Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity is a col­lage. In fact, even the title is a col­lage: I took the title of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and com­bined it with a ref­er­ence to the cul­ture of Inter­net file shar­ing. I have been inter­ested in col­lage and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of mate­r­ial for some time, because as the say­ing goes, good artists bor­row but great artists steal. Col­lage is the most hon­est way to hon­our that prin­ci­ple, and I spent most of 2008 work­ing in this direction.

Col­lage, as well as related ideas such as sam­pling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few uni­fy­ing forces dri­ving artis­tic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMix­ter, these ideas have been respon­si­ble for renew­ing ama­teur art on a mass scale, for chal­leng­ing the stan­dards of cre­ativ­ity, for expand­ing musi­cal taste, and even for influ­enc­ing legal precedent.

For the first time in his­tory, we are drown­ing in art. There is too much music of the high­est artis­tic qual­ity for any­one to ever hope to expe­ri­ence. So how can artists con­tribute to cul­ture in a sit­u­a­tion like this? I think col­lage is an impor­tant part of the answer, and the proof is in the atti­tudes of those who grew up with the Inter­net. For many of them, art is not some­thing sim­ply to be expe­ri­enced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While com­pos­ing Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, I gave myself some restric­tions in order to inspire cre­ativ­ity. For exam­ple, I decided to try to present all quo­ta­tions in as rec­og­niz­able a form as pos­si­ble. I did not allow myself to trans­pose frag­ments from their orig­i­nal tonal­i­ties, and I did not allow myself to com­pose my own new mate­r­ial to bridge together the quo­ta­tions—every note is bor­rowed. I also made tempo an inte­gral part of the musi­cal devel­op­ment, and I tried to make gram­mat­i­cal sense of all the text frag­ments I com­bined. Finally, every quote relates to the oth­ers in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obvi­ously) musi­cal sounds.

This piece deals with my inter­est in both tran­si­tional musi­cal mate­ri­als and the tran­si­tive nature of sound itself, which dis­ap­pears almost as soon as it is cre­ated. I have con­ceived the form of the piece as an explo­ration of tran­si­tion, pre­sent­ing numer­ous sounds in motion as they come into and out of exis­tence in time, and show­ing them from sev­eral per­spec­tives so as to allow the effects of time and tran­si­tion to change the very nature of the sounds and sug­gest new meanings.

Cul­ture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that mod­ern pop­u­lar cul­ture can inform West­ern art music. More specif­i­cally, Cul­ture no.3 is involved in explor­ing the inter­re­la­tion between the vis­ceral ele­ments of pop­u­lar music and tim­bre. By vis­ceral ele­ments, I mean, for exam­ple, the sense of motion, the force­ful­ness of the artic­u­la­tions, or the char­ac­ter of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The tra­di­tional pitch resources of the pop­u­lar sphere have required that vis­cer­al­ity and tim­bre play a greater role in defin­ing pop­u­lar gen­res (and sub­se­quently in deter­min­ing what we find inter­est­ing within them) than is seen in the major­ity of West­ern art music. Cul­ture no.3, with a greater empha­sis on tim­bre and vis­cer­al­ity and a sub­se­quently lesser empha­sis on other aspects of the musi­cal whole, uses the resources of the West­ern ensem­ble to fea­ture this aspect of pop­u­lar music.

Desde was writ­ten in the sum­mer of 2004 and is my first orches­tral work. In sev­eral of the pieces lead­ing up to Desde, I had begun exper­i­ment­ing with ways of deal­ing with the prob­lem of cul­tur­ally biased musi­cal per­cep­tion, which colours all musi­cal expe­ri­ences. This came about as I com­pared my non-classical music edu­ca­tion with the for­mal expe­ri­ences I received in uni­ver­sity, and I wanted to find ways to com­bine what I felt at the time to be sev­eral often-conflicting meth­ods of hear­ing music.

Why call a piece Noth­ing? Well, in a word, curios­ity—most of my music has as its theme the ques­tion, “What hap­pens if…?” At the time I was writ­ing Noth­ing (win­ter 2004), I was both­ered by the almost total reliance on motivic devel­op­ment and form to gen­er­ate local and long-term inter­est in West­ern music. I won­dered if it might be pos­si­ble to “hear” some­thing as a coher­ent (and enjoy­able) piece of music with­out recourse to any for­mal or motivic rep­e­ti­tion. Hence, the title Noth­ing is a ref­er­ence to the cen­tral prob­lem of the piece: “What hap­pens if I have noth­ing (in the tra­di­tional sense) to con­nect with?”

I have since come to view this issue as a spe­cific case of the gen­eral prob­lems of musi­cal cog­ni­tion and our (largely) unques­tioned appro­pri­a­tion of orga­ni­za­tional par­a­digms devel­oped for and by eighteenth-century empiri­cism. Nev­er­the­less, the result remains the same, and as any­one who has tried to com­pose can tell you, hav­ing noth­ing is the same as hav­ing every­thing—there are end­less choices. So I had to find an alter­na­tive focus, and I decided to return to very basic meth­ods of hear­ing as a way of con­nect­ing musi­cal mate­r­ial. For exam­ple, instead of using melodic/harmonic motives, the open­ing of the piece uses a jux­ta­po­si­tion of pitched and non-pitched ele­ments to grab the listener’s atten­tion. Exactly which spe­cific pitched and non-pitched ele­ments are used is rel­a­tively unim­por­tant; the low-level con­trast between har­monic and inhar­monic sound spec­tra is what makes the music interesting.

Of course, this doesn’t com­pletely side­step motivic and for­mal orga­ni­za­tion, but it does push it back to a level that is gen­er­ally not dealt with exclu­sively. Motives and form become syn­ony­mous with tech­niques and mate­r­ial: pitched ver­sus non-pitched; rhyth­mic ver­sus non-rhythmic; these instru­ments together ver­sus those instru­ments together; and so on. Nothing is not the kind of piece that is inspired by sym­met­ri­cal pat­terns or pyra­mi­dal short-term/long-term inter­re­la­tion—there are con­nect­ing links, as demanded by musi­cal cog­ni­tion, but if you come look­ing for devel­op­men­tal strate­gies of that sort, be pre­pared to end up with a whole lot of nothing.