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The Music of the Future
- cousin_it 10y agoI 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.
- iammyIP 10y agoI 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- theoh 10y agoThere'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-scruton/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/enemies-of-roger-...
- empath75 10y agoNo mention of computers or synthesizers or sequencers or modern music technology of any kind, let alone music of the future.
- beat 10y agoTechnology 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".
- alexssung 10y agoHave 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.
- bluetwo 10y agoI will admit I only understood 10% of the article, but all I kept hearing in my head was: "The future of music is obviously jazz"
- elliotec 10y agoA painfully boring chunk of indecipherable drivel that has nothing to do with the future of music.
- beat 10y agoNot 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.
- indigo_rex 10y agoEric 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.
- steamer25 10y agoHere'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rHO7NW-zH8
- dublinben 10y agoThat 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?
- steamer25 10y agoI 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.
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- roymurdock 10y agoInteresting 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".
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoYeah. They've got their very sophisticated musical theory that's tied to their very sophisticated philosophy, and it produces music that is absolute garbage.
- rudolf0 10y agoI'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.
- tunesmith 10y agoWhat 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...?
- roymurdock 10y ago> 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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ
- 10y ago
- sublimeloge 10y agoI 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.
- 21 10y agoThis article could use some youtube links. For example this one, to the 12-note piece mentioned towards the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sylplEFxXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sylplEFxXo and the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8K9gkuHpMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8K9gkuHpMo
- sytelus 10y agoThanks. Also available on Google Music: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/album/B7rnljvundukm5kqk7emgxbjwvi/Yvar+Mikhashoff%2C/Stockhausen+-+MANTRA https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/album/B7rnljvunduk...
- stcredzero 10y agoHow 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.
- iammyIP 10y agoHeres an example of serial Music from 1955, Pierre Boulez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS82nF85_gA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS82nF85_gA (Serial music is like a thorn in the classic cultural body of 'Music', because it's partly inhuman)
- ciconia 10y agoNot 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.
- buzzybee 10y agoThis 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.
- keyle 10y agoThe painting depicted in the top banner is incredibly interesting. Also nightmarish.
- dizzyfingers 10y agoIs 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. https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-Environmental-Structure/dp/0972652914 https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-Environmental...