Music

To reach the headings and resources concerning all the musics, like with the various projects concerning this subject, you can consult it gate Music, or Music category. If you want to add bonds (musical musicians?uvres, instruments, kinds, etc.), you can do it within different lists in connection with the music.

"What music?"one requested one day from a type-setter: if one I ask it to me do not know answered it. And yet... In fact, the music is one art, and like such, a creative intuition, exploiting time and the emotion. It is thus as much with type-setter that with the philosophers, the historians, with semiologists, or with any other amateur who returns the heavy task to answer this question, without confusing the bottom and the form, the sound and the direction, the sign and meant...


Synopsis

What music

Since the deepest roots of sound history, music gets along like a practice cultural, being able or not to have a dimension artistic, but which consists of a combination deliberated on sounds and of silences. Even in the case of musics known as random last misadventures of its déconstruction/rebuilding, the music is always inspired by a "sound material" being able to gather the whole of perceptible data, to build this "musical material", representation suitable for type-setter or that it entrusts to the technique. hearing who is more adapted our directions for the knowledge of the feelings, is, reciprocally, the least suited to objective knowledge. Therefore, the music is also a taking possession offormal elements who belong at the same time to conscious, unconscious and spiritual, and decline themselves in the whole of the cultural affects. Of this diversity of practices, one will retain especially that the music cannot have only one precise definition and gathering all them types of music, all them musical kinds, but that one must, according to the angle by whom one wants to approach it, to cause some definitions, who, without being opposed, melt, on all them continents, a "history of the music" in perpetual evolution, so much in the field of erudite music that traditional musics or of popular musics.

Some possible definitions

The field of the possible definitions is thus very wide. However, that they are approached by experts (Schönberg, Stravinsky, Varèse, Gould, Guillou, Swell, Harnoncourt for example) or by musicologists (Dalhaus, Molino, Nattiez, Deliège inter alia) they are always distributed between two great classes: intrinsic approach, immanente, and extrinsic, functional approach. In the first approach, the music exists before being heard; it can even have an existence by itself, in nature and by nature: the theory of the natural resonance of Mersenne and Rameau goes in this direction, because by introducing by harmonic figuring the bases of a reasoned theory, it restores the preponderance of the naturalness on the formal practice. In the second approach, can function only what is perceived. There is not thus music that if there is one ?uvre musical?uvre which establishes a dialogue between type-setter and listener. This dialogue functions by the intermediary of one gesture musical, formal (and it passes then by the writing), or formalized (and it passes then by interpretation).

Anthropocentric definition

With each end of the chain, there is the man. The music is conceived and received by a person. The definition of the music, like whole art, also passes by the definition of a certain form of communication between the men. Neither language nor language, the music car-is enough.

Tautological definition

The music is l"art sounds" and includes any artistic, combinative or random construction, intended to be perceived by hearing.

Definition a contrario

The music is what is not:
The music it is sound without the direction. Music mean nothing. It is thus a speech, neither a language, nor a language within the meaning of linguistics (i.e., with a double articulation signifiant/signifié).
The music it is not noise : the noise can be a component of the music, as it is a component (essential) its. But yes the Art of the noises theorized the introduction by futuristic Italian of the "noises" of the everyday life in musical creation (movement continued by Varèse then by concrete music - cf will infra-), the noise is also synonymous with disorder not built, when the music, it, is an organization, a composition, a deliberated choice... (cf definition of the musical sound). The opposition often made between these two words often carries to confusion, and it is necessary to refer rather to the concept oforganization.
The music is not a universality : The music does not have the same direction for all those which hear it (cf will infra, ). Each individual calls upon his own emotivity, his imagination, his memories... to give to the music a direction which appears correct to him. Admittedly, it was noted that certain basic phenomena have a similar effect on very different populations (acceleration of the tempo = demonstration of joy for example) but all the details, all subtleties of a?uvre or of an improvisation are not interpreted same manner by listeners of social categories however close.

