A model for composition, or else another manifesto.
Tor-Magnus Lundeby, The Electrifier.
This situation is the precondition for the actualisation of music, that is, the process by which the sonic, aesthetic and cultural potential of music as a whole reaches its fullest possible application – but it’s a precondition only. How could the composition of sound, and more broadly still, the practice of music, be made to reveal and embody this actualisation? How could the music of the twenty-first century be organised so as to take full advantage of its unprecedented sonic possibilities to broaden and satisfy the human imagination to the utmost degree?
Julie Mehretu, Suprematist Evasion (excerpt)
The drive to create ‘new music’ is nothing new. The modern music movement of the twentieth century is probably the most widespread, thorough and currently relevant instance of it, and it too aimed to create bold new musics, using modern methods, to reflect modern times. The twentieth century saw a quick circumnavigation of musical possibility, presenting us with an approximate map of its outer limits not unlike the sketchy first maps of the coastlines surrounding the New World that were drawn in the sixteenth century. The polar everything-and-nothing of Cage’s 4’ 33” and similar works has been reached, but there are still vast ‘inland’ areas left to explore with the help of new technologies.
Daniel Richter, Untitled.
Rather than seeking inspiration, like the twentieth-century modern composer, in the historical teleology of progressively dismantling musical convention, the twenty-first-century modern composer looks to the broad but comparatively limited diversity that has already been achieved in music throughout time and, especially, the world – not to continue or imitate them but as reminders of the extents to which one can plumb the depths of the musically possible. Cage’s music, along with Papua New Guinean house-building song, Japanese Gagaku music, Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Senegalese percussion, Australian aboriginal song, North American blues, Stravinsky’s ballets, central African pygmy song, Hindustani classical music and Bulgarian singing, not to mention the myriad styles of electronic music created over the last quarter century – these are just some of the musical galaxies, making up tiny dots in the enormous night sky, that have already been peered at through telescopes. Many more musics await discovery, and better telescopes are being built all the time.
A musical style is a certain loosely recurring configuration of sonic variables controlled within defined limits of flexibility. Style is like a game with rules – every time the game is played the details are different but the rules are familiar and generally the same. To return to the astronomical analogy: just as a galaxy is composed of millions of stars, so a style can give rise to a practically infinite variety of similar but different musical examples (i.e. tracks, works, pieces, performances, events etc). The local-level possibilities of new and specific musical styles should be explored just as conscientiously as the gigantic space excavated for music as a whole.
Franz Ackermann, Helicopter XVIII (Reality Check).
The future of music no longer lies in the breaking of rules or the perpetual veneration of a creative condition without rules (though this may ultimately be the case as after the twentieth century there are no fixed rules left to break, for the Western world at least – as such you could call this music ‘post-experimental’), but in the localised invention of new and detailed rules for the playing of new games. Personal, social and cultural appreciation of music thrives on a flexible relationship with established and familiar rules; this certain level of stability is what allows a scene (the socio-cultural anchor of musical style) and a tradition to develop. Style and, where it has potential, scene are the pretexts for detailed and sophisticated explorations of new musical formulae.
Stylistic rules should be relatively flexible, not set in stone. Music that does little else than obey stylistic rules can be just as impoverished as music that only amounts to free-form, utterly anarchic chaos. The skill of the twenty-first-century modern composer is in achieving some viable balance between rules (both her/his own and those of others) and innovation, both in a single musical instance and across her/his career. Such a balance, however it is achieved, has always been the hallmark of great music.
Beatriz Milhazes, title unknown.
The twenty-first-century modern composer, as an individual with a stable listenership, most embodies the actualisation of music by inventing new styles, exploring their local-level possibilities for a while, and then moving on to something completely different. Ideally, the world of twenty-first century music would be characterised by a vast array of diverse stylistic forms, each explored along divergent paths, that rise, fall and perhaps rise again over time, driven by the convection currents of culture like chunks in a boiling, infinite soup. This soup doesn’t just facilitate the coming and going of loosely self-contained styles, but is also especially conducive to ‘transversal’ styles or ‘themes’, where some particular common ground causes multiple musics from different styles and eras to resonate in sympathy. ‘Hauntology’ (post-Utopian deconstruction) and ‘wonky’ (unquantised psychedelia) are two such themes that have already been celebrated in the past decade.
