Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making by Harper Adam

Author:Harper, Adam [Harper, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846949258
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2011-11-15T23:00:00+00:00

Music Space and New Music

Here we can sum up what this philosophy of infinite music space means for composers. Its system of infinite musical variability puts all currently existing music into the context of its much wider and unrealised possibilities. Music space is the opened-up continuous phase space upon which all the concrete musical performances that have existed up to this moment can be plotted as single points, arranged in tiny clusters where performances are similar to each other, and spaced widely apart in our imaginations by a distance of as yet unactualised possibilities. As with those aliens slowly coming to appreciate the scope of human music-making by increasing their collection of recorded performances, these plotted points are the data we have received to date in a sample that hints at the scope of musical variability itself. In identifying the small number of loosely defined musical objects we’ve collected so far, we draw imprecise, multidimensional lines, forming shapes that group together collections of these points as we might do around sets of numbers in a data printout, counting them as single musical objects – the piano, the style called ‘jazz’, the musical work ‘Behind the Mask’, for example. Many more clusters of points await this grouping of information that identifies musical objects, especially shapes intersecting more unconventional dimensionalities. But every-where in music space and even beneath these groupings, there’s infinite room for new, multidimensional musical possibilities.

Music space reveals to composers all the gaps and limitations in the conventions of the past and present, and all that hasn’t been composed yet, by situating it against a backdrop of alternative possibilities. It’s a map of musical possibility, currently sparsely dotted with settlements. The innovations of the twentieth century discovered the outermost extremes of this map, and some composers established well-known outposts there. This frontier phase of discovery culminated in Cage’s sound space, which draws a basic perimeter around humanly audible sound, with everything within that realm of sound now accessible for musical composition. The vehicle Cage proposed for traversing this space was magnetic tape, which allowed composers such as Stockhausen and Edgard Varèse to explore spaces far beyond those of the more conventional sounds of their time. But compared to modern technology, tape is so relatively crude and awkward a tool for the composition of concrete music today that it’s now often accompanied by an aesthetics of nostalgia or ironic frailty.

Ever since Cage, and especially in the technological milieu of the new millennium, a second phase of innovation has begun: the infinite task of colonising the entirety of music space. The technology to do this has existed since Cage’s time, but it’s fast becoming a lot more readily available, more nuanced and easier to learn and use. No longer are unconventional sounds the preserve of lone musical astronauts encased in multi-million dollar banks of consoles and miles of electrical wire, with their handfuls of short trips to alien worlds. They are being created and practiced all over the world, every day, by

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