Social definition

Behind the multiplication of the possible definitions, in fact a true fact of company is, which brings into play criteria as well historical as geographical finding itself in the different ones types of music. (see: sociology of the music) The music passes as much by symbols of its writing (notes of music) that by the direction which one grants to his emotional or emotional value. This is why, in occident, the ditch did not cease growing hollow between these musics of the ear (close to the ground, they affirm a certain spirituality and play on the parasympathetic) and the musics of the?il (marked by the writing, the speech, and a certain rejection of the folklore). Our Western values privileged the authenticity and registers the music in a history which connects it, by the writing, with the memory of the past. The musics of Africa, they, call more upon imaginary, with , with magic, and connect this spiritual power to a corporality of the music. The listener takes part directly in the expression of what it feels, whereas a listener in European concerts is frustrated by the theatricalness which unties it participation of its body. baroque constitute in occident the transition period where was installation this cut. The writing, the notation, thanks to temperament, became rationalization of the musical modes.

Social phenomenon, phenomenon of company

Musical practices associated the same cultural context, define some then type of music.

Each culture essaimé its clean types of music, completely different at the same time in their style, their approach, and, quite simply, in their design of what is the music (propensity with , background music, theatricalness of concert, ...), of the place which it must have in the company. To speak about the music of such social group, such area of the sphere, or such time, thus refers to some type of music who can recut different elements totalements (traditional musics, erudite musics, experimental musics, popular musics). This diversity engages at the same time it musician (type-setter or instrumentalist), and the listener, who must adapt his listening to a culture that it discovers at the same time as it perceives it?uvre musical.
A "anthropology of the music" has even some followers since the beginning of XXE century, and which tends to prove that, even if we taste with a certain pleasure in their listening, we cannot live in the same way that the members auxquel they address certain ethnic musics.

To illustrate this problem (cultural) of the representation of the musical?uvres for a listener, the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Bases of a semiology of the music [ 1976 ]) a very interesting anecdote reported quotes by Jakobson Novel in the report of a conference of G. Becking, linguist and musicologist, that this one pronounced in 1932 with the linguistic Circle of Prague:

"a African native plays an air on his flute of bamboo. The European musician will have much evil to imitate the exotic melody accurately, but when it finally manages to determine the heights of the sounds, it is persuaded to reproduce the African piece of music accurately. But the native does not agree because European did not pay enough attention to the stamp of the sounds. Then the native rejoue same air on another flute. European thinks that it acts of another melody, because the heights of the sounds completely changed because of the construction of the new instrument, but the native swears that it is the same air. The difference comes from what most important for the native, it is the stamp, whereas for European, it is the height of the sound. The important thing in music, they the is not given natural one, they are not the sounds such as they are carried out, but such as they are disposed. The native and European hear the same sound, but it has a completely different value for each one, because their design concerns two entirely different musical systems; the sound in music functions like element of a system. The achievements can be multiple, the acoustics expert can determine it exactly, but essence in music, it is that the piece can be recognized like identical."

Music and company

Play of the rear-guards and the avant-gardes

Evolution of musical forms (and in a general way evolution of the architectonic and semantic elements of the musical expression) is born from the desire of the type-setters of déstructurer a homogeneous balance which reigns a priori in the theory, theory suddenly become fixed in its time. Thus Stravinsky with The Rite of Spring, it had gotten busy to break measurement to reinvent the rate/rhythm but without really destroying old musical material inherited the romanticism. Pierre Swell when it studies the rhythmic one Sacring shows well that, even very elaborate, this rhythmic preserve the trace of a material of most traditional. Schönberg exploited, him, a new levelling hierarchy in the scale heights (the series) and in that, was only one catalyst of new syntactic tendencies engaged by Webern. The evolution of the musical language, which passes by the reform of the writing, thus always passes by flexible transitions, "handling" of known parameters, edulcorated by their combinative imposed, with a new material using these parameters differently. This reform makes it possible to make evolve/move the musical "language" as a whole by subjecting it to the progressions criteria esthetics even sometimes that it tries to impose. But it more often modifies the function than the form, because it cannot émanciper of the macroscopic data of perception of the music. It thus solves to handle them together to advance them jointly. This tendency produced at the XXème century a school of type-setters connecting the form of sound and the form of the musical?uvre. It is the spectral school, or spectralism, whose principal representatives are Gerard Grisey, Tristan Murail and Hugues Dufourt.