(The pluralistic multi-stylism I describe here may sound like that notorious feature of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century postmodernism, but it’s crucially distinct from it. Postmodern pluralism, as opposed to modernist innovation, is characterised by its drawing on and recycling of pre-existing musics (with or without irony), whereas the twenty-first-century modern composer embodying the actualisation of music deliberately seeks to create an array of new styles that have little or no basis in the current history of music. It could almost be described as a postmodernism without the collapse of history or the irony that surrounds it.)
Matthew Ritchie, Self-portrait in 2064.
Some basic variables that can apply to a single sound include pitch, volume, timbre, duration and, more broadly, where the sound is produced, who or what produces it, when it’s produced, how it’s produced and why it is produced (remember, music is not just a sound object, it’s an event, an activity). There are also countless less basic variables that can pertain to a sound, many of which are the preserve of electronic manipulation. Some of these variables include (and I’m speaking broadly) amount of reverb, length of reverb, amount and frequency of pitch variation over time, frequency and type of filtration, amount and nature of distortion, various further qualitative specifics of timbre, and so on to even finer levels of detail. Such variables cannot be divided into smaller categories and could be called ‘first order variables’. Anyone who’s used contemporary digital audio software and seen the rows of dials they offer to make musical choices with will be able to appreciate just how many thousands of variables can be brought to bear on a single sound.
Haluk Akakçe, The Magician.
Let’s go back to basics, though, and take a single sound at random from a pre-existing musical style as an example: say, any note from a sixteenth-century sacred motet performed in its usual, original context. Some variables applied to that note are fixed and some allow variety. The variable of timbre is largely fixed, it’s predominantly going to be set to the timbre of the human voice. As to the ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘when’, it’ll probably be sung by a choir as part of a specific church service. The variables of pitch and duration will vary more widely than that of timbre, but only within the bounds of certain rhythmic and modal/harmonic prescriptions. Volume is generally unspecified in the score of a motet, it’s left to implied practical traditions which wouldn’t have allowed extreme volumes such as screaming or whispering. In other musics, the flexibility built into the variable of volume can vary enormously. Classical music is slightly more precise, using a handful of symbols marked into the score (forte, piano, etc) while contemporary electronic music can choose to specify volume to the hundredth of a decibel.
When more than one sound is to be produced, either simultaneously or in succession, the number of possible configurations of variables in the music multiplies enormously. On top of the inevitable ‘mix ‘n’ match’ combinations of different sounds, some variables (call them ‘second order variables’) control the relationships between sounds – examples include tempo, interval size, texture, certain timbre adjustments over time, the size and nature of the instrumental ensemble, tuning system used, amount and nature of ‘swing’ etc.
Fabian Marcaccio, Paintant.
It gets even more complex. First and second order variables and the interrelationships between them can accumulate together to form specific musical procedures and structures or ‘objects’ that can exist within the bounds of style. They can in turn act as ‘third order’ variables and, as sounds themselves, can have first or second order variables applied to them. In basic terms, the variables of ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’ are two stylistic procedures that control the interrelationships of sounds, in fact they’re very broad categories that include stylistic objects as subtypes, such as the various swung jazz rhythms or Wagnerian harmony. Other ‘sub-stylistic’ musical objects made up of specific configurations of sonic variables include the nineteen-eighties rock kick drum (specific timbre, specific reverb), the Viennese classical perfect cadence (specific control of pitch interrelationships), ‘staccato’ method (specific durations), the low-pass filter break in recent French house music (specific temporal structure, specific frequency filtration), the notated score (specific performance practice), the Hatakambari rāgam (specific pitching system) and so on ad infinitum. It must be noted that the boundaries of such recurring objects are not fixed and absolute, but base their unstable ontology on ‘family resemblance’. These objects, many of which do not (yet) have names, most of which have yet to be invented, come together to form the larger, more complex configurations that are handled as musical styles.
Joanne Greenbaum, Prom Queen.
