Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reap­pro­pri­a­tion. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if any­thing, to our sources of inspi­ra­tion? His­tor­i­cally, com­posers have stolen ideas from each other reg­u­larly, rework­ing these into their music and tak­ing all the credit (and the money, if they could). The inven­tion of copy­right was the first attempt at giv­ing credit to the orig­i­na­tors of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled sys­tem of prop­erty that pro­motes the fic­tion that new ideas some­how spon­ta­neously appear out of nothingness.

Com­posers have always taken each oth­ers’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no com­pos­ing. But now the big music com­pa­nies would want us to believe that this is some­how wrong. It is, cer­tainly, wrong to profit from the work of oth­ers with­out mak­ing any con­tri­bu­tion one­self, but there are many uses of exist­ing music that do make new, mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions. For this rea­son, I’ve taken an inter­est in quo­ta­tion, col­lage, and related tech­niques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influ­enced me while at the same time expos­ing the false idea that cre­ativ­ity comes out of noth­ing­ness. So here I am, cards on the table, show­ing every­one the music I was think­ing of when work­ing on this piece—by quot­ing that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Oth­ers. I wanted to write a piece that was reflec­tive and som­bre, and I wanted to make it a col­lage of the work of oth­ers. This was a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge, because I have found col­lage bet­ter suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and som­bre; quo­ta­tions tend to lose their char­ac­ter when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this rea­son, I had to approach this piece dif­fer­ently than in my pre­vi­ous work, trans­form­ing the mate­r­ial in more extreme ways for the sake of musi­cal expres­sion. In Elegy of Oth­ers, there­fore, the quo­ta­tions are not always imme­di­ately rec­og­niz­able, though they do come to the sur­face peri­od­i­cally. Nev­er­the­less, almost every note in Elegy of Oth­ers is quoted, with few excep­tions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

1. The Four Sea­sons, “Drunk­ards Asleep”, Anto­nio Vivaldi, 1723
2. “The Girl from Ipanema”, Anto­nio Car­los Jobim, 1962
3. “Every­body Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
4. “Dazed and Con­fused”, Led Zep­pelin, 1968
5. Die schöne Mül­lerin, “Des Müllers Blu­men”, Franz Schu­bert, 1823

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.

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.