RossWolfe
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08.18.11 Against Lyrics07.29.11 Theses toward a New Music

Theses toward a New Music

Fundamental principles aimed at the creation of a Music that is adequate to our age. We must exterminate the atavistic and anachronistic tendencies of the present epoch in order to usher in the New. LONG LIVE THE MACHINE.
1Musical production is limited by the technical means of an age.

The forms of music produced in any given age are delimited by the technologies of musical production. The symphony orchestra was impossible until the techniques required to create classical instruments had been refined to a sufficient degree. Thus, the potentialities of music (organized sound) are determined by the technical field within which they must work.
2The content of musical production is in largely dependent upon the predominant social structures.

The content of musical production is to a large extent a reflection of the social institutions and exigencies of its age. Thus, when the Church held a great deal of temporal power in Europe, most music tended to toward the ecclesiastical. This remained so up through the baroque age. During the heyday of the aristocracy, classical music provided the blue-bloods with frivolous courtly music. In the nineteenth century, when Romanticism and nationalism prevailed, hymns to the fatherland abounded (Brahms' German Requiem, Strauss' Blue Danube, anything by Wagner).
3The accidental properties of music are in large part cultural and arbitrary.

The accidental properties of music (the scales used, the time signatures employed, the existence of dissonance and resolution or polyrhythms, etc.) are for the most part a product of the particular cultures and regions out of which they emerged. These elements are initially irrational, but through their elaboration and systematization through music theory they are made more rational. Likewise, the organization of musicians into particular formations (chamber groups, orchestras, bands) evolves out of the history of musical production according to the patterns of tradition.
4Each epoch produces a music adequate to its capacities.

Based on the above, it would seem natural that each age has produced a form of music appropriate to its ideological, technological, and peculiar structures.
5The technical reproducibility of sound altered musical production significantly.

In the twentieth century, with the serialization of sound via audial recording (the gramophone and so on), music was vulgarized to such a level that it was aimed generally at "the masses," toward a "popular" audience. While live performances were still valuable, the mass reproducibility of sound through increasingly precise recording devices made innovations such as radio and eventually television great media through which music has been disseminated. The effect of sound recording and reproducibility had on music was very much the same as the effect of photography on painting and the effect of film on theater.
6Electrification and electronic amplification of sound superseded non-electrified instruments.

With the introduction of a new interface mediating between the tone produced and its sonic amplification, new levels of mediation were possible. Small bands could play to increasingly huge audiences through the increased audial output of electronic amps. The more "natural" traditional instruments were thus outmoded, except through their analogue or digital recording.
7The invention of the Moog and other synthesizers has revolutionized the possibilities of music.

With the even further intermediation of sound through digitally-contrived sounds and artificial pitch alterations, as well as precisely preset drum beats and tape loops, the sphere of musical production was yet again revolutionized. Now the organic element of music was eradicated entirely. Layer upon layer of artificial mediation was piled atop one another. The human element was reduced to a programming decision.
8Even the human voice has been rendered obsolete.

Even that most human, seemingly irreproducible component of musical production, the voice, has been replaced by artificial intonations and articulations. No longer is music a slave to the peculiarities and imperfections of the human voice. Since 1961, this has been the case, and the survival of the unaltered human voice has been that of a living fossil: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGsfwhb4-bQ
9With even further mediation, the human element of music can be further extirpated.

Through the implementation of various algorithms and modalities, a program could be automatically set to generate other programs, which in turn generate other programs, etc., each of which generate different patterns of sound. These sonic patterns would vary each in their repetition, differentiation, pitch, tone, sound, lyricization, etc. The human element in the production would be akin to the role of God in the Deist universe -- after an initial thrust or "prime movement," all else would proceed according to artificial laws engendered by the ever-changing constitution of the program.
10Music videos featuring human beings have been outstripped.

Accordingly, music videos should no longer feature human beings, but rather only depict sequences of digits or mathematical functions, or alternately factory scenes of machines producing other machines producing other machines, in a grandly-orchestrated symphony OF THE MACHINE. THE HUMAN ELEMENT WILL FINALLY BE ERASED AND HUMANITY CAN GAIN ASCENDANCY ABOVE THE REALM OF MUSICAL PRODUCTION.
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