ABSTRACT

There is a curious and rather touching passage in the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, in which that philosopher responds with considerable melancholy to the thought that sooner rather than later, music will all be used up. There are only, Mill reflected, a finite number of combinations of a finite number of tones, so before too long all the melodies possible will have been discovered and there will be nothing left to compose. The augmentation of the octave by the twelvetone scale, something Mill of course had not counted on, would but postpone an inevitable exhaustion, and the future history of music must be repetitions of all the combinations of tones that there are. Mill might have taken comfort from the fact that concert performances themselves seem infinite repetitions of the same

compositions, but his concern was with creativity and the closing off of its possibility in musical composition.