I think a lot of art is about charming people with your point of view. A big part of it is moving on from points of view that were charming once, but aren't anymore. A century ago, avant-garde art's point of view was new and exciting, and deserved its time in the sun. But now we know that all those manifestos didn't bear as much fruit as everyone hoped, and the time has come full circle. I don't know what a new and charming point of view could be like, but I'm pretty sure that it won't be like avant-garde art. The OP hopes that it will be more sensory and less theoretical, but more likely it will focus on some other (though related) factor, in a way we can't predict now.
I disagree - instead of calling it 'charming' i would extrapolate it to: 'a lot of art is about sexually rooted behaviour - music is made to find a mate'. I don't think that's true, because, and thats one of the main points here; serial music was never regarded as resembling anything in the vicinity of 'charming'. serial music is more like pandoras box for music, and it happened at the same time as computers where invented, shortly after ww2.
And the fruits of serial music are massive, but they all taste bitter.
There's a UK-based duo called Autechre who've been making interesting but not theoretical electronic music since the early 90s. I think they might be a model for popular, intelligent future music.
They are not unaware of classical developments--for example, one classical composer who influenced them is Bernard Parmegiani.
Roger Scruton, author of the article posted, is a controversial figure. He's not someone you'd go to for tips on the latest digital deconstructivist architecture, and probably not for actually cutting-edge music either. More about him here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/enemies-of-roger-...
Technology isn't what makes music modern. The points raised in the article go much, much deeper than that. This makes me think of the composer Conlon Nancarrow, who mostly composed for player piano. He was often credited as being a "father of electronic music", which baffled him. As far as he was concerned, he'd never composed a single note for an electronic music. But his music was the earliest attempt at seriously exploiting the ability of machines to play things humans could not play.
But synths and sequencers? They're not "modern". I find it hard to imagine music much more primitive than the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance.
Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music. A conscious disregard for consonance/dissonance isn't the same as choosing the balance of consonance/dissonance. They were interesting intellectual exercises, but as a musician, I think they deserved to die. They're the music of the past now.
Most of the real experimentalism in music I hear these days (and I have some bias here) is in the noise and free improvisation fields. I'm biased because I also play free improvisation. But undermining rhythm and harmony, and focusing on tonal evolution - that's interesting and daring. And that music is done with some seriously analog approach, not computers. Computers are generally very restrictive (although there are exceptions - the people doing million-note sequences are fascinating noise experimenters). One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was an improvisation of one percussionist, who spent several minutes carefully wadding a piece of cellophane. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked by tossing aside virtually every musical convention except "be interesting".
Have you seen recently released software synths? They are much different from traditional analog synths and are capable of way more possibilities of sound. Definitely modern.
I don't get why "traditional" musicians tend to dismiss electronic music. Electronic music is not just dubstep or Eurodance. There are modern genres such as future bass that incorporate more advanced musical composition and implement it with new technologies that many people enjoy.
I hope I'm not coming off as dismissive of electronic music in general... just the idea that "computers and synthesizers and sequencers" represent the future of music. They are, at best, merely instruments. If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult.
Electronic music can be wonderfully experimental, but that's not because of anything that's been invented lately. Listen to the Forbidden Planet soundtrack, for example. That was wild, and it was 1956. I work with a lot of electronic musicians, and there's a strong interest in older instruments - analog synthesis, early digital like 12 bit samplers, etc.
I've used recent software synths, but for the most part, they're either not all that interesting, or they're studied knockoffs of analog synthesis techniques from the 1970s and earlier. At worst, many/most hit Brian Eno's criticism of modern synths - they lack character. By trying to sound like everything, they wind up not sounding like themselves.
As a cultural innovation, trap music is cool. But from a musical standpoint, it's not terribly innovative. It's still a lot of mid-tempo 4/4. The underlying dismantling of conventional harmony was done in hip-hop 30 years ago by Dr Dre, Terminator X, and other great innovative DJs of the early hip-hop era.
That said, I think hip-hop is THE driving force behind innovation in pop today. Even country music is now being driven by hip-hop concepts. The beats of trap will be around for a while, but they sure as heck didn't invent 808 kicks or filter sweeps.
And it's important to distinguish between cultural innovations and real, substantial changes here. Disco was a cultural innovation 40 years ago. It's more or less dead now. 45 RPM singles were a real, substantial change.
There was a paper I read some years ago about a music student analyzing modern trance music, how it relates to ancient tribal music, and how both relate to the brain. It also explained the mechanism behind the "drop", how the drop is caused by the brain anticipating it and then getting a reward for a good prediction, just like you feel nice when you can predict a twist in a movie or an ad.
What I am saying is that I think that what makes 4/4 so prevalent today is that it is somehow deeply connected to how our brains work, and if you consider popular music subject to Darwinian pressures, it is likely that 4/4 is the most "evolved" one (from a fitness view).
Anyway, I think that in 10 years we will be passing all of our music through a deep neural network, and then ask the network to create new things, like invent a new number one hit, cultural style, or create a new work in the style of Beethoven.
Disco is not dead in a pop context? Discos are full. 4/4 Beat is the norm. Ass shaking is standard. It's everywhere.
The essence of disco and ass shaking is the essence of pop. Add sonified marriage/breakup proposals to it and then you got all pop in a basket.
Hiphop is not the driving force anymore, also it did not care about harmony at all in a special way. Hiphops focus has always been on rythm. The essence of hiphop is the political rap combined with sampling (pirate citations of all kind creatively layered together). Hiphop (especially rap) has been culturally annihilated.
Disco isn't just 4/4... it's a particular 16th note hi-hat groove, conventions around the use of string synths, etc. It's a stylistic period piece, and the underlying rhythms aren't widely heard these days.
I don't know why you think hip hop has been "culturally annihilated". I hear it as an incredibly dynamic and forward-looking genre.