Thus the complexity of musics and their constituent variables can be traced upwards and outwards from basic forms (such as a few simple sounds with a handful of rudimentary variable settings and procedures), through intermediate forms to a diverse range of richly complex forms. This process is very similar to the development of biological diversity as shown on maps like the phylogenetic ‘tree of life’ (see a comprehensive diagram here). A musical style’s constituent pattern of thousands of variables can be compared to the genome of a species, and just like music, all the species on the planet can be arranged into a hierarchy of categories that branch out as their genetic material becomes increasingly complex and specified, from domains to kingdoms, then to phylums, to subphylums, to classes, to orders, to families, to subfamilies, to genuses and finally to species. A biological object as relatively basic and primordial as a mouth travels upwards and outwards to the complex specifics of the set of teeth belonging to the Gemsbok (Oryx gazelle), or, on a different branch, the complex specifics of the human mouth, engineered for speech and song. A relatively basic musical object like a harmonically grounding bassline is perhaps analogous to the appearance of biological objects like the spine in vertebrate life-forms (from Myllokunmingia fengjiaoa all the way to Huayangosaurus taibaii), and similarly, can travel upwards and outwards from the simple fact of a bassline to the complex specifics of, for example, the intricate timbre adjustments in the bass parts of contemporary electronic bass-dominated music. (Note that this complexity tree is similar to but distinct from a literal evolutionary model of musical development across history – technically speaking, the tree I’m discussing is a ‘cladogram’, as in ‘cladistics’, of all possible variations in music, rather than a ‘chronogram’. Note also that unlike most known biological life-forms, musical styles can be fragmented and combined to form new styles).
Rosemarie Fiore, title unknown.
Given the practically infinite variety of possible configurations of musical variables I’ve started to demonstrate, it becomes clear that vast swathes of music’s own complexity tree of possibility have yet to be discovered, and contemporary technology affords both a greater expanse of control and a finer control of sonic variables than ever before for achieving this. The twenty-first-century modern composer is able to ‘genetically engineer’ strange new and detailed musical life-forms, even from scratch. But again, the most successful way to explore this space is by grounding exploration in the relative coherency afforded by the recurring specifics of style.
(One route to the specificity that musical creativity thrives on is in the use of instruments. Conventional instruments, like musical styles, impose certain limits on the variables in the music they produce. A piano can play a relatively wide range of pitches and volumes within the limits of its particular tuning system, but has little scope for controlling the variable of timbre compared to a modern synthesiser. Contemporary digital audio workstations, also instruments, offer enormous control over sonic variables, but this panorama of possibility often frightens users into conservativeness. I hope that the twenty-first century will see the return of instrument-building, especially the invention of electronic instruments (software or hardware), that are creatively limited in the number of variables they control, as these limitations, like the rules of style, offer ways into the music for both the composer and the listener. In a very real sense, inventing these instruments is composing itself.)
Sarah Morris, Endeavor (Los Angeles).
Where the amount and complexity of the variables involved in such styles is equal to that of richly developed pre-existing musics (Western classical musics, for example, or Top 40 pop musics), that radical, ‘alien’ music truly constitutes an ‘alternative’ pattern of music-making. As many scholars and theorists have shown, the musical-aesthetic and the political are always closely related and often amount to the same thing: once the aesthetics of such radical alternative styles become collective knowledge, it potentially becomes a tool for challenging and even breaking up musical, aesthetic and (symbolically) political hegemony.
Jane Callister, Red Spring.
Even before this music takes on cultural meaning and becomes aestheticised, though, the alien sounds of such music can serve to jolt listeners out of a musical-aesthetic environment in which meaning is stable and readily accessible (that is to say, able to be controlled for political purposes). This has not happened in recent years as often as it has done during periods of the twentieth century, perhaps, but be sure that it can happen again. Looking at music as a practically infinite variety of possible configurations of variables shows that there is still plenty of scope for musics that will have first-time listeners asking themselves ‘how do I listen to this sound?’.
Alien sounds can be swiftly co-opted and tamed in an atmosphere of late capitalism, but the twenty-first-century modern composer perpetually moves on to new styles, and besides, there is plenty of room on the tree of musical complexity for musics that cannot truly be bought or sold, either as an object or an experience. This is an area that deserves investigation, but participatory, live-improvised music seems a particularly fruitful direction in which to explore, as it flies in the face of the professionalisation of music as an elite activity requiring ‘special talent’ (arguably a deeply ingrained Western cultural myth).
Inka Essenhigh, Supergod.
Maybe we will all be composers – perhaps not for the sake of fame or fortune, but for the satisfaction of ourselves and our societies. But of course individual composers, in the conventional sense of the term, cannot themselves truly effect the actualisation of musical production. Music created by a single individual is just another branch on the tree of musical complexity, and not its entirety. Music can be created as a group effort, with equal agency for all members of the group, for example. For this reason the ‘twenty-first-century modern composer’ I refer to here is not necessarily an individual per se, but a metaphorical concept that represents the general creation of music, however that is achieved.
