Music's Limits?

In any case, the entire deal is, no matter how you define "revolutionary", it doesn't apply today where everything is possible.

I said this PAGES back. With all of the different genres going on together, how can you possibly look for THE next big thing?

That's not to say that revolutions aren't taking place and that there aren't new things to try. There will always be new things to try. As genres create sub-genres and then subs of those genres, what we get is more to play with and more to COMBINE. A little from column A and a little from column B and see how it sounds. Bring your sensibility from one area to another area, and play.

There's no way to get one big thing that will shake up everyone, but the OP seemed to feel that we had hit a complete stand-still and music would stay exactly as it is for the rest of time. Obviously, that's not true. If you're looking for one thing that will affect every genre and every artist, you'll probably be looking for a long time. But if you're looking for new tools to play with in your own composition, then have at it and have fun.

Ah, the amount of time spent on this topic is time which could have been used to write the next "new shiny thing in music" or at least do some score reading/counterpoint/concentrated listening.

Hope you all had fun.

Ah, the amount of time spent on this topic is time which could have been used to write the next "new shiny thing in music" or at least do some score reading/counterpoint/concentrated listening.

Hope you all had fun.

Well scraggy, why even bother to post on YC other than to ask a question.

Exactly.

Or who is working in certain fields that is revolutionary. As far as I know, there is no Steven Hawking of the music world right now - no one superstar face who has at least symbolized, if not actually produced, new and original thought in his field for the mass public. There is no Stockhausen, no Schoenberg, no one who is taking the reins. I'm curious about who is on the REAL cutting edge - who is not still considering the modernism from a previous era to be truly modern.

Anyone?

Seriously, this is all so ridiculously vague. Are you looking for a composer/musician who has just come on the scene within the last year or two that looks like they're on the brink of changing the face of music as a whole? That's pretty close to impossible to figure out if that is what you're looking for.

You're not going to know who's about to lead music in a direction or what aspect of music is about to fundamentally change or what new idea is going to spawn a new musically movement. You won't know these things unless they've already happened or you're the one who's doing it.

I guess I'll end by throwing in my 2 cents about some of the questions that may or may not have been the point of this thread as I really have no idea what the point here is.

1) Has music reached its limits? No.

2) Is there someone out there who's creating the next big change in music a la Beethoven, Schoenberg, etc? Yes.

3) What musical revolution is going on right now? Could be anything. Pick one and place your bets.

4) Should I be depressed that I can't write something that feels like it's going to change the world of music? No.

Maybe I'm too practical but I think that's about as far as it's worth going with answering those questions. Anything else is just wasting your time speculating on speculations about speculations that don't ultimately lead to any musical progress because you're spending all your time talking about it instead of doing it. Just do your thing and keep your ears open.

I'm fascinated that there are no names being thrown around. If it is anybody, show me examples, please. We had some earlier, are there any others, specifically?

I'm fascinated that there are no names being thrown around. If it is anybody, show me examples, please. We had some earlier, are there any others, specifically?

John Adams, Chick Corea, Hiromi, Subtle, Sigur Ros, Andy McKee, Autechre, Louis Andriessen, Meredith Monk, Tan Dun, Eric Whitacre, Bjork, Buck 65, Cursive, Bright Eyes, Dillinger Escape Plan, Meshuggah, DJ Q-Bert, The Flecktones, Joanna Newsom, Mars Volta, Niyaz, Radiohead, Steve Reich, Sikth, Penderecki, Arvo Part, Tom Waits, Vicente Amigo, Yesterday's New Quintet, etc..

Any of these people/groups or any of the other hundreds or thousands that could be named could be considered to be changing the face of music. There's no one change, there are a lot of little changes happening all over the place and 10 years from now you'll probably be able to figure out a general change that occurred.

It really seems like you keep asking for someone to tell you what the next big thing is. You won't know ahead of time and it's been extremely rare when you could say that one person was the catalyst for a fundamental change in music.

I believe that Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain, and Edgar Meyer are premiering a concerto for tabla, bass, and banjo soon. While it's easily within the bounds of music as defined today and nothing groundbreaking like the rise of atonality, the fusion of styles should be interesting. The Bohlen-Pierce scale mentioned earlier also looks interesting. I'd like to compose something for it some day, if I can learn the notation. I think tuning systems and microtonality will continue to be the main source of new ideas in the future. The options with microtonality are not even close to being exhausted.