Yes, that 70's disco sound. That's gone; Like a snake 'Disco' has shed its skin. My point is that the essence of disco is pretty much alive. Take that to the contrast that the innovative essence of hiphop is resampling - that's pretty dead. Can you name any currently successful hip hop band that does radical resampling over all genres? It's not possible because of music industry lobbying.
> Take that to the contrast that the innovative essence of hiphop is resampling
Resampling isn't particularly innovative as Im sure you aware of musique concrete and tape music.
Hip-hop is essentially defined by the combination of rapping, sociopolitical subtexts, and, yes, specific music production techniques that include sampling but also certain types of rhythms and beats.
Those are roughly in order of importance; notice how few people openly lament the death of sampling but the prominence of a white rapper will prompt endless critical and popular commentary.
> that's pretty dead.
Anyone who can listen to To Pimp a Butterfly and believe that hip hop is dead does not know what hip hop is.
> Can you name any currently successful hip hop band that does radical resampling over all genres?
When has this been the criterion for what makes a hip hop band?
Every pop music genre has a signature sound. This is acoustic branding. It's vital for pop-music to function that the audience can determine in a fraction of a second what brand is being offered. Nothing deep going on.
I hear it as an incredibly dynamic
and forward-looking genre.
What dynamic
and forward-looking about 3 decades of "where da hoes at where da bitches at"?
In what sense? It's same old same old "Where da hoes at where da bitches at" soft-porn junk that the distraction industry has been selling to teenagers for about 3 decades.
"If anything, they're pretty strongly wedded to some very narrow musical conventions, such as 12 tone equal temperament and basic time signatures like 4/4 and 3/4. Getting past those limitations is doable, but difficult."
It depends on what you're using. You can get anything from a system that can't be pulled off of 12 tone equal temperament and some conventional time signature all the way up to systems that offer complete and total freedom, up to and including setting the exact values in the .WAV file you generate. I wouldn't say getting past those restrictions are "difficult" necessarily, it's just that by necessity, the more power you take on yourself to define your music, the more work you're going to need to do. By the time you end up with the systems that offer total freedom you have music synthesis systems that look more like programming than musical instruments. But they do exist, and back on the topic of the original article, there's a lot of avant-garde-style work that has been done in them.
When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry. I'm not being particularly critical or cruel when I say that... that's seriously what his music sounded like. If you look at how telemetry is generated and compare to how granular synthesis works, it's not hard to see why. Tonality was entirely absent, let alone 12-tone equal temperament.
> When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry.
I actually have no idea what telemetry is supposed to sound like but I think this guy was just making bad music, with granular synthesis.
Granular synthesis can actually be quite beautiful and tonal if thats what you're looking for, see examples [1] and [2] just to dig up some quick examples.
Ableton's built-in time stretching uses granular synthesis.
One guy's bad granular music isn't really indicative of anything.
My point was not to snark about granular synthesis; my point was to demonstrate the amount of freedom that exists in synthesis methods that have been around for a long time. I understand the criticism that a lot of music is stuck in 12-tone equal temperament, I don't understand the idea that electronic music as a whole is stuck there.
I like the theory (which I think I associate with Ambrose Field) that we recently came out of a period in which invention in music was tightly associated with technological capability.
Most apparent in pop where, for example, each new wave of chart hits in the 80s was driven by the sounds available on some newly-released synth, but the same thing goes on with electro-acoustic music (timbrally, spatially) and modern classical music (in terms of organisation and programme content).
The theory is that this period has ended because we can pretty much synthesise anything now. (Or can we?)
If so, we no longer have the same motivating impulse. Where next?
Why not traditions? Why do we have to make progress? There are musical traditions that started in the second half of the 20th century, along with recording and radios, that I think will last for centuries. I wouldn't be shocked to hear electric blues, bluegrass, or thrash metal 300 years from now.
Good question, not one I have any tidy answer for.
The fact that we have so many "more traditional" genres in the first place is a result of some progress or invention having happened in the past. Why should it stop?
Novelty is something people seek in every field of course. But some of what makes music music (as opposed to just a soothing or vexing noise) has to do with anticipation and surprise. Perhaps novelty broadly is appealing to music listeners for similar reasons to why any music is appealing in the first place.
Although many forms in e.g. the classical canon might have been inspired by new technology of the day (most obvious example probably being the piano), genres have often arisen for reasons other than technology. It's plausible that our excursion through a hyper-speed series of technological drivers of musical novelty was just a crazy detour. But then we're back to the earlier question, what will it mean to put aside technological novelty as a driver? Or is it absurd to suggest that it has ended?
Part of the problem is that most electric music comes as a simulated band of robots playing in a virtual space materialised as sound through a loudspeaker. Modern electronic music has more in common with a police siren than music in the cultural sense. 'Music' as a deeply rooted cultural term is quite conservative, probably the most conservative art form there is. Therefore it's primarily bound to 'oldskool' rites, techniques and tools.
It's also heavily human-centric (one of the main reasons serial music is not a big hit) and thus demands direct engagement of man as composer, interpret and performer. Serial music shares profound similarities to conceptual machine music as it is composition with strict binary rules, but is still interpreted and performed with traditional instruments. As such it is already quite a borderline concept for the traditional Music world. Now if you want them to talk about softsynths that's of no interest to them at all because it happens on quite a different planet to them, to which i would agree.
No, there is lots of experimentation in electronic music. "Dubstep" and "Eurodance" are not the only instantiations of electronically composed music.
I'd link you to some but I don't really care about convincing someone with unknown tastes.
Synths and sequences are tools, and are no more limiting than fingers or strings. Throwing away every musical convention might be interesting, but so is experimenting to see why those conventions developed in the first place. What parts of the structure can be removed? When and why?
Computers are generally very unrestrictive--they can be used to put together virtually any sound one can think of, as opposed to physical instruments which have physical limitations (although there are exceptions - the people doing pop music or the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance have different goals in mind than mere experimentation, and they enforce their restrictions with their tools to help produce their ideas more effectively).
