Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making

Here we stand in the 21st-century after the tumultuous 20th-century has left us with great monuments and ruins of artistic movements come and gone, and revolutions that have broken boundaries and given us the restricting freedom to do anything and everything. How does one pick up these shards, build upon the great successes, and deal with the various philosophical thoughts that have lead us to where we are? How do we reconstruct some sort of order so we know where we are (and if possible decide where we’re going)? In his new book “Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making” (published November 2011), Adam Harper takes on the challenge of making sense of all of this. In the book, Harper attempts to take the myriad of directions musical thinking has produced throughout history (particularly over the last century, and not restricted to just the world of “art music”) and synthesize it into a conception that can point us in a direction in our own century.

In the opening pages, Harper references Leonard Bernstein’s 1959 lecture (similarly titled “The Infinite Variety of Music”) in which he lays out how truly infinite the possibilities of music are. Using only the pitches of the Western chromatic scale to construct a series of pitches allows for countless possibilities. And when you add to that the multitude of possibilities that are created when you consider other musical parameters (harmony, rhythm, register, timbre, etc), non-equal-temperament tunings, electronic modes of sound production, etc, the prospects quickly become overwhelming.

In many respects, Harper’s book is refreshing in that he discards the partitions that we often build between various musical genres, practices, and movements and does away with our historically charged jargon that has accumulated much baggage through the years. In doing so he opens up the musical possibilities and helps to give a fresher look at what is available to us as composers, performers, and listeners.

This book is full of insights and freer ways of looking at the vast art of music. Whether or not this book will (or should) influence a reader’s specific practice as a composer or performer is open for each individual to decide, but it has the potential to open our ears to listening to everything that the wide range of sound has to offer. As Harper states:

“Often we can’t tell when our imaginations have become limited and we can no longer detect what might lie beyond their horizons, making us ignorant both of the way things really are and the way things might one day be.”