ThreeThesesOnMusic

ThoughtStorms Wiki

1 : White Noise is your Limit

Music, unlike other arts has a well defined limit : WhiteNoise. The maximum variety / chaos / volume ... the limit of rule-breaking or experimentalism.

Musical progress can not simply be pointing in a direction and following it further. All musical progress must accommodate itself in the space between where we are now, and white noise.

Or rather music follows a dialectic.

Thesis : music must follow the rules
Anti-Thesis : music must break the rules
Synthesis : music must break the right rules.

But what determines the right rules to break? The meta-rules of course :-)

But can you not break the meta-rules?

Of course you can, but only by following the meta-meta-rules.

It is this infinite piling of meta-on-meta that creates music's history. Its "forward motion". But it's also fractal, infinitesimal, tracing ever new strange-loops within the circumference of white noise.

2 : Musicians and Composers are Ancient Enemies

Don't be naive enough to think of them as willing collaborators. There is a ClassWarBetweenMusiciansAndComposers. A deep hatred that only those chained together by necessity for centuries could possibly understand.

The tape-recorder and LoopingPedal are the musician's revenge on the composer, turning his or her live improvisations into eternal compositions.

The recording-studio and DigitalAudioWorkstation are the composer's revenge on the musician, rendering his / her performance unnecessary as the score is rendered directly into listenable format.

3 : Eternal and Ephemeral

The dynamics of evolution are complex. All music looks backwards and forwards. All music calls on eternal truths and rules and simultaneously explores new territory and breaks those rules.

Roots and Future

Pop music has evolved like this ... sounds are ephemeral ... ever evolving ever open to experimentation. But harmony and melody are eternal ... a strange but compelling and stable synthesis of radicalism and conservatism ... eternal song-structure in a new coat of the latest sound-fashion.