One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was a live electronic performance where a single tone was generated and then manipulated on the spot beyond recognition. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked only because of the availability of electronic musical tools.
Oh, if you have good examples of modern electronic music that's really experimental, please share! I try to keep my ears open to new things.
That said, I've used the tools of electronic music. I've composed with sequences and samples. I find physical instruments to be more directly expressive (I play guitar and drums myself, but I get the same vibe from keyboard, horn, and string players).
More importantly, though, I find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music. The more "unrestricted" the instrument, the more problematic it is. As a musician, I often use deliberately-imposed restrictions to narrow my choices and channel myself in certain directions. That's especially important in the improvisation world, where you don't have musical conventions to serve as boundaries.
I agree that it's extremely important to understand why musical conventions came to be, and experiment with structures that either generate or break those conventions. The flip side of my own music is playing with folk and "world music" forms. The contemporary music I find most interesting these days is cultural fusion music coming out of Israel, and out of the western Sahara desert. The "desert blues" of the Tuareg and other western Sahara tribes is an incredible reinterpretation of centuries-old tradition with modern instruments (mostly, electric guitar). And in Israel, there are second and third generation Arab Jews discovering the music of their grandparents and filtering it through their own Millennial internet-driven sensibilities. Musicians like Riff Cohen and Yemen Blues just boggle me. So, so cool.
I find it interesting that your comment mentions that restriction in sound leads to better musical creation, and the comment you're replying to remarks that the best electronic performance they saw was one where all the music was composed of one sample
I find it more interesting that the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13231557) found computers "generally very restrictive" and therefore uninteresting for experimentation...
And their reply to mine found computers "unrestrictive" and that they "find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music"
There are good restrictions, and bad restrictions. For example, you might want to program in a strictly typed language, because the restrictions solve other problems. But you might not want to program in FORTRAN, because its restrictions are mostly just painful.
To be more clear, though, I think I should have used the word "expressive" rather than "restrictive". I find it difficult to be expressive with computer-based music. And this is personal - I'm typing this while listening to a friend play an amazing live show with nothing but a Roland MC-808 beat box.
Given a guitar, I can do a lot with just one note, by modulating the timing and tone of that note. But I'm dependent on the direct physical feedback. The indirectness of computer interfaces dismays me. This isn't to say all computers are bad... certainly, I play with digital effects in my chain. My sound passes through computers and still sounds like me. But hopefully you see the point here.
"Free improvisation" is kind of a misnomer. A lot of improvisation is done within very strict structures - limitations, to use phrasing I used elsewhere. For example, most traditional jazz music is in 4/4 time, with circle of fifths western harmony. You can noodle over ii-V-I changes with a swing beat until the cows come home. Because you're settled in this warm bed of familiar grooves, chords, and tunes, everyone has a common language. Any random group of jazz musicians can get together, open up the Real Book, and perform group improvisation. And the audience, also accustomed to the conventions of jazz, can make value judgments and enjoy the performance, unencumbered by needing to figure out a 17/8 ostinato or the sound of just intonation.
I played for years in a free improvisation duo. One of the constraints we used (only for gigs) was "set lists". We would write titles for "songs", and interpret the titles. This helped us have beginnings and ends and moods.
If you're interested in this stuff for serious, seek out the book "Improvisation", by Derek Bailey. He was a famed improviser himself, and wrote a moderately academic book on musical improvisation in a wide variety of different contexts around the world.
> Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music.
Beautifully put.
Off topic, but I think the same is true of brutalist architecture.
I expect the article doesn't mention them because it views them as a means to an end. Since the article is about high-level philosophical concerns and not the nuts and bolts of how the music is created, talking about compositional/performance tools such as computers and synthesizers would be out of place -- the article is more concerned with the aesthetic goals which these or other tools would be used toward rather than the tools themselves.
Anyway the article does actually mention electronics at least twice, althouh both times mostly in passing:
"I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music."
"Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds ..."
Not really to the article's point at all, but when I think of "the music of the future", I think of the extended funk experiments of the 1970s. 40 years ago, Miles Davis' band sounded like music from 40 years in the future. It still sounds like music from 40 years in the future. And he wasn't alone... Parliament/Funkadelic, Fela Kuti, and others were working with these deep, deep funk grooves that ran forever and sounded completely timeless - the most primitive drums and percussion sharing equal billing with wah-inflected guitars and synthesizers. It was and is amazing music.
Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, and Andrew Hill stand out(to me) in this way. Love the Funk picks, and I would throw in Sly Stone. Ishmael Butler, of Digable Planets and Shabazz Palaces, also has a knack for creating music with a futuristic yet timeless quality.
Here's a pretty recent piece... The first time I heard it, my exact thought was that it's future music. It's unorthodox but still quite approachable and tasteful : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rHO7NW-zH8
That piece sounds exactly like every other prog/power metal song written in the last twenty years. What makes you think it is either unorthodox or futuristic?
I guess I'm not familiar with anything that sounds quite like it. It obviously does have some metal influence but also seems kinda jazzy and less aggressively sober--having more sparkly reverb-y parts. Her guitar has few traditional design elements and maybe that lends to the perception as well.
I have the same feeling you have about these guys making music that was ahead of their time. To me specifically sounded like space jazz from the future. By the way, I think it's worth mentioning that the band 'Shobaleader' (by artist 'squarepusher') has been playing electronic jazz that is very much influenced by these classics you mentioned https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX9QE6OBvoY
Interesting ideas wrapped up in painfully obfuscated academic references (obviously not intended for this audience).
THE FOURTH DEVELOPMENT [of new music], which is in many ways the most interesting, [is] namely the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order. These experiments are not what I have in mind when referring to the replacement of tones by sounds and musical by acoustical hearing. I am thinking of a more general transition, from Tonkunst to Klangkunst, to use the German expressions – a transition of deep philosophical significance, between two ways of hearing, and two responses to what is heard.