Jacques Attali the social phenomenon

Each time is tributary of the relationship between art and the company, and more particularly between the music and the forms of its reception. This social study through ages was extremely well studied in a test of Jacques Attali ( Noises Paris, PUF, 1978). The questions which are put there can be found today in the form: which is the role of the music in the life of today? Why is a different product for human consumption (compared to the other products for human consumption, and other arts. The music becomes an instrument of being able (Major Companies, industry of the disc, policy of the media). Which are today opportunities, the prospects, of the Internet and the musics in line etc.

"Evolution" of the music

Release of the aesthetic attitude of the type-setter with respect to the rules and the interdicts, and that, concomitant, from the bonds which it ties with the listener never does not go without clashes. All the forms of communication under consideration by the music are a need without which it would not know y to have history. :The historical evolution of the currents stylistics is marked out conflicts and of idylles. Each time is concerned with such questionings. The history of the music works with the margin of the company. Thus, the dominating place which occupies J.- S. Bach in the repertory of the sacred music, consequence of the creative genius of this musician of exception, cannot make us forget all the type-setters who preceded it and who wove these bonds with the public by preparing it with evolutions major stylistics. The?uvre of Bach concentrates in fact a beam of German influences (Schütz, Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel), Italian (Frescobaldi, Vivaldi), Flemish (Sweelinck, Reincken) and Frenchwomen (Grigny and Couperin), all put by Cantor at the service of a function. In the same way, one can only approve Nikolaus Harnoncourt, for which: "Mozart was not an innovator". Mozartwas only the cristallisator of the traditional style, and the genius which could carry to its apogee of the elements in the air of time. To concentrate the one time influences, to consolidate the elements and to draw a new sap from it, it is there the characteristic of any classicism. Contrary to our experimentative contemporaries who at the same time seek "the system and the idea" (according to an article founder of Pierre Swell), Mozart never invented anything which did not preexist to him. The radical changes that it knew to impose come well from designs already in germ. One perceives in fact that the bond between the technological developments and the writing, between the material adequacies (instruments, places, spaces) and the expression, especially succeeds in locking up the type-setter in the double ambiguity of the systemic yoke and the expressive release. The music is built around structures, of categories, which it is necessary to know to exceed (work in extreme cases). It often oscillated during centuries between a rhetoric of the understatement and minimum of syntactic elements (it is the case of Bach or of Lully, it is also that, with an extreme degree of J. Cage) and a excessivity (Wagner or B. Ferneyhough for example), dilution in the emphase (another definition of baroque), revolt counters conceptual alignments. With the historical passing, the phases of this development appear to follow successive stages; the expressive capacity passes from strictly personal contributions to a complexification which denatures the first richnesses of the innovation while seeking to exhaust the resources of initial material.

Philosophical definition

Immanence and transcendence

The music offers a representation of certain forms of transcendence who never was the subject of a knowledge and will never be the subject of one knowledge. The music is an open system: it is addressed to each individual initially. Moreover, it is a autoréférencé system, and which thus creates its characteristic . What tends to prove that the ontology of the musical?uvre reflects well from these two points of view which aesthetic philosophies always managed to distinguish: a plan ofimmanence where the?uvre means itself and is identified with its object, and a plan of transcendence where it overflows this object, where it does not have any more an object, and where it is satisfied to be report/ratio in the world. (cf Genette (Gerard), the?uvre of art. Immanence and transcendence, Paris, the Threshold, coll. Poetic, 1994, 301 p.)