Federico Herrero, Untitled.
This has been a sketch of a theoretical model for twenty-first-century modern musical composition. The analogies I use aren’t watertight (they’re only analogies after all) and there are many questions still to be answered and concepts to fine-tune, but I’d argue that what I write about here has, to a small extent, already started to happen. Tiny steps out into the actualisation of music have already been taken – but entire worlds await.
Happy New Year, happy new decade and a happy and prosperous ninety percent of the twenty-first century to everyone.
This is the final part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:
1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
2. ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’.
3. ‘What is a [Classical] Composer?’.
‘To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.’ – inscription on the Voyager Golden Record.We are entering an era of near limitless sonic possibility. A time when any sound imaginable (and supposedly also some that are currently unimaginable) could be created by technological means was predicted by John Cage, and that time is now. Technological development has enabled the range of choice in controlling sounds and their interrelationships to grow exponentially in the past few decades, and the capability to produce any and every conceivable form of continuous sound with ease, from basic structures to the most richly complex styles, will soon be at everyone’s fingertips. We are rapidly heading deeper and deeper into a creative environment in which any music will, at the sonic level, be possible.
This situation is the precondition for the actualisation of music, that is, the process by which the sonic, aesthetic and cultural potential of music as a whole reaches its fullest possible application – but it’s a precondition only. How could the composition of sound, and more broadly still, the practice of music, be made to reveal and embody this actualisation? How could the music of the twenty-first century be organised so as to take full advantage of its unprecedented sonic possibilities to broaden and satisfy the human imagination to the utmost degree?
Twenty-first-century modern music
The concept of the ‘twenty-first-century modern composer’ is not tautological. Not all music created in the present is ‘modern’ by default. Despite its current potential, much contemporary music largely continues or imitates older musics, even when the technology used to do this is richly advanced in what it can achieve, and so it can’t truly be called modern music. It would be ‘modern/ist’ to make comprehensive use of the technological possibilities currently on offer to create bold new musics that were previously unheard of.The drive to create ‘new music’ is nothing new. The modern music movement of the twentieth century is probably the most widespread, thorough and currently relevant instance of it, and it too aimed to create bold new musics, using modern methods, to reflect modern times. The twentieth century saw a quick circumnavigation of musical possibility, presenting us with an approximate map of its outer limits not unlike the sketchy first maps of the coastlines surrounding the New World that were drawn in the sixteenth century. The polar everything-and-nothing of Cage’s 4’ 33” and similar works has been reached, but there are still vast ‘inland’ areas left to explore with the help of new technologies.
Rather than seeking inspiration, like the twentieth-century modern composer, in the historical teleology of progressively dismantling musical convention, the twenty-first-century modern composer looks to the broad but comparatively limited diversity that has already been achieved in music throughout time and, especially, the world – not to continue or imitate them but as reminders of the extents to which one can plumb the depths of the musically possible. Cage’s music, along with Papua New Guinean house-building song, Japanese Gagaku music, Bach’s Brandenburg concertos, Senegalese percussion, Australian aboriginal song, North American blues, Stravinsky’s ballets, central African pygmy song, Hindustani classical music and Bulgarian singing, not to mention the myriad styles of electronic music created over the last quarter century – these are just some of the musical galaxies, making up tiny dots in the enormous night sky, that have already been peered at through telescopes. Many more musics await discovery, and better telescopes are being built all the time.
The specifics of style
Now of course, creating music that is possible is not always enough to create effective music for inspiring people’s imaginations, and possibility alone doesn’t constitute the actualisation of music. For that, musical innovation and exploration needs to function inward as well as outward, on the level of fine detail as well as on the level of re-inventing the wheel. This can be achieved by grounding new musics in the recurring specifics of style.A musical style is a certain loosely recurring configuration of sonic variables controlled within defined limits of flexibility. Style is like a game with rules – every time the game is played the details are different but the rules are familiar and generally the same. To return to the astronomical analogy: just as a galaxy is composed of millions of stars, so a style can give rise to a practically infinite variety of similar but different musical examples (i.e. tracks, works, pieces, performances, events etc). The local-level possibilities of new and specific musical styles should be explored just as conscientiously as the gigantic space excavated for music as a whole.
