The Music to Come

by François J. Bonnet

This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as “music” is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music―this, ultimately, is the ambition of the lines to come.

Genres: Music

56 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

François J. Bonnet is a composer, visual artist, recording artist (as Kassel Jaeger), director of Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA-GRM) in Paris, and part-time lecturer at the Université de Paris 1.

Reviews

[Leah Weyandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Musicians and music-lovers often share the same mania: a mania for articulating their love of music by way of strategies of confinement. But love must not be constructed as one constructs a barricade.”

“Music is a happening that cannot be claimed for one-self. You don't create music, it happens. The challenge of any musical creation must be to invent the conditions of possibility for an appearing of the musical, but nothing else, because that is all that lies within its power. You don't create music; you create environments conducive to the advent of music.”

“The music to come is inhuman, as it is not built around a dialogue. The sound of the sea, of the waves running aground, the crackle of the backwash, can become music to a listener capable of listening.
Not just an evocation of the musical, but music. And this becoming-music does not take place, as some have naively thought, through the identification of formal structures and narrative pathways-through the identification of organised forms that could have been created by a 'genius'-that is to say, the phantasmagorical incarnation of an impersonal will hidden behind screens such as chance or contingency. There is no hidden spirit that imparts meaning and form to the world, playing a score that remains invisible to mere mortals. The noise of the sea may become music when it encounters a listening that listens only for that very noise, without trying to find in it some index, without investigating it, but simply being in the experience, in search of an impression. The impression, then, is neither suggested nor induced by another human. It is unaddressed.”

[Tomas Serrien · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an attempt to write a book about music philosophy, but the attempt fails. I think some basic assumptions in the book are good, but what follows is just some random arty-farty pseudophilosophy. I really like Bonnet his music, but this is... bad.

[Jascha Narveson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author starts with the premise that all music isn't really Music because it's always tied to other concerns, such as power (displays of virtuosity, etc) or narrative ideas or social identities or any number of things.

What follows for many pages is the kind of teasing you see in internet ads about secret health supplements, but in a more academic prose style: the problem of music not being just-music is presented and then analyzed, with layers being peeled away one by one: music isn't this, it's not that, it isn't the other thing, etc etc... "what is it?"... well, it's also not this... or this... "so what is it?"... well, it's also not that...

Towards the end [MILD SPOILER ALERT?] there's a hint that maybe music can be found in natural phenomena by those who are prepared to listen the right way, but it doesn't fully commit to the idea, preferring to leave the answer un-answered. The whole thing reads a bit like a Zen koan, presenting the reader with an imponderable: if music isn't anything that can be named, then what is it? This is a music-centric version of the age-old human problem of gesturing towards something like Reality using tools that can't quite grasp the topic at hand.

I was in the right mood to read this today, as it's short, and I decided to read it as a game, or in the spirit of reading a Zen riddle, and as a spectator sport where I watched how the author dealt with the initial premise. It's a fun little book, and might be a useful way for some people out there to shake up their ideas on what music is or isn't. On a different day in a different mood I might not've given it the same chance.

[graceofgod · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some might find it pretentious; others might find it incomprehensible. It might be both of these things, but I found it perfectly readable and even useful for my own musical projects/thinking.

[Halle]

I found this book at an artsy bookstore in the East Village, and I still can't decide if this is all nonsense or if there's something to it.

Overall, the language is a bit excessively academic and sort of inaccessible, and this is coming from someone who far from being an anti-intellectual. I often got lost in the language and probably only grasped half of what Bonnet was trying to communicate.

Nonetheless, I like the questions that the book poses, driving us to really think about what music is and how it can evolve. I think it's beautiful to think about how music is something that just naturally exists and that people are merely a vessel for it, or that music is a "landscape." Maybe most of this book is just a guy writing his thoughts down on a complex philosophical quandary, but I think it's going to stick with me.

[Antonin Rimbaud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's start an Artaudian revolution again

[Paulina F · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pocas veces leí cosas tan soberbias. Un par de ideas buenas---

[Scott Weyandt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“At the threshold where language collapses, this is where we find the threshold where music begins.” p.48

"Music is a happening that cannot be claimed for one-self. You don't create music, it happens. The challenge of any musical creation must be to invent the conditions of possibility for an appearing of the musical, but nothing else, because that is all that lies within its power. You don't create music; you create environments conducive to the advent of music." p.30