter draws upon radical pedagogy, anarchafeminist theory, decolonial theory, and more to begin to rethink what music theory teaching and learning is capable of as community-facing, creative, transformative practice. It orbits around three interrelated fields of activity through which music theory becomes essentially “public.” First is a refusal of the theory–practice divide in favor of a prolonged commitment to the irreducible, productive entanglement of the two: all theory is practice, and all practitioners produce theory in some important way. Second is a reimagining of music theory as a space for dialogue across and within diverse communities of practice. And third is positioning music theory as transformative: not just descriptive of existing or historical practices, but as opening onto ever new modes of creativity.