Composition, Change and Musical Objects in Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making

Adam Harper

Infinite Music, published in November 2011, is my attempt at building a broad-based, progressive philosophy of musical composition and aesthetics for the modern era. I use the term ‘modern’ in its sense as ‘contemporary’ and ‘new’, since much of my approach is informed by aspects of music technology that developed relatively recently, at least as far as its long-term history is concerned. But I also use the term in its relation to concepts of ‘modernity’ and even ‘modernism’, concepts that many now believe to have had their day. These concepts often carry negative associations with aesthetic dogmatism and failed cultural projects, and for good reason, but in that they represent concerted and collective artistic focus on imagining new forms and, indeed, new ways of perceiving and living in a changed and changing world, their lasting importance cannot be emphasised enough.

Infinite Music aims to call for such a modernism, one which is directed towards the imagination of the new but which refuses dogma or limitations. Ferruccio Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music was perhaps the key inspiration in this regard, since it advocates dismantling musical rules without making very explicit assumptions or demands about the specific nature of music in the future. In many areas of contemporary culture, such a call still needs to be heard. Part of my background is in the criticism of underground popular music, where resistance to the conservatism of mainstream music and debate over the value of ‘retro’ idioms are common themes. But here at the 46th Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, such a call – explaining the importance of New Music – might be relatively redundant.

Instead, I’d like to elaborate on a central aspect of Infinite Music that is less explicit than its call for a twenty-first-century-modernist expansion of the musical imagination. I’d like to describe the musical ontology – its system of con ceptualising the ‘being’ of music – that I hope supports this call and provides it with its method. As well as describing what music might be ‘composed of’ in better imagining the possibilities open to the modern composer, Infinite Music also aims to describe the process of hearing new music in constructive ways.

Unlike many of the musical ontologies that might be connected to modernism, Infinite Music’s is not a hierarchical or absolute system. It is not based on particular laws, structures or fundamental musical units. Instead it is a fluid, relativistic, infinitely flexible system based on change itself – constant, continuous and infinitesimal change, change in the abstract. Here’s how the ontology is summarized in Infinite Music’s introduction:

This book proposes a system for the imagining of music. It’s not just a single system as was offered by serialism, but a system of systems, an infinite system allowing for the creation of subordinate musical systems or what will be called ‘musical objects’, describing how they interrelate and how they’re perceived (or not). It sees music as a complex system of variables relating primarily to the production of sound, and takes this idea to its infinitely variable conclusions. This system, which is given the name ‘music space’, situates the limitations of any one, particular idea or set of ideas about musical forms against a space of infinite variability expressed in infinite dimensions. It ultimately treats all music as a process of continuously changing information and thus at the point of infinity, music, which manifests as an event, is always unrepeatable and different (i.e. changed) unless we restrict the perception of this change in some way. We see every musical structure as one of different relative rates of this change, with some elements changing while others repeat or remain effectively the same. We see how the same structures of musical change apply both within and outside of the borders of musical performances, making music as a whole a single system spanning all lengths of time. We see how composers and listeners perceive this change in relation to their own capacities and interests and thus come to handle and develop musical information discriminately. Most importantly, by imagining music in terms of paths of possible change running through a space of infinite possibility, we learn how the restrictions of unwitting convention and the apparent finitude of our imaginations can be detected and thus overcome. – p. 11

One of the first things to note about Infinite Music’s ontology might be that there is no stable, discrete object at the centre of it. Elsewhere, such a fundamental object might be the motif (as in Schoenberg), or the note (as either pitch or rhythmic value), or sound (as in Varèse), or the sonic grain (as in Curtis Roads’s Microsound). There are no sonic atoms of the system, no taxonomy or periodic table of musical elements with which to proscribe music-making. But how might we handle, as an alternative ontological base, this ‘change’ – changing information, difference, relative difference in information?

To find a more useful fundamental creative condition of composition, we’d need a way of expressing [the] power to manipulate sound by grasping the specific attributes of (any) sound based on the ways in which it varies. There is a term for this, common in maths, science and their applications: variables. – p. 17

Of course, it is nothing new to consider the activity of composition to amount to the manipulation of variables, the most prominent of them being pitch, volume, timbre and duration or time. This was often the perspective of twentieth-century music, as in post-war serialism, the theory of John Cage, and indeed in folk music champion and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics system, in which the characteristics of any folk music in the world could be described using a system of thirty-seven variables. Variables express values, such as, for example, 440Hz for pitch, 30dB for volume, sine waveform for timbre and three seconds for duration. Taken as a category in themselves, these ‘musical variables’ represent the continuity behind values that change in time and space. But this variability can be considered more than just a descriptive signifier for a priori sounds:

When it comes to musical composition, sounds don’t exist independently of the activity of the variables and values that specify them. Sounds are made up of values expressed by variables, whatever they may be: it’s the activity of combinations of variables and their values that actually creates or constitutes in the first place what we may then identify as (certain) sounds. There’s no such thing as a sound without values, that is, values that can be expressed through variables. For composers, variables can do more than just describe sound(s) – they are in a significant sense what compose them … Musical variability comes before sounds, not vice versa. – p. 24

In its first part, Infinite Music looks at the workings and possibilities of musical variables at length. Irreducible, again, to any single set of elements (even as forms of change), they can be broken down or built up into simpler or more complex paths of changing values. Pitch, for example, can be understood on another level as the joint activity of amplitude and time, while a choice between different musical instruments (also a variable) involves relations between certain particular possibilities of pitch, volume, timbre and duration all grouped together in each instrument, as well as variables and values that might pertain to social, cultural or economic concerns. Indeed, I propose that variables with no effect on sound, ‘non-sonic variables’, be considered as musical variables that composers and listeners might observe. Furthermore, the values of variables might be continuous (changing smoothly, as in the pitches on a trombone) or be ‘quantised’, thus becoming discrete (changing in step, as in the pitches on a piano), and might have range limitations imposed on them in particular contexts, such as those of particular instruments.

Most important, perhaps, is that the values of a musical variable might be left unspecified, to whatever degree, at the point of performance. This allows for the continuity behind the differently detailed performance events that might arise from a single musical work – for example, the different values expressed by the variable of tempo with which the same piano piece can be performed on different occasions. The term I apply to music with values that, in this way, change at the point of performance is ‘flexible music’, in contrast to ‘concrete music’, whose values are, notionally at least, entirely specified in each performance and do not differ between them. However, these two categories are, as is typical for Infinite Music’s ontology, relative, since no two performances can have infinitely specified values such that they are identical:

In contrast to the way we usually talk about musical works, we could say that when we hear ‘the same’ work performed in two different sets of circumstances, we are in a different sense – that is, at a more advanced degree...