Is There Still a 'Future Music'?

 

The Ondes Martenot

 

If we listened to today’s pop from the vantage of 1950, it would sound stupid and/or broken. That wasn’t the future then, at least in pop music. It was Les Paul and Mary Ford, or anyone using electric instruments. This was really the first “going electric”, and I would imagine purists hated it. The future is always in harsh un-patterened noise, that is continually self-fulfilling.

Futurization of music is hard to do. Bowie was great at it because he used everything with sophistication, without resorting to pastiche. This is what Miles, Sun Ra and Ornette were doing. Jazz is still the future of music because of its natural sophistication.

The past is all there waiting to be used. How do you use what Les Paul was doing and deconstruct it? Would you want to? The idea of neo-big-band is kind of exciting, but the music education armatures are missing. No one would have the skill (or attention) to play it.

Musical “facadectomies” are still possible, a device borrowed from architecture where new structures are built on the base of an older structure. Up until now futures have been all “neos” or “posts”. That’s good too. The 90s are now up for Neo, a period where we started sampling the past. These days, everything might be Posts.

2/4/2017

[2/4/2025: In terms of early electronic instruments there was the Ondes Martnenot which came out in the late 1920s. We’ve run out with things we can do with electronics. The magic is now all in how AI is reshaping the whole landscape. Anything new in music will have to have some kind of magic in it. At the moment AI is still a magic, but more of a black magic. It’s not just the 90s up for neo. Since AI music is a repository of all decades, you could even start using recorded music from the 1920s-1950s. At the moment, the problem with AI music is that it is more of a magic trick or shell game, where you waste a part of yourself, “Panning for gold at the expense of the soul. Now you know, you’ve been controlled”, which was actually a lyric of mine that was a somewhat successful AI generation].

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Exordium:

2/4/1998

Interesting (hard to write on train) article in Computerlife with Brian Eno. He talks about the generative nature of future music where pieces are started from seed ideas and grow organically and evolve naturally, which mimics the way folk music resonates through culture. Computer programs also will have these types of characteristics whereby they are designed to develop and learn with experience, just as humans do. To me, generative music is useful in producing raw ideas from which to develop new pieces. This approach could also use the computer to solve the problems inherent in composition, for example, to design the form of the piece, dynamics, and so on. Eno also says that the most interesting connection is in the brain, so we don't always have to associate images with sounds. He says we spend too much time syncing things together. He didn't even compose cues when he wrote for film, he just uses existing music. And as in Hall's observations, things can naturally synchronize regardless of whether they have anything obvious in common.

[2/4/2025: Describes AI music: “You can strap together a few nice-sounding samples, and they're all loops, so the thing will run forever, and in half an hour or so you have something that really sounds like music. And that's very dangerous. The thing has a sheen - it sounds professional; it sounds authentic - but actually you haven't really got anything yet.” But it takes five minutes and you have a produced song, but it still isn’t really a song in the sense that it can be reproduced live.]