This discussion of the exhausting of all possible melodies probably goes
back to early in this century. I know I heard about it when I was 12
or 13, in 1969 or 1970.
It is a specious argument for at least 2 reasons:
1. There are many, many, many musical traditions, which use a variety
of different scales and forms of composition. The Western 12 tone system
is only one, and the implicit assumption in this meme is that it is somehow
a proper superset of every musical system, which is fallacious.
2. The number of musically meaningful phrases is constrained much more
tightly than the combinatorial serialism implied by the argument. Only
a small subset of the possible melodies have any aesthetic appeal to human
ears. So we long ago exhausted the 'useful' melodies. Yet people keep coming
up with new ones? What gives?
3. Beyond simple melody, you have qualities such as dynamics, timbre, voicing,
sound design, and repetition. Thelonious Monk never played a song the same
twice, even when he was playing his composition "Played Twice." And is the
same piece played in two different contexts really the same? There are
certainly enough variables in the musical equation to allow for more variations
than there are atoms in the Universe. Even with a very large hard disk,
you'll never download them all!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: idm-unsubscribe@hyperreal.org
For additional commands, e-mail: idm-help@hyperreal.org