
The Music of the Future - tintinnabula
http://www.futuresymphony.org/the-music-of-the-future/
======
sublimeloge
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.

~~~
21
This 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)

~~~
ejlo
Here is a page with a lot of good examples of more accessible modern classical
music:

[http://lukemuehlhauser.com/how-to-fall-in-love-with-
modern-c...](http://lukemuehlhauser.com/how-to-fall-in-love-with-modern-
classical-music-4/)

------
cousin_it
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.

~~~
iammyIP
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.

------
beat
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.

~~~
steamer25
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rHO7NW-zH8)

~~~
dublinben
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?

~~~
steamer25
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.

------
stcredzero
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.

------
buzzybee
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.

------
roymurdock
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".

~~~
21
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.

~~~
rifung
> 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 =)

Scriabin Etude Op42 No5:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqaOGikyNs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwqaOGikyNs)
Schubert Impromptu Op90 No3:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxhbAGwEYGQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxhbAGwEYGQ)
Prokofiev Piano Concerto 3 Mvmt 3:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdBi5IBrto](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AdBi5IBrto)
Shostakovich Piano Concerto 2:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCTEx3w2_jU](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.

~~~
21
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](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.

~~~
rifung
> 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.

------
elliotec
A painfully boring chunk of indecipherable drivel that has nothing to do with
the future of music.

~~~
rhizome
How can you know whether it has anything to do with the future of music if
it's indecipherable to you?

~~~
elliotec
Ok, from what I could tell, which wasn't much, it didn't have anything to do
with the actual future of music.

------
iammyIP
Heres 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)

------
bluetwo
I 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"

------
tunesmith
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...?

~~~
roymurdock
> 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)

------
empath75
No mention of computers or synthesizers or sequencers or modern music
technology of any kind, let alone music of the future.

~~~
beat
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".

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> 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.

~~~
mafribe
Modern pop music is to music what brutalism is to architecture. Cheap,
repetitive, horrible.

------
ciconia
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.

~~~
hellofunk
You think John Cage was the most profound revolution in 20th century classical
music?

~~~
iammyIP
Do you really think any civilisation could exist in this universe without
having discovered the musical piece of 'play nothing and listen'?

~~~
ssalazar
Yawn.. people who only know about 4'33" should not attempt lazy critiques of
John Cage.

------
dizzyfingers
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.

[https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental...](https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental-Structure/dp/0972652914)

------
keyle
The painting depicted in the top banner is incredibly interesting. Also
nightmarish.

