Definition of Ritornello

What is Ritornello?

A concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to elucidate the process of worldmaking – worlding. In music, a ritornello is a recurring passage — a return and variation. A Ritornello describes the looping quality of habitual embodied activity: the small repeated circuits of daily life that stabilize and return, providing the rhythmic scaffolding within which improvisation and novelty become possible. It gives a richer sense to the active experimental logic of waymaking and worlding. 

See also: Waymaking, Worldmaking, Affordances