The author is arguing that we've moved from lyrical experimentation with tones, to serialization (complete lyrical structure of tones, probably commonly known as musical theory), and now to the avant garde of replacing tones (chords, progressions, structure) with recorded/processed sounds. Sounds (presumably) lack the melodic/harmonic qualities such as notes played together in a classical scale or progression.
This leads to: The experience of ‘next,’ and the inevitability of the next, has been chased away. In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.
Naturally we can fill in the blanks if we hear 75% of a chord progression, but with sounds, we have no idea what is coming next. They're disjointed.
I'm not sure what the author's conclusion is, but this seems to be as close to a summary as he gives: It seems to me that, if there is, now, to be a music of the future it will, in that way, belong with the music of the past.
Personally, if I hear a bunch of sounds that my brain can't connect together, and that don't please me or move me, I would have trouble calling that acoustical experience "music".
Yeah. They've got their very sophisticated musical theory that's tied to their very sophisticated philosophy, and it produces music that is absolute garbage.
I'm not sure exactly what theories they're referring to here, but if you listen to an avant-garde musician like Stockhausen, you can still hear incredibly beautiful melodies and progressions and rhythms. They're just very different from the norm.
These melodies, progressions and rythms you hear are not there, especially with stockhausen, as he made that absence his main point. It's the same if you talk about seeing structures in old terrestrial tv noise patterns.
Even if the only person who can predict the melodies, progressions, and rhythm is the composer, doesn't that inherently make the composition less random than completely unpredictable and truly random TV noise?
In historical serial music there is certainly a leftover of human interaction with the compositional rule system, so in practice it resembles more to a chaotic attractor than complete noise, i agree. The core conceptual idea of serial music is however the inevitable disembodyment of historic human music into pure structural sound patterns beyond history and beyond (historic) emotions.
That seems very wrong just on the face of it. Stockhausen has written numerous papers about his theories of rhythm. And if you listen to his music there is undoubtedly a sense of rhythm, just not any conventional ones. There are also definitely melodies.
Serialism does not mean non-melodic. Procedural creation of music does not mean the melodies and rhythms "don't exist". If anything, they're more there than they are in traditional music.
If anything, they're more there than
they are in traditional music.
Exactly. What makes modern classical music so disturbing to those socialised on pop music is the absence of endless repetition that is the true essence of pop.
FWIW, one of my beefs with classical music is the extreme lack of diversity in tones (ie: piano, violin, ...) as opposed to popular music (synthesizer)
When you listen popular music on a timeline (70s, 80s, ...), you can at the same time see to the evolution of synthesizers and music production software.
I tend to believe the exact opposite and it's one of the reasons I dislike much of popular music. Good orchestral music makes use of a wide range of tonal, harmonic, and dynamic colors available. Bad (in my opinion) pop music sounds the same and uses the same limited orchestration of guitars, bass, maybe keyboard, drum set, + vocals and tends to have little dynamic or harmonic variety.
I agree that synthesizers in pop music have been a welcome addition (70s & 80s produced some good music with it as you mentioned).
It has been changing slowly and slightly though, I often hear electric guitars in contemporary "orchestral" pieces (film scores like by Hans Zimmer, musical theatre like POTO)
> When you listen popular music on a timeline (70s, 80s, ...), you can at the same time see to the evolution of synthesizers and music production software.
I wonder how much of this is just due to taste or lack of familiarity? Not that you're wrong but for whatever reason I actually feel like classical music has a much greater variation of sound than pop music.
I'm curious whether you feel like there's a lack of diversity among these pieces (which happen to be a few of my favorites =)
I admit though that I probably am biased, because frankly I enjoy the sounds of the instruments very much. If anything I suspect that having people listen to recorded music probably makes them less likely to appreciate classical music.
I think we are talking about different kinds of diversities.
To say it another way, no matter how you bang at a piano, it still sounds like a piano.
I was talking about diversity in what is technically known as "timbre". For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1T-za0WH4Y You can say that these are toy sounds, that they don't sound like real instruments, I can then say that they are purer sounds. But I think we can agree that a classical orchestra cannot make these sounds, so in way it's less expressive.
> I think we are talking about different kinds of diversities.
I don't think we are actually because I was also referring to timbre. But yes I suppose I would agree that by the nature of being limited to certain instruments, you are limited in what you can express. I suppose I just feel like each of those instruments can be played to produce a very wide variety of colors as well, but I do of course see what you are saying.
What other art forms dictate events as a function of time? Dance, I suppose. I must be missing something obvious. Maybe spoken word slams.
Most other art forms that are performed over a period of time are not a function of time, but a function of dependency. In a play, you say your line after another actor finishes. Even in a movie it's the same way - it's not locked into an actual tempo until the editing process. Exceptions are the films where the music is written first, like Fantasia (this is a sorely ignored medium; I'd love to see a live-action film scored to a pre-written John Williams or Michael Giacchino score; where they have the freedom to pull in actual musical forms).
It's odd to consider music written like this - where snippets of a piece are written in all sorts of conflicting tempos, and then finally assembled during "editing" into something cohesive (although I guess this is how the Norwegian megapop songwriters kind of do this).
I think there's a lot of opportunity for introducing more tempo-based notation into other artforms. What if an internal pulse were introduced into a play? What else could sheet music be applied to if you kept everything except for the instruments and pitches/melody/harmony? Could you rehearse/perform a debate, a game, a dinner party...?
> It's odd to consider music written like this - where snippets of a piece are written in all sorts of conflicting tempos, and then finally assembled during "editing" into something cohesive (although I guess this is how the Norwegian megapop songwriters kind of do this).
Sample-heavy (hip-hop, house) musical genres have been doing this for a while. They'll take old 90 BPM records, sample em, pitch em/speed em up, or cut samples in such a way that they fit into new time signatures, keys, tempos, etc. The really good producers will take a bunch of samples and mash em up into a new work.