Vision of the musicologists

Vincent d' Indy

If the improvement of the language and its evolution in a formal system constituted the principal base of the scientific development, does art also have the capacity to exert an influence on our knowledge and our forms of communication? Telegraphy code, art sometimes consciously produces, of the signs, Generals or private individuals, open or tangible, evolving/moving like those of any language. Vincent d' Indy, in introduction to its course of musical composition, this power of communication suggests. It estimates that from a subjective point of view one can adopt the definition given by Tolstoï for which "art are the human activity by which a person can, voluntarily, and by means of external signs, communicate to others the feelings and the feelings that she tests itself."

The music if one assimilates it to such a will, becomes indeed in power a telegraphy code. This approach returns to a restricted definition of the fundamental elements in music. Its operation does not depend any more but on indexed or voluntarily indicated signals. While recognizing the importance of functional correspondences, it seems difficult to us to agree to this restrictive assimilation. The music would be rather a system symbolic system without meaning universal reference frame. It acts according to an opened system, not insulated (like any system alive), and autoréférencé. The music is thus not differently codifiable only by signs of writing (signs who, such of symbols, are not univocal).

Tripartition of Jean Molino and Jean-Jacques Nattiez

It is while passing from the level of the element to that of its structuring that the musicologists granted the experimentation of new material expanded to discovered on the form of communication which appears to best define the mankind compared to the animal species: the language. Insofar as it remains the only entity of differentiation between the man and the animal, the verbal language endeavours well to translate spiritual dimension, and even the social dimension of the man since no agreement can be built, no regulation cannot intervene, without the communication with others and oneself. Jean-Jacques Nattiez A began in the Seventies a research seeking to lead so that it qualifies semiology music. It finds its anchoring in the study of the correspondences symbolic systems which the music establishes since the level of its creation until that of its reception. The third level, qualified of neutral per Jean molino, would be that of the partition, element of representation at the same time symbolic system and semantics. It is the level where nothing occurs without the intermediary of another level: partition especially translated relativities of scale for the heights, the durations and the nuances. Do not remain whereas to determine if such hermeneutics can music be based on the semiologies founded since the origins, or if it has on the contrary only one value of reference mark? For these authors who claimed themselves of a comparison with the language, if the?uvre communicates something to us it is before very that it is a word and thus which it is not justiciable to the only syntax. This direction founder, of which it remains to define nature, opens in the particular world of the unutterable one, as knowledge opens with that of sensitive, and as the language remains the support of the evolution of knowledge.

Aesthetic definition

Esthetics of the reception

Rebirth until the XVIIIème century, the representation of the feelings and passions was carried out by preestablished musical figures, which Monteverdi assisted it prattica expressio Verborum called. Simultaneity in the dimension the heights (polyphony, agreements), advanced of Ars Nova in XVe (pH From Vitry), was codified with XVIIe and the XVIIIe (Treaty of the universal harmony of the father Marin Mersenne, 1627, Traité of the harmony reduced to its natural principles of Jean-Philippe Branch, 1722). Since, the representation of the music posts more personalized tendencies. This translation of the personality leads quite naturally to the XIXe century with the passions developed by the romantic music. But all the large schools of style are often only one regrouping factitious around theories a priori. The music passes as much by the symbols of its writing as by the directions granted to its "value" (emotional, emotional...). Theory and reception meet to grant to the music a statute, artistic since communication, esthetics since translation of representation. However a ditch did not cease growing hollow in the Western music between the type-setter and his public. Current musical research tends to make music a support of the representation of the complexity of our world (of infinitely small with infinitely large). They moved away from this purely aesthetic research where the type-setter sought to be in phase with the evolution of the history.