The future of music no longer lies in the breaking of rules or the perpetual veneration of a creative condition without rules (though this may ultimately be the case as after the twentieth century there are no fixed rules left to break, for the Western world at least – as such you could call this music ‘post-experimental’), but in the localised invention of new and detailed rules for the playing of new games. Personal, social and cultural appreciation of music thrives on a flexible relationship with established and familiar rules; this certain level of stability is what allows a scene (the socio-cultural anchor of musical style) and a tradition to develop. Style and, where it has potential, scene are the pretexts for detailed and sophisticated explorations of new musical formulae.
Stylistic rules should be relatively flexible, not set in stone. Music that does little else than obey stylistic rules can be just as impoverished as music that only amounts to free-form, utterly anarchic chaos. The skill of the twenty-first-century modern composer is in achieving some viable balance between rules (both her/his own and those of others) and innovation, both in a single musical instance and across her/his career. Such a balance, however it is achieved, has always been the hallmark of great music.
The twenty-first-century modern composer, as an individual with a stable listenership, most embodies the actualisation of music by inventing new styles, exploring their local-level possibilities for a while, and then moving on to something completely different. Ideally, the world of twenty-first century music would be characterised by a vast array of diverse stylistic forms, each explored along divergent paths, that rise, fall and perhaps rise again over time, driven by the convection currents of culture like chunks in a boiling, infinite soup. This soup doesn’t just facilitate the coming and going of loosely self-contained styles, but is also especially conducive to ‘transversal’ styles or ‘themes’, where some particular common ground causes multiple musics from different styles and eras to resonate in sympathy. ‘Hauntology’ (post-Utopian deconstruction) and ‘wonky’ (unquantised psychedelia) are two such themes that have already been celebrated in the past decade.
(The pluralistic multi-stylism I describe here may sound like that notorious feature of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century postmodernism, but it’s crucially distinct from it. Postmodern pluralism, as opposed to modernist innovation, is characterised by its drawing on and recycling of pre-existing musics (with or without irony), whereas the twenty-first-century modern composer embodying the actualisation of music deliberately seeks to create an array of new styles that have little or no basis in the current history of music. It could almost be described as a postmodernism without the collapse of history or the irony that surrounds it.)
The constituents of music and genetic complexity trees
In order to compose music, one must have an awareness of what any given music is composed of and how it is composed. I have already used the noun ‘variable’ above (‘A musical style is a certain loosely recurring configuration of sonic variables controlled within defined limits of flexibility’) to refer to a changeable quantitative or qualitative value that can pertain to sound(s). The smallest unit of musical composition is not the note but, even more fundamentally, the indivisible variable. A pattern of variables, some of which are largely fixed while others may vary in value to allow built-in flexibility, forms the genetic code of any stylistic group of musical life-forms.Some basic variables that can apply to a single sound include pitch, volume, timbre, duration and, more broadly, where the sound is produced, who or what produces it, when it’s produced, how it’s produced and why it is produced (remember, music is not just a sound object, it’s an event, an activity). There are also countless less basic variables that can pertain to a sound, many of which are the preserve of electronic manipulation. Some of these variables include (and I’m speaking broadly) amount of reverb, length of reverb, amount and frequency of pitch variation over time, frequency and type of filtration, amount and nature of distortion, various further qualitative specifics of timbre, and so on to even finer levels of detail. Such variables cannot be divided into smaller categories and could be called ‘first order variables’. Anyone who’s used contemporary digital audio software and seen the rows of dials they offer to make musical choices with will be able to appreciate just how many thousands of variables can be brought to bear on a single sound.
Let’s go back to basics, though, and take a single sound at random from a pre-existing musical style as an example: say, any note from a sixteenth-century sacred motet performed in its usual, original context. Some variables applied to that note are fixed and some allow variety. The variable of timbre is largely fixed, it’s predominantly going to be set to the timbre of the human voice. As to the ‘who’, ‘why’ and ‘when’, it’ll probably be sung by a choir as part of a specific church service. The variables of pitch and duration will vary more widely than that of timbre, but only within the bounds of certain rhythmic and modal/harmonic prescriptions. Volume is generally unspecified in the score of a motet, it’s left to implied practical traditions which wouldn’t have allowed extreme volumes such as screaming or whispering. In other musics, the flexibility built into the variable of volume can vary enormously. Classical music is slightly more precise, using a handful of symbols marked into the score (forte, piano, etc) while contemporary electronic music can choose to specify volume to the hundredth of a decibel.
