For some, the Ritournelle has a bit of an odd name; it was a French court dance of the 17th century, but "ritornello" the Italian far more common, the repeated refrain of the concerti of Torelli & Vivaldi, larger than a gesture, smaller than a section. It is taught as the origin point of scherzos & rondos, and even to the great holy bovine of music-history-lite, the sonata!

But I love the resonances of the French form; most obviously, the evocation of the dances at the Sun King's court, aesthetic and political significance suspended in each step. And even more so, the deeper entailments intrigue. This is the 'refrain' of the 14th-century French motets I studied during my dissertation time at Penn, music from a period with very different ideas of order and emotion.

The most common description, at that time and now, is "the song of a bird in the forest". This, the small figure insistent on its own return, is found in the poetry of those Parisian motets, and still shows up in Proust, through the melodic theme of Vinteul's sonata. As if it could make itself even more French, it was deemed worthy of an entire chapter in Deleuze & Guattari's Mille Plateaux.

We would say that the refrain is properly musical content, the block of content proper to music. ...Tra la la. A woman sings to herself, “I heard her softly singing a tune to herself under her breath.” A bird launches into its refrain. All of music is pervaded by bird songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen.
(A Thousand Plateaus, 1980, trans. B. Massumi, 1987, pp. 299-300)

As is often, though, seductive musicality throws the devout philosopher off course; Deleuze is as mystified as most all who preceded him, and connects music to a naive freedom, it seems to me.

Music submits the refrain to this very special treatment of the diagonal or transversal, it uproots the refrain from its territoriality. Music is a creative, active operation that consists in deterritorializing the refrain. Whereas the refrain is essentially territorial, territorializing, or reterritorializing, music makes it a deterritorialized content for a deterritorializing form of expression.

He misunderstands the historicality of the mechanics of music: Deleuze's Tra-la-la is the bird marking its territory; in music, repetition (the ritournelle) marks territory just the same, but here the territory is immaterial; it is the manifold of aesthetic potential, the dunamis which will be transformed to energia through a technical creativity.

And just as the act of making relies on its historicity (heard here and the mixture of Baroque refinement and Modern disorder), each action reshapes the manifold of potential just a bit. The refrain may seem to deterritorialize, in the moment of performance, but marks territory as does its avian parallel, its technics reshaping what might follow, and how we might access the past in new ways.