Here are some ideas that would be new:

1. Throw a bomb into the audience (not suggested). (Well, actually, the Wikipedia article on "Danger music" says that there has been a composer who instructs players to kill or otherwise physically harm audiencemembers.)

2. Kill something. The flies that gather around it will create the music.

3. Release lemmings into the audience. The music is the series of screams from the audience.

Of course, there's no major conceptual revolution behind these. Actually, I don't recognize postmodernism as a genuine movement, so there actually is a conceptual revolution behind these, since postmodernism opens up many possibilities, but most have never been tried or though of.

John Adams, Chick Corea, Hiromi, Subtle, Sigur Ros, Andy McKee, Autechre, Louis Andriessen, Meredith Monk, Tan Dun, Eric Whitacre, Bjork, Buck 65, Cursive, Bright Eyes, Dillinger Escape Plan, Meshuggah, DJ Q-Bert, The Flecktones, Joanna Newsom, Mars Volta, Niyaz, Radiohead, Steve Reich, Sikth, Penderecki, Arvo Part, Tom Waits, Vicente Amigo, Yesterday's New Quintet, etc..

Many of these people, such as Reich, Radiohead, Bjork, Penderecki, and Adams, have gotten us to where we are today. I think the point is to find revolutions beyond these.

I will repeat my previous saying, since it almost got ignored! ;)

Evolution, or revolution, or innovation doesn't happen only in technical level (pitch, rhythm, computer sounds, etc).

There are a few parts that seem to be left totally alone:

*. Marketing. Yes! Why not? Should the 2008 composer still compose for the same reasons as... Listz? Or Ligetti? For comissions? Come on! Let's be the 2008 composers!

*. Reason d'etre (sorry different keyboard don't have the fancy tones, etc... :P). I find that one of the most revolutionary things done in music are done by Radiohead, Prince, NIN, etc. The people who decided to dumb the companies and go ahead alone.

*. Myspace rubbish. Yes, rubbish, but it does still stand as revolution. Along with computers, and the Internet. Since when had you ever seen 3,000,000 composers gathered in the same place? All providing digital files of... noise/music? Why should we be snob (like I totally am and I hate myspace) and not enjoy the fruits of such sites?

*. finally. FILTERS! Limited sounds, limited pitch, limited rhythm, unlimited imagination!

PS. The next big thing won't happen in the so called classical music. I don't even think that it will happen in what is generally called jazz! I doubt it will happen in rock/pop/porn music (QCC favourite, you know it! ;)), etc... Nope! It will happen to the audience. gently caress it! It's happened to the audience already and you are still not clear about it.

[/Romantic Nikolas]

Many of these people, such as Reich, Radiohead, Bjork, Penderecki, and Adams, have gotten us to where we are today. I think the point is to find revolutions beyond these.

It's happened to the audience already

Ezzzactly.

Many of these people, such as Reich, Radiohead, Bjork, Penderecki, and Adams, have gotten us to where we are today. I think the point is to find revolutions beyond these.

Everyone I mentioned is still writing and pushing the limits. The only reason that I had to name people that didn't show up yesterday is because I'd have to know them personally to discover what they're doing that quickly. Still, they're all, relatively, recent. Some have only been doing their thing for maybe 10 years even.

That's my whole problem with these questions though. As much as many of you would love to know specifically what's happening right now that showed up only yesterday that will change how we look at music, it's not going to happen. It's like some of you are looking at the history of music and thinking, "Yeah, when Schoenberg composed his very first piece there were millions of people that knew about it and studied it and acknowledged him as the next great revolution in music." It only seems that way because you have the advantage of looking back and seeing everything in it's context. It's easy to look up old famous composers and tell yourself that it must have been really obvious that they were great right from the get go but that's not reality. When these things are going on they're very, very, very rarely shoved into everyone's faces. They just brew for a while and slowly gain momentum and then one day people eventually start saying, "Oh that guy, yeah, the one who's been writing this for the last 15-20 years, I just realized that he's great."

That this thread is idiotic.

Look harder.

If art is in the eye of the beholder, shouldn't music be in the ear of the composer?

Music is whatever you say it is, stop worrying about being unoriginal. 100 Years ago people thought that in their lifetime they would run out of things to invent, but we just keep coming up with ideas.

If art is in the eye of the beholder, shouldn't music be in the ear of the composer?

No...music is in the ear of the behearer.

By which I mean, whoever hears it...

Well, as an example there's this: This woman makes music with her MIND mannnnn!

