The Music of the Future

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.

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"

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".

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".

Yeah. They've got their very sophisticated musical theory that's tied to their very sophisticated philosophy, and it produces music that is absolute garbage.