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.

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.