But I can find direct parallels in the music actually produced - this isn't transgressively shocking music; we've all heard music that, independent of the process of production, has these qualities nearly exactly. If the music itself is any different, then it is a refinement of that genre.

But it is mad cool. Lots of ways to play with it :)

Well, as an example there's this: This woman makes music with her MIND mannnnn!

That's not exactly new though. People were already making music out of brainwaves in the sixties. Alvin Lucier, David Rosenboom, Pierre Henry, and many more.

I do think there's certainly lots of new things to create in music, however these new things may now be less "revolutionary" or "world-shaking" than they used to be. It has become rather hard to produce a scandal with music these days.

Many truly new things however are not very blatant and have to do with musical structures or underlying concepts that may seem almost insignificant at the first glance but which open quite new ways of approaching musical material and ideas that may have been around for centuries, but never questioned or explored thoroughly.

And, as Nicolas said, very new things may yet be experienced when it comes to the creation, distribution, presentation, and reception of music. Will things like internet culture, ranging from Wikipedia over Ebay and Myspace to Youtube affect more how art is created, distributed, received? Will the roles of the composer and performers as the clear authors of music remain, or will musical authorship (and thus ownership) become less distinct and more variable? Will musical pieces remain distinct entities that are clearly distinguishable from the environment they appear in? And so on.

I don't believe there are too many making giant leaps forward in pushing the definitions of music. The borders have not been pushed, they have been removed. This does not limit anyones ability to create music, based on archaic systems or physical limitations, it allows people to create any kind of sound they want. The only progress we will see for sometime is new timbres being created.

We understand what produces the phenomenon of sound and therefore music. Obviously any pitches can be used, the only limits are the ranges of human hearing. We can put these pitches in any order, occurring at any point in time, this is basically limited to when you define the beginning or end of your piece, anything can happen in between. Timbres are limited only by imagination and experimentation, they lose uniqueness when our ear interprets it as white noise, a seemingly random sound or just highly complex tone.

I feel the most impressive strides in music will be made with texture that will be created, and plenty already have been. No doubt new sonic sculptures are being made currently on a myriad of mediums. There are countless ways to create new atmospheres of sound and express the endless ideas of man.

Music has been completely dissembled into its bare pieces, now the composer is able to pick which tools he wishes to craft his aural architecture. Defining one's own style based on the resources made available by past generations will allow more avenues of music to be discovered.

We have new breakthroughs in music, it happens with basically every band. They are an amalgam of different sounds, usually unique to their own group. Similarities are often seen and this is why artists will say they are a funk/blues/reggae band or a post-industrial-neo-doom or perhaps a grind/hard/goat/apple-core band... the permutations of existing genres and new coined terms is also endless... whether any of these are desirable is a matter of opinion.

As for a list of musicians that I feel are forging their own way into the ether of music:

Non-horse - acting as a DJ using cassette tapes he creates mind-blowing psychedelic effects, with circuit-bent hardware and field recordings of a nefarious nature, this is worth checking out.

The Skaters in a similar fashion to Non-horse/G lucas crane, these guys twist knobs and fluctuate air in a distorted chaotic fashion, yielding very interesting.

There are plenty of other artists, but in an attempt to not sound like a jerk listing off underground musicians I will stop there.

With what I know about music and the current state of the world, I feel things are bubbling below the surface, not yet noticed until the majority of people stop looking in the same direction for entertainment. While society is homogenized in one direction, a detritus is created due to the run-off. This is where the new inventiveness will come from.

Without delving into the thread as a whole, I'd like to say that a lot of what some people think of as "pushing boundaries" look a lot like "using a gimmick" to others.

I agree. There is no such thing as "new". I read a famous quote to that effect but I don't remember who said it. I'll figure it out.

Oh. Duh.

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1:9

^ You know what that means...

...we've got to go over the sun!

Without delving into the thread as a whole, I'd like to say that a lot of what some people think of as "pushing boundaries" look a lot like "using a gimmick" to others.

I wholly agree; much of the "Avant Garde" just uses that term for marketing purposes. But you can't deny that there are SOME people out there at least attempting to legitimately push limits...

^ You know what that means...

...we've got to go over the sun!

To Sirius, specifically.

humans never stop making new things because they get bored of old things so easily.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a genre that is extremely new (ie, past 20 years) that's wholly revolutionary...

You can't expect a musical revolution after 20 years! In the grand scheme of things, that isn't very long at all! Music needs time to develop and evolve, even today people are still experimenting with music - you need to be more patient!