Esthetism of the composition

song angels
(?uvre of William Bouguereau - XIXE century)

Each important stylistic stage (Rebirth, baroque, classicism, romanticism, and in a certain way modernism...), thus carries in it one or more aesthetic junctions. Comparatively, where is one today? Which understanding could go so far as to lock the limits of the field of the music? At the middle of the XXème century, in the years 1947-1950, after the formal attacks of the serialism, the federator core which remained with the arrival of the tape recorder and electronic engineering resided in the demonstration of sound perceptible and built. Treaties of harmony of the end of the XIXème (for example Treaty of Th harmony. Dubois), taking again the theory of Branch, had endeavoured to moor the tonality with a need developed by the history since Monteverdi. However one realizes that the XXème century, while breaking since 1920 with these diagrams, confines the tonal system with only XVIIIème and XIXe century, in the strict geographical delimitation that we know to him in Europe and in the United States (what, altogether, can appear negligible compared to the history of humanity). If it is so difficult to be satisfied with the traditional definition of the music as "art to combine the sounds" it is that this definition broke down little after the middle of the XXème century. Perhaps let us be us invited today to replace the musical?uvres and the currents which they caused in a context impresses of provocation, context where all the products of the avant-garde obey a logic whose only appreciation a posteriori makes it possible to determine the range.

Artistic dimension

Music above all, and any definition must set out again from there, is one art (that of the MUSE, known as one). It is thus creation, representation, and, of course, communication. For this reason, it uses certain rules or type-setting systems, of simplest (pure risk) with most complex. Like any creation, the music creates the unknown with the known one, the future with the present. But the music is évanescente. It exists only in the moment of its perception.

Music, an art of time

It will be noted simply that time controls the music like it controls the perception of the sound: since the microphone-time, which is the scale of sound vibration (the sound is a setting in vibration of the air), until musical form, its construction in macro-time. The music is an art of time, the evolutionary one, thing that few arts can envy to him, except the new forms of technological art (cinema, video, conceptual art...). In this temporal component, the music can be spread according to three fundamental dimensions.

- the rate/rhythm, which concerns the duration of the sounds and their level of intensity (dynamics).
- the melody, which is the impression produced by the succession of sounds different heights.
- the polyphony or harmonizes (these two terms, taken in their broadest direction), which considers the superposition of sounds in a voluntary simultaneity
  • Another category of the sound appeared in the erudite music from XVIE century, that of stamp. It allows a polyphony mixing several instruments (the term harmonize is still used besides in this direction when one speaks about "the municipal harmony"), or one monodie especially dedicated to the one of them.

All these elements are developed in the article musical acoustics.

Components of the music

All these "components" of the music have a temporal origin well, they result from sound découlement in time, simultaneities, succesions...
Time and rate/rhythm
Height and melody
Harmonize and simultaneity (cf too fusion)
Stamp
  • According to type of music considered, one or the other of these three dimensions will be able to prevail. For example, it rate/rhythm generally the primacy in certain traditional African musics has (Black Africa in particular); melody, in the majority of the musics of Eastern culture; and the harmony, in the Western erudite music, or of Western inspiration.

Composition and combinations of the components to the?uvre in the music

The trihedron of the music

The perception of the music studies in a dynamic way, i.e. in contexts changing with time. But the brain perceives the components of each sound, and the structure of the whole like a whole, which is built and rebuilt. The music sails with the intersection of three plans, being able to create new combinations: combination enters a plan heights and a plan of the durations, between a plan of the durations and a plan of the intensities, etc. It is what one can, initially, to call "the fundamental trihedron of the music": a trihedron where each dimension forms a plan with the temporal co-ordinates and where the whole of these plans with two dimensions forms a new space à.trois.dimensions. It is in reference to this trihedron that entitled its third study "study of the fertile trihedron" (1975-1976).

Dimensions of sound and its musical

Thanks to the development of research ofmusical acoustics and of psychoacoustics, the musical sound is defined starting from its components timbrales and of the parameters psychoacoustics which return concerned in its perception. Of sound object, rough material that the musician must work, it material becomes musical object; the music makes it possible to pass to an artistic dimension which metamorphoses "given to understand". Silence is not any more "absence of sound". Even the famous 4' 33 "of John Cage, one "is given to understand", like the monochromic ones of Klein do not represent a univocal uniformity at all...