When more than one sound is to be produced, either simultaneously or in succession, the number of possible configurations of variables in the music multiplies enormously. On top of the inevitable ‘mix ‘n’ match’ combinations of different sounds, some variables (call them ‘second order variables’) control the relationships between sounds – examples include tempo, interval size, texture, certain timbre adjustments over time, the size and nature of the instrumental ensemble, tuning system used, amount and nature of ‘swing’ etc.
It gets even more complex. First and second order variables and the interrelationships between them can accumulate together to form specific musical procedures and structures or ‘objects’ that can exist within the bounds of style. They can in turn act as ‘third order’ variables and, as sounds themselves, can have first or second order variables applied to them. In basic terms, the variables of ‘rhythm’ and ‘harmony’ are two stylistic procedures that control the interrelationships of sounds, in fact they’re very broad categories that include stylistic objects as subtypes, such as the various swung jazz rhythms or Wagnerian harmony. Other ‘sub-stylistic’ musical objects made up of specific configurations of sonic variables include the nineteen-eighties rock kick drum (specific timbre, specific reverb), the Viennese classical perfect cadence (specific control of pitch interrelationships), ‘staccato’ method (specific durations), the low-pass filter break in recent French house music (specific temporal structure, specific frequency filtration), the notated score (specific performance practice), the Hatakambari rāgam (specific pitching system) and so on ad infinitum. It must be noted that the boundaries of such recurring objects are not fixed and absolute, but base their unstable ontology on ‘family resemblance’. These objects, many of which do not (yet) have names, most of which have yet to be invented, come together to form the larger, more complex configurations that are handled as musical styles.
Thus the complexity of musics and their constituent variables can be traced upwards and outwards from basic forms (such as a few simple sounds with a handful of rudimentary variable settings and procedures), through intermediate forms to a diverse range of richly complex forms. This process is very similar to the development of biological diversity as shown on maps like the phylogenetic ‘tree of life’ (see a comprehensive diagram here). A musical style’s constituent pattern of thousands of variables can be compared to the genome of a species, and just like music, all the species on the planet can be arranged into a hierarchy of categories that branch out as their genetic material becomes increasingly complex and specified, from domains to kingdoms, then to phylums, to subphylums, to classes, to orders, to families, to subfamilies, to genuses and finally to species. A biological object as relatively basic and primordial as a mouth travels upwards and outwards to the complex specifics of the set of teeth belonging to the Gemsbok (Oryx gazelle), or, on a different branch, the complex specifics of the human mouth, engineered for speech and song. A relatively basic musical object like a harmonically grounding bassline is perhaps analogous to the appearance of biological objects like the spine in vertebrate life-forms (from Myllokunmingia fengjiaoa all the way to Huayangosaurus taibaii), and similarly, can travel upwards and outwards from the simple fact of a bassline to the complex specifics of, for example, the intricate timbre adjustments in the bass parts of contemporary electronic bass-dominated music. (Note that this complexity tree is similar to but distinct from a literal evolutionary model of musical development across history – technically speaking, the tree I’m discussing is a ‘cladogram’, as in ‘cladistics’, of all possible variations in music, rather than a ‘chronogram’. Note also that unlike most known biological life-forms, musical styles can be fragmented and combined to form new styles).
Given the practically infinite variety of possible configurations of musical variables I’ve started to demonstrate, it becomes clear that vast swathes of music’s own complexity tree of possibility have yet to be discovered, and contemporary technology affords both a greater expanse of control and a finer control of sonic variables than ever before for achieving this. The twenty-first-century modern composer is able to ‘genetically engineer’ strange new and detailed musical life-forms, even from scratch. But again, the most successful way to explore this space is by grounding exploration in the relative coherency afforded by the recurring specifics of style.
(One route to the specificity that musical creativity thrives on is in the use of instruments. Conventional instruments, like musical styles, impose certain limits on the variables in the music they produce. A piano can play a relatively wide range of pitches and volumes within the limits of its particular tuning system, but has little scope for controlling the variable of timbre compared to a modern synthesiser. Contemporary digital audio workstations, also instruments, offer enormous control over sonic variables, but this panorama of possibility often frightens users into conservativeness. I hope that the twenty-first century will see the return of instrument-building, especially the invention of electronic instruments (software or hardware), that are creatively limited in the number of variables they control, as these limitations, like the rules of style, offer ways into the music for both the composer and the listener. In a very real sense, inventing these instruments is composing itself.)
