The fold: musical monads and baroque assemblages

The Fold is a collaborative composing project staged in Singapore (2013) and Cologne (2014) involving musicians from disparate stylistic and cultural back- grounds. The musicians come together to compose written scores that are subse- quently used for improvisation during performances. This essay frames the project as a musical manifestation of conceptual trajectories articulated in Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. The first section contemplates Leibniz’s psy- chic geometry and the monad as a musical score. Following this, a machinic analy- sis of the music created during the project sparked by Deleuze’s notion of the refrain is offered. In the last section, I return to The Fold and situate its composi- tional, improvisational and performative practices within Deleuze’s geophilosophi- cal and nomad thought.