Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of becoming offers a productive framework for rethinking fundamental ontological questions in music theory, particularly those concerning form, material, and musical individuation. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's non-representational, process-oriented ontology, as further elaborated by Manuel DeLanda and Elizabeth Grosz, this paper proposes a three-level ontological model for musical works: (1) actual, extensive musical objects (such as compositions and their formal structures); (2) intensive processes governed by differential relations, energetic flows, and critical thresholds at which quantitative change yields qualitative transformation; and (3) the virtual, understood not as the merely possible but as a real field of immanent potential—also described as a “chaos” that contains all possible forms.

These ontological dimensions are explored through analyses of three compositions that exemplify different modes of musical individuation. Djuro Živković's On the Guarding of the Heart largely resists consolidation into stable motifs, pitch centers, or formal articulations. Instead, the work unfolds as an intensive sonic flux, punctuated only intermittently by phase transitions in which provisional melodic contours or pitch foci briefly emerge. These moments suggest processes of individuation that remain incomplete, offering fleeting actualizations of virtual musical forces.

In contrast, a Classical work such as Mozart's Piano Sonata in C minor exemplifies a regime in which intensive processes are actualized as clearly articulated musical objects. Here, energetic differentials are captured and organized into hierarchical formal structures, thematic identities, and tonal functions, allowing only minimal perceptual access to the intensive processes that underlie them.

Occupying an intermediate position is Srđan Hofman's Hadedas. Its generative material—two chords followed by a scale-like passage—produces a web of potential associations, including pentatonic formations, harmonic-series relations, atonal collections, and weak tonal implications. Yet these possibilities remain largely indistinct in perception, and the resulting musical events appear deliberately neutral. The piece seems to suspend individuation at the threshold of actualization: virtual forces are engaged but never fully resolved into stable musical objects. In Deleuzian terms, the music presents “the object and its potential at one and the same time.”

In closing, the paper briefly reflects on Ligeti's micropolyphony as an alternative encounter with musical chaos—one that reveals not disorder, but a proliferation of simultaneous, coexisting orders. Together, these examples suggest that Deleuzian ontology can enrich music-theoretical discourse by reframing form not as a fixed structure, but as a dynamic outcome of ongoing processes of individuation.

DeLanda, Manuel. 2010. Deleuze: History and Science. Athropos Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989/85. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. 1994/1991. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.

Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press.

Zatkalik, Miloš. 2024. Hadedas Srđana Hofmana: Analiza, teleologija, ontologija. In Mirrors: The Musical World of Srđan Hofman. Edited by Mirjana Veselinović Hofman and Ivana Miladinović Prica. University of Arts in Belgrade.