The Socio-Epistemological Dimension of Music Composition

Neither our individual destinies, not our future as species is written in the stars. For the same reasons, there is not a music of the spheres beyond the orbit of the Platonic composer and mathematician. Transcendental idealism is the remnant of the ancient fears and superstitions, not only entertained by the old narratives but also by the not-so-obvious mythologies of the universal law inherited by philosophy and later by modern science. Not all modern science believes in the existence of a universal law, but its Queen, theoretical physics, worships such hypostasized order of the universe, giving the norm for how we should think about the cosmos, and defining reality disregarding the serious epistemological problems of completeness faced by formal systems after Gödel, expensively selling their tale about the universe in tune with the most careless medieval metaphysics. This scientific mess, poorly balanced by the advances of life sciences, helps very little to the development of a musical practice based on our human law, i.e., in our neurophysiological limitations.

Music composition is mathematical inasmuch mathematics (remember that the Greek root of the word is related to knowledge) represents basic epistemological actions of the living beings (not only humans), as Changeaux and Dehaene have shown through neuroscientific experimentation. Music composition, like math, is an epistemological action which establishes spatio-temporal relationships among objects, a cognitive multidimensional process which creates life experiences, ordering life accordingly. As any syntactic algebra, it can be interpreted (modelized) in many different reference frames, assigning object-values to its constructions, whether sounds, colors, space-extensions, emotions, poetic meanings, etc. In this sense, music composition goes beyond not only mathematics but also beyond what our traditions (including the avant-garde) have passed down to us as art of sounds. I remember, quite some time ago, a conversation with Iannis Xenakis at the Viitasaari New Music Festival (August, 8^th, 1986) in which I objected to his Parmenidean exposition the importance of aesthetic decisions in composing, not as much in terms of the choice of beautiful sound objects as in terms of the role played by freedom in the determination of a piece, which an exclusively mathematical orientation in composing seemed to deny. His answer was that he valuated music in terms of the intelligence used to manufacture a piece, understanding intelligence in mathematical terms, i.e., according to a mythology of the universal law in which there is a unique truth and a right way to express it, in his case, an interpretation of the Markovian algebra for complexity. But intelligence is not just a question of syntactical complexity reducible to the algebra of thermodynamics, for there is an emergent semantical complexity in life which in fact does not fit very well into the traditional mathematical thinking, whether stochastic or not: the complexity of bio-social phenomena defy the simplicity of our formalized conceptual models. Music composition is a social phenomenon and can only be understood encompassing a wider realm of symbolic constructions, which are also the frame for mathematics (despite the vehement denial of the recalcitrant Platonists) and for any human action.

At the same time, the acknowledgement of the socio-epistemological dimension of music frees composition of the conditionings of music industry, the concert hall, or the world of art, which today tame creative action under the whip of old social inertias (the genius religions), for the epistemological value of composition, its applicability in many different reference frames, makes it a tool for the general symbolical development of the human being. The extraordinary vitality of the music composition of the XX century grew in part out of the daring of the avant-garde movement, but also out of its uncompromising attitude in relation to its social status (sometimes too messianically expressed) as a realm for free aesthetical action, a play proposal to break social and individual ancient shackles.