Subject: [extropy-chat] Re: Serial music and transhumanist art forms

From: Jef Allbright <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 May 2005 11:36:44 -0700

primeradiant wrote:

> Dear Matt,
>  
>     By 'serial' I meant, of course, 12-tone music, hence Schoenberg, 
> Berg Webern, Stravinsky (middle period, e.g. /Abraham and Isaac/), the 
> post-war Europeans including Boulez, Berio, Dallapiccola, Lutoslawski, 
> Schaffer, Xenakis, earlier Stockhausen, the American School including 
> of course Milton Babbitt, Wuorinen, Lewin etc.
>  
> If I introduce people to 12-tone music I usually select Schoenberg's 
> /A Survivor from Warsaw/ -  a terrifying, gut-wrenching work! The 
> all-combinatorial sets that lie at the core of 12-tone composition are 
> related to Messiaen's /modes of limited transposition/ and the 
> symmetric modes employed by Bartok in his central string quartes (3-5).
>  
> 12-tone composition has expired as a creative force. This is tragic. 
> It demands a highly developed level of skill, and most of the 
> theoretical advances made before its final demise never became fully 
> incorporated into the serial 'canon'. Yet for me it always represented 
> the power of transcendence of the human condition. By its very nature, 
> 12-tone structures and processes are excellently adapted to 
> computer/AI encoding and expression (I did a lot of work on this at 
> the CSRG in Toronto during the 80's).
>  

Coincidentally, this week I read _October The First Is Too Late_ by Sir 
Fred Hoyle, 1966, because someone said it presented an interesting 
theory of time.  While I didn't find anything that struck me as 
interesting or informative about time, I did find this inspiring passage 
about a musical competition between an accomplished human composer and 
his opponent, posing as a god but actually a posthuman:

    It still baffled me as to exactly what restrictions were being
    placed on the choice of the notes themselves. This was not
    twelve-tone music, all the tones were not being used. Yet it wasn't
    tonal in the sense of our system of keys. The structure was more
    complicated than anything I had heard before. I had the strong
    impression of rules depending somehow on the form of the work
    itself. It was as if the rules, the restrictions, depended on the
    place in the piece. The rules at the beginning and those at the end
    seemed different, and different again from those in the middle. It
    was as if the large-scale development of the work influenced its
    manner of construction.

    I mention all this to show why it wasn't in any way easy even for a
    trained musician to grasp instantly what was going on. Plainly I had
    to deal with a subtle and complex form. My last thought of the
    people outside was that they could hardly find the music of the god
    easier to comprehend than my own. I think it was at this point, as
    the second of my opponent's sections came to an end, that the first
    chill of apprehension swept over me...

I find it interesting to consider the parallels between aesthetic 
appreciation and moral reasoning, each considered within a context of 
greater awareness.

- Jef

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From: [email-masked] ("Hal Finney")
Date: Thu, 5 May 2005 12:26:20 -0700 (PDT)

> > of course Milton Babbitt, Wuorinen, Lewin etc.

I'm not familiar with this musical style.  From what I understand it
arranges the 12 musical notes in a particular order as the basis of the
musical composition.

But I will mention an interesting variant I ran into a few years ago on
a programming project.  It was for a computerized home exercise program;
we had an animated figure acting out the exercises and the voice of Jack
LaLanne shouting encouragement.  The musical composer was a creative guy
who loved to push the envelope on the music synthesis software we had
designed, and I interfaced with him to get his music into a form that
we could create using the primitive computer technology of the time
(early 1980s).

For one of the songs, he wanted to do something unusual with the
musical notes.  Instead of the conventional musical scale which has 12
notes, he wanted to use an 18 note scale.  This scale goes C, C sharp,
D flat, D, D sharp, E flat, E, E sharp/F flat, F, and so on.  Unlike in
the 12 note scale, C sharp and D flat are different; and there is an
extra note between E and F and between B and C.  This makes 18 equally
spaced notes.  Interestingly, this causes the frequencies of all of the
notes of the conventional scale (C, D, E...) to be about the same as in
the 12 note scale.

It was just as easy for us to synthesize these 18 notes as the regular
12 ones, so he wrote some music using the 18 note scale.  And it
sounded great!  Not quite like regular music, but not too far off either.
Just different enough that you could tell something unusual was going on,
but for an untrained musical ear it was hard to say what it was.

Hal