But it given to understand include from now on an increasingly broad material. Since the beginning of XXE century, this widening takes place towards the integration of intrinsic qualities of our sound environment (concerts bruitists, introduction of the sirens at Varèse, catalogues of birds of Messiaen, etc.). How to distinguish noise and signal then, how to distinguish order and disorder, musical creation and sound harmful effect? noise, it is only what one does not want to transmit and who penetrates in spite of us in the message; in itself it does not have any difference in structure with the useful signal. One cannot distinguish any more like before the purely musical sound and the noise. With the development of a formalization by nature of the functions of the noise, sounds inharmonic (aperiodic) which belongs to the everyday life take part from now on, in the integration of sound, with musical construction. All the elements of our sound environment contain a certain share of noise, which has vocation to become function structuring by destination. The whole of these conceptual upheavals accompanies the scientific and technical discoveries which made it possible to develop new instrumental invoices (in particular with data processing). The primitive musical instrument wanted to be representation of the natural sounds (wind in the trees being found in the sound of the flute, song of the birds in that of the man...). In this condition, it was the only able one to translate the musical one (to make a distinction enters harmonic sounds and noises). The extension of the techniques helping, the concept even of instrument was redefined... The machine and the instrument met. What the men agree to recognize as musical corresponds from now on to an appropriation of an extended sound material, with an integration of phenomena hitherto considered as noises.

The intrusion of the random one

With composition computer-assisted, first musical experimentation to use the computer, the musical theories were in turn concerned with inflect or leave the initiative with the machine, and, in parallel, to completely release the man of certain tasks of regulation or himto leave a significant part of creation. The problems oscillate thus, in a quasi paradoxical way but finally fundamentally dialectical, between determinism and random, risk and logic, chance and need. The random formalism (mathematized)"calculates" without it not encroaching on the sensitive assets of the type-setter. The mathematical objects which developed create truly an intermediary towards aesthetic paradigms that the musical experimentation gradually tries to update, intermediary which would be between an order regular, periodic, and an uncontrolled chaos, random and singular. Hiller, the father of the composition computer-assisted, without judging which could carry out the compromises, considered already that "the music is a compromise between monotony and chaos. "Artistically, withinformation theory of Shannon the theory of the indetermination answers of John Cage (information is maximum thus null). In 1951, Cage and Feldman went back from there to random codified I Ching to build to them?uvre Music of Changes. This?uvre, which breaks the yokes of the traditional concept of?uvre musical, is used as artistic proclamation with the concept of the indetermination which, on the same moment, was essential on the scientific experimentation: this concept arrived at the c?ur of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity; indeed the rules which govern nature, the infinitely small one like the infinitely large one, obey in these contemporary theses more with random that with a universal order. Cage surreptitiously introduces the chance into the composition in a combinative direction. Music of Changes leave place with the risk against logic by rehabilitating the creative capacity of the experiment divinatoire, the capacity of creation by the chance. John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown used also a codified chance, the random one of "I Ching", delivers divination Chinese which shows the possibility for certain numbers of combinations by pentagrams. The chance is sublimated by the destiny in a preaching divinatoire (Concerto for piano (1957)). Then, at Cage the theories becoming paroxystic, it preaches the rarefaction of the music until the total risk (4' 33 ' '): listening is focused towards sound objects which do not have summers directly planned for that. Few criticisms could abound in its direction, deploring that these theories are used only for the justification of a media "blow".

Algorithmic music

To try to reduce the proportion of chance fatally entrusted to the technique, the machine was used thereafter for its functions of control of the automation which ensures a continuous sequence of mathematical operations and logical. Pierre Barbaud began in this spirit its work on the "automatic" composition and developed with Roger Blanchard in 1959 program ALGOM I-5 for the computer Gamma 60 of the electronic computer Centre of the Bull company in Paris.