I think a lot of popular art forms have an internal tempo, whether their creators are conscious of structuring the tempo or not. All stories (music, movies, books, plays) have "shapes" [1] which incorporate a component of tempo. It would be interesting to make it explicit though for an art form where language rather than music is the main form of expression. Musicals are a happy medium here, a completely time-based dinner party or play might end up more like Jeopardy and less like free-flowing art.
I was just noting tempo in other art forms last night. I went to a theatrical performance of the play The Lion in Winter (the perfect Christmas story for anyone who has ever wanted to lock their families in a dungeon for the holiday, or gets sick of parents openly playing favorites with kids just to spite each other). I kept comparing it in my mind to the film version, starring Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. The film version just feels faster and snappier than the theatrical version did. Same dialog, same characters, same scenes, just faster. The movie was less funny and more dramatic than the play.
I expect that this article's title will give some Hacker News readers an incorrect impression of what it's about.
As the article mentions, this talk was given at the Donaueschingen Festival, so the audience almost certainly consisted mostly of fans of avant-garde contemporary classical music. If the author only mentions jazz or rock, or electronics only in passing, it's because he's primarily talking about the future of contemporary classical music, and in particular the future of the sort of highly-experimental classical music played at the Donaueschingen Festival, and probably not the future of music at large.
In this context, I think his question is a reasonable one. What will/should innovative classical music look like in the future? The article's suggestion seems to be that it should focus less on being radically experimental, and more on innovating in a way which is more deeply rooted in traditional techniques and more easily comprehensible to the listener. I suppose the question is, in light of what is now a long history of extreme musical experimentation, what does innovation look like in this more traditional context? I obviously don't have any answers, but I agree with the author that it would be nice to see more focus in this in the experimental classical music culture.
As an aside, this article has a lot of references to composers and pieces which will make it tough reading for someone not already familiar with avant-garde classical. That said, it does give a nice whirlwind overview of a lot of historical trends in this space, so if you're unfamiliar, but still sufficiently interested, you might use it as a quick reference for areas to listen to. Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise" is a good resource for a deeper look at the area.
For easily digestible ideas about the future of popular/electronic music, I can recommend Adam Harper's book[0], blog[1] and his recently started podcast/show[2].
Besides the overview of philosophical trends in "serious" music, it also attempts to explain the sociological mechanism through which the avant-garde movement still survives (what he calls The Dictatorship of Difficult Music). I found that very interesting and I wouldn't be surprised if it extended to other art forms too.
Part of it might be that musicians and composers have a finite boredom threshold. As a jazz musician, much as I love "the girl from Ipanema," and it's one of the greatest songs ever written, if I have to play it yet again in the same way as it's always played, I find it hard to refrain from misbehaving.
I prefer playing music that is more avant garde (within my abilities of course) even if it appeals to a smaller audience.
From reading it, I almost got the impression there are 2 different worlds of music and they are completely isolated.
That led me to wonder if there should be more cross pollination between the two.
When speaking of, and indeed when many modern electronic music composers write music they don't think in terms of phrases, chords, cadences, etc. The tools they use to write music don't have notes on a staff, they are just rectangles in a graph (1 axis for pitch and the other for time).
But at the same time, those who compose in the more traditional sense only stick to the sounds, patterns, and vocabulary from the classical world. They don't do anything like "drops".
It would be really interesting to hear what could come from the combination of the two and also the productivity that could be gained by both worlds learning about the concepts and tools used by the other.
There are (at least) two separate worlds of music according the field of musicology. The two worlds represented here are art music and popular music. The other major category of music is traditional or folk music.
It's funny that he identifies the problem: that avant-garde classical hasn't been able to find a way to connect with an audience, but then spends the conclusion trashing pop and rock as "plastic" music, listeners of which need to be apparently re-educated to appreciate better music. This despite the fact that pop and rock music has already achieved exactly what he is advocating. It has integrated avant-garde elements within a traditional framework and delivered it to a mass audience. Maybe he should consider learning from these genres, instead of trashing them.
Sure, there's plenty of generic, uninspired pop and rock. But there's plenty of generic, uninspired classic musical as well. And dig even a little deeper, and you find many, many pop rock, and hip-hop artists who are wildly experimental, yet still find an audience. Techniques like sampling and the use of electronics were pioneered by the avant-garde, but it is pop, rock and hip-hop artists who have taken them further and done the hard work of figuring out how they can be incorporated into a traditional (and new) melodic frameworks that actually have an appeal to the listener.
How about a super-optimizing hyper-intelligent AI with "hyperspace effectors" from the Culture books? Make it the "Mind" who was shunned as a pervert, because he liked to mess with sentients. We'll call him "MeatFracker." Perhaps a "concert" from MF could be billed as a new kind of experience, where MF scans the brains of the listeners to determine the best sounds to play. What's more, MF could conduct experiments, determine the best phrase out of several, then "rewind" the brains of the audience so that everyone only remembers hearing the best phrase. This process is then iterated over the entire "set" of compositions. The concert would take longer than the audience's subjective experience of the time. However, the audience would likely be left in tears and speechless, saying the experience was timeless and indescribable.
As a meta joke, years later, he could confess to not actually having gone through with the above process, and instead say he used remote brain manipulations equivalent to injecting the audience with LSD while playing Nickleback.
Not really surprising considering the venue and the audience in front of which this talk was given, but still, a complete disregard for the greatest musical phenomenon of the 20th century _in classical music_, that is John Cage and the profound revolution he has brought to musical thinking is more than enough reason to reject this as nonsense.
It just goes to show how the so-called "avant garde" in classical music is disconnected, and frankly, quite old. It really has nothing to do with the future.
This author cuts to the heart of it at the end of the article - the economics of current arts patronage supports an obscuring attitude that makes new ideas deliberately less accessible, else they must be crammed into a hyper-marketable popular formula.
