ABSTRACT

The main aĴraction of taking ‘timeless noise’ or ‘the world’ to be the maĴer of music is its infinity. So, instead of assuming music to have some finite number of basic elements to start with, I am suggesting the opposite: the maĴer of music is ‘all that is (sounding)’. The form of a specific music, then, is the way it cuts into this infinitely dense continuum. This suggests that, in creating music, one is not, as it were, going into the continuum to look for or to discover certain definite things to be taken out and to be used as elements of a composition. There is no way of entering the continuum: because of its density, there is no place to walk around. It seems more appropriate to think of creating music as cuĴing into this infinity, knowing that even the smallest slice one carves out, again, contains an infinite number of elements. So, asking someone to play an ‘a’ of a certain duration, a certain volume and a certain tone colour is like asking him to write the number pi: he’ll do something more or less approaching something else, which is more or less close to something else again, etc.