In the last few decades, new technologies have brought composers and listeners to the brink of an era of limitless musical possibility. They stand before a vast ocean of creative potential, in which any sounds imaginable can be synthesised and pieced together into radical new styles and forms of music-making. But are musicians taking advantage of this potential? How could we go about creating and listening to new music, and why should we? Bringing the ideas of twentieth-century avant-garde composers Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage to their ultimate conclusion, Infinite Music proposes a system for imagining music based on its capacity for variation, redefining musical modernism and music itself in the process. It reveals the restrictive categories traditionally imposed on music-making, replaces them with a new vocabulary and offers new approaches to organising musical creativity. By detailing not just how music is composed but crucially how it's perceived, Infinite Music maps the future of music and the many paths towards it.
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Infinite Music is a super clear, open-ended philosophy of sound and music for the post-rave generation. Essential reading for sonic modernists everywhere. --(Cristian Vogel)
A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures. --(Steve Goodman, author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear)
A timely analysis of musical evolution at a moment when many practitioners have become fixated on the past and thinkers have found themselves unable to locate possible futures. --(Steve Goodman, author of Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By rimbo
Format:Paperback
Exciting beginnings of a conceptual framework that might shine light on structural functions throughout the infinite territories of "musicking"-- music as it's played, rather than as a fixed/discrete object. This is a theory of Music Space-- all possible music-- and its subsets, music spaces, which might be: instruments, works, styles, -- maybe all of these things simultaneously ('alien genres'? great speculative chapter on these near the end). Formal musical models ringing with a kind of vitality once again (this is nothing if not a book of beautifully imagined musics)-- a new process music, a theory of objects and variability across all scales, a theory of movement, tactics of 'dequantization' woven throughout.
A new object-oriented formalism, a kind of serialism for our times-- a connection made explicit in the introduction, recalling the early 20th century's own theory of variability which opened new spaces, which said "yes" to the affective forces of all twelve equal-tempered tones and their combinations-- with Harper's ontology, a new "YES" to all the materials that we have at our disposal, all objects, all spaces. Infinite Music reads as a proud inheritor of Modernist ideals, a kind of response to the helplessness of 'retromania' that Simon Reynolds and others have identified in recent years. Is pop culture obsessed with its own past? Dequantize it!
The language can be a bit dry if you're not prepared for it. The imagined musics here are revealed as architectural constructions rather than poetic flows-- for the most part, it's our own imaginary drifts through the spaces that fill them in with "content", the book merely setting the stage. Remember, though, it's about "Music Space" & its territories/structures-- the stage/space itself (in motion) is the subject.
In any case-- a very inspiring read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in where music is at, and where we might "musick" it from here. It's a landmark, as far as I'm concerned, in the formal project of dissolving music objects-- something that we hear in classical "transition liquidations", in improvisation, in open-form composition, in collage, remixes, music software spaces, etc. Aesthetics of fluidity, dispersion-- a powerful trajectory of musical development with many bright futures ahead of it.
A new object-oriented formalism, a kind of serialism for our times-- a connection made explicit in the introduction, recalling the early 20th century's own theory of variability which opened new spaces, which said "yes" to the affective forces of all twelve equal-tempered tones and their combinations-- with Harper's ontology, a new "YES" to all the materials that we have at our disposal, all objects, all spaces. Infinite Music reads as a proud inheritor of Modernist ideals, a kind of response to the helplessness of 'retromania' that Simon Reynolds and others have identified in recent years. Is pop culture obsessed with its own past? Dequantize it!
The language can be a bit dry if you're not prepared for it. The imagined musics here are revealed as architectural constructions rather than poetic flows-- for the most part, it's our own imaginary drifts through the spaces that fill them in with "content", the book merely setting the stage. Remember, though, it's about "Music Space" & its territories/structures-- the stage/space itself (in motion) is the subject.
In any case-- a very inspiring read. Highly recommended for anyone interested in where music is at, and where we might "musick" it from here. It's a landmark, as far as I'm concerned, in the formal project of dissolving music objects-- something that we hear in classical "transition liquidations", in improvisation, in open-form composition, in collage, remixes, music software spaces, etc. Aesthetics of fluidity, dispersion-- a powerful trajectory of musical development with many bright futures ahead of it.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By David X
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Read this after directly after reading David Byrne's excellent How Music Works and was extremely let down. Infinite Music has a fantastic premise but is somewhat lacking in ideas, momentum, and energy.
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