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.