In the same way that we have class or income divides, we have a culture divide through the hard division of "pop" vs. "academic" styles. This divide affects not just the arts, but math, science, philosophy, and related endeavors.
Is anyone else here familiar with the work of Christopher Alexander? I'm specifically thinking of his 4 volume 'The Nature of Order.' Feels like low hanging fruit for all of us musicians who grasp for existential clarity as to the nature of our order.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadRoger Scruton, author of the article posted, is a controversial figure. He's not someone you'd go to for tips on the latest digital deconstructivist architecture, and probably not for actually cutting-edge music either. More about him here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/enemies-of-roger-...
But synths and sequencers? They're not "modern". I find it hard to imagine music much more primitive than the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance.
Serialization and 12-tone, for all their shortcomings, represented serious questioning of how notes should be organized at all. I think they failed because they dehumanized, and humanity is at the heart of music. A conscious disregard for consonance/dissonance isn't the same as choosing the balance of consonance/dissonance. They were interesting intellectual exercises, but as a musician, I think they deserved to die. They're the music of the past now.
Most of the real experimentalism in music I hear these days (and I have some bias here) is in the noise and free improvisation fields. I'm biased because I also play free improvisation. But undermining rhythm and harmony, and focusing on tonal evolution - that's interesting and daring. And that music is done with some seriously analog approach, not computers. Computers are generally very restrictive (although there are exceptions - the people doing million-note sequences are fascinating noise experimenters). One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was an improvisation of one percussionist, who spent several minutes carefully wadding a piece of cellophane. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked by tossing aside virtually every musical convention except "be interesting".
I don't get why "traditional" musicians tend to dismiss electronic music. Electronic music is not just dubstep or Eurodance. There are modern genres such as future bass that incorporate more advanced musical composition and implement it with new technologies that many people enjoy.
Electronic music can be wonderfully experimental, but that's not because of anything that's been invented lately. Listen to the Forbidden Planet soundtrack, for example. That was wild, and it was 1956. I work with a lot of electronic musicians, and there's a strong interest in older instruments - analog synthesis, early digital like 12 bit samplers, etc.
I've used recent software synths, but for the most part, they're either not all that interesting, or they're studied knockoffs of analog synthesis techniques from the 1970s and earlier. At worst, many/most hit Brian Eno's criticism of modern synths - they lack character. By trying to sound like everything, they wind up not sounding like themselves.
It's pretty obvious that it's different from what was there before, so it is an innovation in that sense.
What's the take from "serious listeners" as mentioned in the article, just a mere stylistic change, I'm very curious about this.
That said, I think hip-hop is THE driving force behind innovation in pop today. Even country music is now being driven by hip-hop concepts. The beats of trap will be around for a while, but they sure as heck didn't invent 808 kicks or filter sweeps.
And it's important to distinguish between cultural innovations and real, substantial changes here. Disco was a cultural innovation 40 years ago. It's more or less dead now. 45 RPM singles were a real, substantial change.
What I am saying is that I think that what makes 4/4 so prevalent today is that it is somehow deeply connected to how our brains work, and if you consider popular music subject to Darwinian pressures, it is likely that 4/4 is the most "evolved" one (from a fitness view).
Anyway, I think that in 10 years we will be passing all of our music through a deep neural network, and then ask the network to create new things, like invent a new number one hit, cultural style, or create a new work in the style of Beethoven.
Hiphop is not the driving force anymore, also it did not care about harmony at all in a special way. Hiphops focus has always been on rythm. The essence of hiphop is the political rap combined with sampling (pirate citations of all kind creatively layered together). Hiphop (especially rap) has been culturally annihilated.
I don't know why you think hip hop has been "culturally annihilated". I hear it as an incredibly dynamic and forward-looking genre.
Resampling isn't particularly innovative as Im sure you aware of musique concrete and tape music. Hip-hop is essentially defined by the combination of rapping, sociopolitical subtexts, and, yes, specific music production techniques that include sampling but also certain types of rhythms and beats. Those are roughly in order of importance; notice how few people openly lament the death of sampling but the prominence of a white rapper will prompt endless critical and popular commentary.
> that's pretty dead.
Anyone who can listen to To Pimp a Butterfly and believe that hip hop is dead does not know what hip hop is.
> Can you name any currently successful hip hop band that does radical resampling over all genres?
When has this been the criterion for what makes a hip hop band?
It depends on what you're using. You can get anything from a system that can't be pulled off of 12 tone equal temperament and some conventional time signature all the way up to systems that offer complete and total freedom, up to and including setting the exact values in the .WAV file you generate. I wouldn't say getting past those restrictions are "difficult" necessarily, it's just that by necessity, the more power you take on yourself to define your music, the more work you're going to need to do. By the time you end up with the systems that offer total freedom you have music synthesis systems that look more like programming than musical instruments. But they do exist, and back on the topic of the original article, there's a lot of avant-garde-style work that has been done in them.
When I was going to school and minoring in electric music there was a guy playing with "granular synthesis"; his result sounded like telemetry. I'm not being particularly critical or cruel when I say that... that's seriously what his music sounded like. If you look at how telemetry is generated and compare to how granular synthesis works, it's not hard to see why. Tonality was entirely absent, let alone 12-tone equal temperament.
I actually have no idea what telemetry is supposed to sound like but I think this guy was just making bad music, with granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can actually be quite beautiful and tonal if thats what you're looking for, see examples [1] and [2] just to dig up some quick examples. Ableton's built-in time stretching uses granular synthesis. One guy's bad granular music isn't really indicative of anything.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6BU18mP3A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZ8zaGuaeBk
Most apparent in pop where, for example, each new wave of chart hits in the 80s was driven by the sounds available on some newly-released synth, but the same thing goes on with electro-acoustic music (timbrally, spatially) and modern classical music (in terms of organisation and programme content).
The theory is that this period has ended because we can pretty much synthesise anything now. (Or can we?)
