Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making

by Adam Harper

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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Art

Paperback

First published November 16, 2011

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harper describes the potential of diversifying musical language away from stagnant traditions through the development of more intricate musical objects, styles and works which spread like tendrils into the infinite Music Space of possibilities. The ideas here reflect favourably on contemporary electronic music and provides some great food for thought on how composers might frame their own work processes - especially as the act of creating music now often depends on creating your own instruments and systems to establish more opportunities for variance, subversion and innovation.

Unfortunately, as per the review below I found this maddeningly wordy given the ideas, and I became very impatient around the halfway point as it was clear the pace was not going to pick up. It feels like each idea is explained over and over, and even as the book progresses through its sections it continues to re-illustrate and re-frame previous ideas. I appreciate this commitment to ensuring the reader is following some quite abstract topics, and would prefer that than to go too far the other way, but I felt it really missed the mark for economy of words and actually became overwhelming. Throw in some good illustrations and I think it could have been a third of the length whilst clarifying its ideas more clearly.

[Carson May · Rating 4 out of 5]

excessively wordy, but incredibly thought-provoking.

[glambient · Rating 1 out of 5]

Trying to formally deconstruct something 'infinite' is a pointless endeavor... and the author admits this on every other page. There is no process and pragmatism here. It attempts a top-down view when a bottom-up view would be more useful, and ultimately realistic. Learned nothing new about the possibilities of music.