The political resonance of the twenty-first-century modern composer
The twenty-first-century modern composer innovates at every level (or branch) of musical complexity, inventing new styles as well as new sub-stylistic musical objects and new but fundamental musical structures. The closer s/he gets to the inventing branches near the ‘root’ of the tree of musical complexity, the more radical s/he becomes (radical literally means ‘going to the root or origin’). The radically modern twenty-first century composer endeavours to create musical styles that make enormous departures from pre-existing musics and seem utterly alien in every element.Where the amount and complexity of the variables involved in such styles is equal to that of richly developed pre-existing musics (Western classical musics, for example, or Top 40 pop musics), that radical, ‘alien’ music truly constitutes an ‘alternative’ pattern of music-making. As many scholars and theorists have shown, the musical-aesthetic and the political are always closely related and often amount to the same thing: once the aesthetics of such radical alternative styles become collective knowledge, it potentially becomes a tool for challenging and even breaking up musical, aesthetic and (symbolically) political hegemony.
Even before this music takes on cultural meaning and becomes aestheticised, though, the alien sounds of such music can serve to jolt listeners out of a musical-aesthetic environment in which meaning is stable and readily accessible (that is to say, able to be controlled for political purposes). This has not happened in recent years as often as it has done during periods of the twentieth century, perhaps, but be sure that it can happen again. Looking at music as a practically infinite variety of possible configurations of variables shows that there is still plenty of scope for musics that will have first-time listeners asking themselves ‘how do I listen to this sound?’.
Alien sounds can be swiftly co-opted and tamed in an atmosphere of late capitalism, but the twenty-first-century modern composer perpetually moves on to new styles, and besides, there is plenty of room on the tree of musical complexity for musics that cannot truly be bought or sold, either as an object or an experience. This is an area that deserves investigation, but participatory, live-improvised music seems a particularly fruitful direction in which to explore, as it flies in the face of the professionalisation of music as an elite activity requiring ‘special talent’ (arguably a deeply ingrained Western cultural myth).
Do it yourself
So perhaps the most exciting aspect of the technology-enabled actualisation of music in the twenty-first century is that it’s practically in the hands of the general public, and will be even more so in the approaching decades. All anyone needs to create twenty-first-century modern music nowadays is a computer (one day they could be free to anyone in education) and an internet connection (free wi-fi is increasingly ubiquitous) with which to download some music software for free (legally or illegally). Composers like Burial are the earliest examples of this paradigm in action. Even now, a certain degree of technical expertise is required to operate music software, but such programs are becoming more and more user-friendly and intuitive. In ten or twenty years, practically anybody could be creating the radical musics I describe here using advanced mobile phones or portable touchscreen ‘tablets’. Given the range of musical control this technology does and will offer inexpensively, this is surely a musical revolution many times greater in scope and significance than the punk DIY revolution of the nineteen-seventies.Maybe we will all be composers – perhaps not for the sake of fame or fortune, but for the satisfaction of ourselves and our societies. But of course individual composers, in the conventional sense of the term, cannot themselves truly effect the actualisation of musical production. Music created by a single individual is just another branch on the tree of musical complexity, and not its entirety. Music can be created as a group effort, with equal agency for all members of the group, for example. For this reason the ‘twenty-first-century modern composer’ I refer to here is not necessarily an individual per se, but a metaphorical concept that represents the general creation of music, however that is achieved.
This has been a sketch of a theoretical model for twenty-first-century modern musical composition. The analogies I use aren’t watertight (they’re only analogies after all) and there are many questions still to be answered and concepts to fine-tune, but I’d argue that what I write about here has, to a small extent, already started to happen. Tiny steps out into the actualisation of music have already been taken – but entire worlds await.
Happy New Year, happy new decade and a happy and prosperous ninety percent of the twenty-first century to everyone.
This is the final part in a four-part series of essays on musical pasts, presents and futures. The other parts are:
1. ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’.
2. ‘The Premature Burial: Burial the Pallbearer vs Burial the Innovator’.
3. ‘What is a [Classical] Composer?’.
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