Apodion.net

So I finally went through one of my old and full notebooks and transcribed all the interesting parts onto my computer. I think of an entire Moleskine there were ten bits worth reading. I guess that’s not a terrible ratio, all things considered.

Anyway, among them were these two short notes that have something to say about the way my mind and my aesthetic sense works. Neither of them is particularly publishable, but for a couple hundred words written two years ago there’s a bit of interest there. I don’t remember how many days separate them when they were written, but they relate well enough.

Consider the example of calculus:

If any given function is a body of information, then that function’s derivative is a body of the same class (ie it can be represented by the same method), but one order higher, describing the original function.

By that same token, one may effectively or usefully apprehend some arbitrary set of information—say, a family of languages, or some body of music—by examining the variation within it; in this way, the phonetic relationships among Eastern European languages or the differing uses of harmony among the Minimalist composers can achieve a sort of beauty of the same class (if not equal to) the actual compositions or speech they describe.

This is why one may view in the same aesthetic light the relationship between a text and its instantiation as they do the literary aspect of the language, or the visual aspect of the letterforms.

The next one has an interesting point, but it’s ridden with quite a few pseudo-scientific buzzwords. Please excuse them.

The scored composition is best understood not as a set procedural instructions, but as a set of probabilities; the score maps to the set of extant recordings (and performances, though this is not demonstrable) like the Lorenz attractor or the current [nyamic—dynamic?] model map to the phenomena they describe; as probabalistic predictions of note choice, dynamics, rhythmn, timbre, etc.

The score is a superposition of probable instantiations of the piece. If we compare each performance they will probably correspond in each aspect that is defined by the canonical text, with error-correction increasing with the number of samples. The picture will get might be said to be the ideal of text; however the areas where they differ will provide what’s perhaps the most precious or rarified information, the shading, texture and timbre, so to speak, which have no written form. The oft-invoked dialogue between composer and audience shares a musical space with the dialogue between composer and performer.