If so, we no longer have the same motivating impulse. Where next?
The fact that we have so many "more traditional" genres in the first place is a result of some progress or invention having happened in the past. Why should it stop?
Novelty is something people seek in every field of course. But some of what makes music music (as opposed to just a soothing or vexing noise) has to do with anticipation and surprise. Perhaps novelty broadly is appealing to music listeners for similar reasons to why any music is appealing in the first place.
Although many forms in e.g. the classical canon might have been inspired by new technology of the day (most obvious example probably being the piano), genres have often arisen for reasons other than technology. It's plausible that our excursion through a hyper-speed series of technological drivers of musical novelty was just a crazy detour. But then we're back to the earlier question, what will it mean to put aside technological novelty as a driver? Or is it absurd to suggest that it has ended?
I'd link you to some but I don't really care about convincing someone with unknown tastes.
Synths and sequences are tools, and are no more limiting than fingers or strings. Throwing away every musical convention might be interesting, but so is experimenting to see why those conventions developed in the first place. What parts of the structure can be removed? When and why?
Computers are generally very unrestrictive--they can be used to put together virtually any sound one can think of, as opposed to physical instruments which have physical limitations (although there are exceptions - the people doing pop music or the boring wub-wub-wub of dubstep or the endless 4/4 oontz of Eurodance have different goals in mind than mere experimentation, and they enforce their restrictions with their tools to help produce their ideas more effectively).
One of the best modern music performances I've ever heard was a live electronic performance where a single tone was generated and then manipulated on the spot beyond recognition. It was complex, dynamic, exciting, and above all, musical - but it worked only because of the availability of electronic musical tools.
That said, I've used the tools of electronic music. I've composed with sequences and samples. I find physical instruments to be more directly expressive (I play guitar and drums myself, but I get the same vibe from keyboard, horn, and string players).
More importantly, though, I find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music. The more "unrestricted" the instrument, the more problematic it is. As a musician, I often use deliberately-imposed restrictions to narrow my choices and channel myself in certain directions. That's especially important in the improvisation world, where you don't have musical conventions to serve as boundaries.
I agree that it's extremely important to understand why musical conventions came to be, and experiment with structures that either generate or break those conventions. The flip side of my own music is playing with folk and "world music" forms. The contemporary music I find most interesting these days is cultural fusion music coming out of Israel, and out of the western Sahara desert. The "desert blues" of the Tuareg and other western Sahara tribes is an incredible reinterpretation of centuries-old tradition with modern instruments (mostly, electric guitar). And in Israel, there are second and third generation Arab Jews discovering the music of their grandparents and filtering it through their own Millennial internet-driven sensibilities. Musicians like Riff Cohen and Yemen Blues just boggle me. So, so cool.
And their reply to mine found computers "unrestrictive" and that they "find restriction to be essential to playing interesting music"
To be more clear, though, I think I should have used the word "expressive" rather than "restrictive". I find it difficult to be expressive with computer-based music. And this is personal - I'm typing this while listening to a friend play an amazing live show with nothing but a Roland MC-808 beat box.
Given a guitar, I can do a lot with just one note, by modulating the timing and tone of that note. But I'm dependent on the direct physical feedback. The indirectness of computer interfaces dismays me. This isn't to say all computers are bad... certainly, I play with digital effects in my chain. My sound passes through computers and still sounds like me. But hopefully you see the point here.
I played for years in a free improvisation duo. One of the constraints we used (only for gigs) was "set lists". We would write titles for "songs", and interpret the titles. This helped us have beginnings and ends and moods.
If you're interested in this stuff for serious, seek out the book "Improvisation", by Derek Bailey. He was a famed improviser himself, and wrote a moderately academic book on musical improvisation in a wide variety of different contexts around the world.
Beautifully put.
Off topic, but I think the same is true of brutalist architecture.
Anyway the article does actually mention electronics at least twice, althouh both times mostly in passing:
"I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music."
"Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds ..."
THE FOURTH DEVELOPMENT [of new music], which is in many ways the most interesting, [is] namely the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order. These experiments are not what I have in mind when referring to the replacement of tones by sounds and musical by acoustical hearing. I am thinking of a more general transition, from Tonkunst to Klangkunst, to use the German expressions – a transition of deep philosophical significance, between two ways of hearing, and two responses to what is heard.
The author is arguing that we've moved from lyrical experimentation with tones, to serialization (complete lyrical structure of tones, probably commonly known as musical theory), and now to the avant garde of replacing tones (chords, progressions, structure) with recorded/processed sounds. Sounds (presumably) lack the melodic/harmonic qualities such as notes played together in a classical scale or progression.
This leads to: The experience of ‘next,’ and the inevitability of the next, has been chased away. In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.
Naturally we can fill in the blanks if we hear 75% of a chord progression, but with sounds, we have no idea what is coming next. They're disjointed.
I'm not sure what the author's conclusion is, but this seems to be as close to a summary as he gives: It seems to me that, if there is, now, to be a music of the future it will, in that way, belong with the music of the past.
Personally, if I hear a bunch of sounds that my brain can't connect together, and that don't please me or move me, I would have trouble calling that acoustical experience "music".
Serialism does not mean non-melodic. Procedural creation of music does not mean the melodies and rhythms "don't exist". If anything, they're more there than they are in traditional music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donaueschingen_Festival#List_o...
So it's all garbage right? Metal is noise too I suppose, and Charles Mingus should have just played lounge music eh?
When you listen popular music on a timeline (70s, 80s, ...), you can at the same time see to the evolution of synthesizers and music production software.
I agree that synthesizers in pop music have been a welcome addition (70s & 80s produced some good music with it as you mentioned).
I wonder how much of this is just due to taste or lack of familiarity? Not that you're wrong but for whatever reason I actually feel like classical music has a much greater variation of sound than pop music.
