Lifting All Boats
I wouldn't want to bring back Classical music, simply for the fact that there's no possibility for real innovation there. If some of the ideas were theoretically innovative, it wouldn't necessarily sound that way. Innovation in music has historically been in electronics and the textural or timbral aspects, through Pop music. I have personally been more interested in rhythmic innovation, and the psychoacoustics of sound, and the uses of it as "signal" (data).
Art materials are a technology for representation just as much as anything else. I don't think that will change and will certainly change further. Will we learn more about Renaissance painting by looking at macro shots of paint strokes through AR or VR, or through new kinds of documentary that extend those possibilities?
David Bowie made the comment that he was more interested in the top-level system in which music is created rather than the "software" that runs on it. Using the metaphor of boats on a river, he didn't want to just make more "canoes" (songs), but rather re-shape the landscape such that the river flows in another direction, or simply build out new infrastructure to extend the possibilities.
Ultimately all this hits the wall of the idea of endless progress just for the sake of itself. Perhaps a better idea is to keep looping back farther and farther in history to extend whatever innovations were left unfinished or unexplored--which means we can still write symphonic music, make representational paintings, contemporaneously with the vanguard of technology. You wouldn't want to completely remove any of the existing systems or traditions, but keep them all in reach (at bay), and not devalue them, and re-evaluate them for future purposes.
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[1/2024: This is what I want to do with the Sum II album, where music is made in a top-level framework wrapped in a conceptual idea, rather than one-off songs].
[1/2025: A good example of eliminating the Resolution and replacing it with a System for creating things based on concepts that relate to calendar time (years/months/days/hours/minutes) and the time you’re living in. A piece of content made in January 2005 would be different than something made today, but the system is the same].
[1/2/2026: Now with AI more in the loop for content creators, those canoes will completely jam the waterways, which creates the need for re-engineering infrastructure, as China needed to do in the 90s with Three Gorges Dam. The energy demands of AI will create a similar situation. Systems can be generative but not necessarily efficient. As it relates to generativity, a good system can create lots of possibilities, but ultimately things have to be pared down. With the Songdays series, I can generate lots of ideas (canoes) every day but there’s only going to be a few that get to “float”. What’s great about systems and frameworks is that once you’ve created them it’s easy to generate material, but perhaps too easy, but you'll never have a blank canvas moment].