Stochastic music

This increased mathematisation of possible, continued to be taken into account, but while trying to take again with the machine the share of responsibility which it had conquered. Since 1954 Iannis Xenakis its opus one had created, Metastasis for 61 instruments; it is the first music entirely deduced from rules and mathematical procedures. For its creator, it is a question into practice of putting a direct relation between music and architecture, combination certainly not very common, but which for the assistant of Corbusier goes from oneself. It will make it profitable by using the same rules of construction in the development of the plans of the Philips house for the World Fair of Brussels in 1958 (house where will be given in the same concert creations of the?uvres of Varèse (electronic Poems) and Xenakis (concrete pH). In 1956 a theorization of the music will be published stochastic who is based amongst other things on the game theory of von Neumann. The chance is not there already more one simple chance; at Xenakis contrary to the third sonata of Swell or the others?uvres "opened", contrary to Cage, and with its resignation of type-setter, the probability is entirely calculated, the clarified rules (Achorripsis or ST/10-1 in 1961). The total process is foreseeable, even if the events which make it up are random. By this philosophy of creation, Xenakis tries to approach the biological phenomena and the events of the alive world.

Notation, theory and system

One musical system is a whole of rules and uses attached to one type of music given (one speaks sometimes about musical theory). Certain musics have moreover one system of notation (the Western music, with its musical theory, in is a notorious example). In this case, it is difficult to separate the musical system from the system of notation which is associated for him. Other types of music are only of transmission oral, and develop completely different musical systems.

Music: production and reception

The musical?uvre

Perhaps then, to find a certain coherence in the multiplication of the definitions, would be necessary it to be based on the concept of?uvre musical. Like all ?uvre, the musical?uvre exists before being received, and it continues to exist afterwards. One can thus wonder with good quality about the absence of his continuation (how many?uvres really remain with their type-setters, and are they really the reflection of what it composed). What one ?uvre musical ? One understands especially by ?uvre musical the particular project of a musical realization. But which decides this realization? Listening that makes of it each individual (with his culture, its memory, its feelings particular to this precise moment..) or partition, transcription which does not comprise all the music? From the Rebirth and until the beginning of XXE century, its single support was partition of music. This intrusion of the writing was the key element of the construction of polyphony and ofharmonize in the erudite music. The partition remains plain in the name of or of musicians who have it composed or recorded, according to case's. Some?uvres can be collective, others remain anonymous. Since the generalization of average the techniques of recording of the sound, the?uvre can be also identified with its support: the album of music, magnetic tape or with a simple penmanship of the representation of the musical gesture suitable to transcribe the?uvre of the type-setter. informatic musical still this concept made evolve/move of?uvre, since now a simple software is succeptible to generate "automatically" a musical?uvre, or of to produce sounds with which the interpreter is supposed to react.

Formalism and functionalities

As explains it Jean-Marie Schaeffer, in the modern art (and a fortiori in the technological art of the XXème century), the question-key: "What art?"or" When there is art?"gradually changed into: "How art function does?” . In music this displacement of object posed the problem of the elements which one can distinguish a priori in listening structural of a?uvre. In 1945 the first forms of automation of information appeared, and in 1957 one assisted, with the arrival ofmusical data processing, at a point of junction. Initially a new representation of sound which, although difficult to control, has in fact open of the prospects above suspicion. Then, and especially, these techniques called into question certain theoretical speculations on the formalization of the thought creative, returning the type-setter with confrontation, essential in its step, between an abstract formalism and making of a functional material. How the transition towards atonality has it destroys the functional hierarchies, transformed the role held by the tonal functions since elaborate Monteverdi ? In fact, the logic of musical forms thus became especially a functional logic, insofar as it makes it possible to maintain the cohesion of the?uvre, even if the elements of composition are multiple (elements rhythmic, contrapuntic, harmonics …). The concept of process compositionnel, made it possible to pass from the static vision of "the musical object" (that that one can index, and which would cease living while returning in the "inheritance") to a dynamic vision. This vision is evolutionary, which did not take into account the theory based on GestaltPsychology who solidify the thought in "images" accumulated in the memory. The musical process is more than the structure: it is indeed a dynamic form, to become. This to become is marked by the print of sound, i.e. by a musical material, and not only by the tool or the theory.

From communications theory of Shannon and Weaver, other definitions insist more on the means of reception than on the chain of production of the music.

See too


Gate Music - Reach the articles of Wikipédia concerning the music.

 

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