I'm curious whether you feel like there's a lack of diversity among these pieces (which happen to be a few of my favorites =)
Scriabin Etude Op42 No5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqaOGikyNs Schubert Impromptu Op90 No3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxhbAGwEYGQ Prokofiev Piano Concerto 3 Mvmt 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdBi5IBrto Shostakovich Piano Concerto 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCTEx3w2_jU
I admit though that I probably am biased, because frankly I enjoy the sounds of the instruments very much. If anything I suspect that having people listen to recorded music probably makes them less likely to appreciate classical music.
To say it another way, no matter how you bang at a piano, it still sounds like a piano.
I was talking about diversity in what is technically known as "timbre". For example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1T-za0WH4Y You can say that these are toy sounds, that they don't sound like real instruments, I can then say that they are purer sounds. But I think we can agree that a classical orchestra cannot make these sounds, so in way it's less expressive.
I don't think we are actually because I was also referring to timbre. But yes I suppose I would agree that by the nature of being limited to certain instruments, you are limited in what you can express. I suppose I just feel like each of those instruments can be played to produce a very wide variety of colors as well, but I do of course see what you are saying.
Most other art forms that are performed over a period of time are not a function of time, but a function of dependency. In a play, you say your line after another actor finishes. Even in a movie it's the same way - it's not locked into an actual tempo until the editing process. Exceptions are the films where the music is written first, like Fantasia (this is a sorely ignored medium; I'd love to see a live-action film scored to a pre-written John Williams or Michael Giacchino score; where they have the freedom to pull in actual musical forms).
It's odd to consider music written like this - where snippets of a piece are written in all sorts of conflicting tempos, and then finally assembled during "editing" into something cohesive (although I guess this is how the Norwegian megapop songwriters kind of do this).
I think there's a lot of opportunity for introducing more tempo-based notation into other artforms. What if an internal pulse were introduced into a play? What else could sheet music be applied to if you kept everything except for the instruments and pitches/melody/harmony? Could you rehearse/perform a debate, a game, a dinner party...?
Sample-heavy (hip-hop, house) musical genres have been doing this for a while. They'll take old 90 BPM records, sample em, pitch em/speed em up, or cut samples in such a way that they fit into new time signatures, keys, tempos, etc. The really good producers will take a bunch of samples and mash em up into a new work.
I think a lot of popular art forms have an internal tempo, whether their creators are conscious of structuring the tempo or not. All stories (music, movies, books, plays) have "shapes" [1] which incorporate a component of tempo. It would be interesting to make it explicit though for an art form where language rather than music is the main form of expression. Musicals are a happy medium here, a completely time-based dinner party or play might end up more like Jeopardy and less like free-flowing art.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
As the article mentions, this talk was given at the Donaueschingen Festival, so the audience almost certainly consisted mostly of fans of avant-garde contemporary classical music. If the author only mentions jazz or rock, or electronics only in passing, it's because he's primarily talking about the future of contemporary classical music, and in particular the future of the sort of highly-experimental classical music played at the Donaueschingen Festival, and probably not the future of music at large.
In this context, I think his question is a reasonable one. What will/should innovative classical music look like in the future? The article's suggestion seems to be that it should focus less on being radically experimental, and more on innovating in a way which is more deeply rooted in traditional techniques and more easily comprehensible to the listener. I suppose the question is, in light of what is now a long history of extreme musical experimentation, what does innovation look like in this more traditional context? I obviously don't have any answers, but I agree with the author that it would be nice to see more focus in this in the experimental classical music culture.
As an aside, this article has a lot of references to composers and pieces which will make it tough reading for someone not already familiar with avant-garde classical. That said, it does give a nice whirlwind overview of a lot of historical trends in this space, so if you're unfamiliar, but still sufficiently interested, you might use it as a quick reference for areas to listen to. Alex Ross' book "The Rest is Noise" is a good resource for a deeper look at the area.
For example this one, to the 12-note piece mentioned towards the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sylplEFxXo and the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8K9gkuHpMo
http://lukemuehlhauser.com/how-to-fall-in-love-with-modern-c...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Music-Imagining-Millennium-M...
[1] https://rougesfoam.blogspot.com
[2] https://www.rbmaradio.com/shows/adam-harpers-bubblebath (might need non-US proxy)
I prefer playing music that is more avant garde (within my abilities of course) even if it appeals to a smaller audience.
That led me to wonder if there should be more cross pollination between the two.
When speaking of, and indeed when many modern electronic music composers write music they don't think in terms of phrases, chords, cadences, etc. The tools they use to write music don't have notes on a staff, they are just rectangles in a graph (1 axis for pitch and the other for time).
But at the same time, those who compose in the more traditional sense only stick to the sounds, patterns, and vocabulary from the classical world. They don't do anything like "drops".
It would be really interesting to hear what could come from the combination of the two and also the productivity that could be gained by both worlds learning about the concepts and tools used by the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_music
Sure, there's plenty of generic, uninspired pop and rock. But there's plenty of generic, uninspired classic musical as well. And dig even a little deeper, and you find many, many pop rock, and hip-hop artists who are wildly experimental, yet still find an audience. Techniques like sampling and the use of electronics were pioneered by the avant-garde, but it is pop, rock and hip-hop artists who have taken them further and done the hard work of figuring out how they can be incorporated into a traditional (and new) melodic frameworks that actually have an appeal to the listener.
As a meta joke, years later, he could confess to not actually having gone through with the above process, and instead say he used remote brain manipulations equivalent to injecting the audience with LSD while playing Nickleback.
(Serial music is like a thorn in the classic cultural body of 'Music', because it's partly inhuman)
It just goes to show how the so-called "avant garde" in classical music is disconnected, and frankly, quite old. It really has nothing to do with the future.
In the same way that we have class or income divides, we have a culture divide through the hard division of "pop" vs. "academic" styles. This divide affects not just the arts, but math, science, philosophy, and related endeavors.
https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-Environmental...