Post-Music Post
A blog dedicated to new music discourse in the form of articles and concert reviews
What is new music for ?
a schematic answer
July 2025
Some remarks
The following text has a programmatic aim. I wish to consider, with relative freedom, a series of intuitions regarding my compositional practice that have occupied me for some time. The clarity of this outline matters more to me than its academic value. Therefore, I will undertake the difficult exercise of citing nothing. I do not wish to import the baggage that certain names imply. I hope that organizing these developing ideas will allow me to give them a certain structure that can, once established, be refined, communicated, and discussed.
My goal is the following: to proceed precisely and stepwise, from very general considerations to the horizon of my current work. I want to establish a coherent discursive basis that accounts for the aims of my practice. Although personal and without normative pretensions, I naturally hope these ideas might inspire others beyond myself.
A word on the situation / why I write this text?
I believe that an integral part of an artist’s work is to grasp the necessity of their art at the highest possible level. This grasp can be intuitive and obvious for some. It is not for me, and I am convinced it is not for many contemporary music composers today. An ambitious discourse about the present—and also the future—of this discipline seems difficult to find at the moment. The postmodern "crisis of (meta-)narratives," caught up and even surpassed by history, often serves as an excuse for intellectual laziness. Everyone drifts in their own concerns within the vast contemporary post-media ocean.
It is clear that the importance of composed music today as a relevant cultural field is steadily declining. Contemporary music, at least as it exists in European institutions, sees its budgets shrink year after year. It is caught in a permanent tension between the “museum-like” ambitions of conserving historical repertoire works and the disruptive functioning that characterizes new music. It also struggles to compete with the enormous resources of contemporary art and the spectacular, entertaining aspect of theater. As a result, fewer and fewer people believe contemporary music "serves" a purpose or at least merits support at the expense of more current and relevant forms of sonic expression. Put differently, contemporary music struggles to find a specific place in today’s cultural landscape. Perhaps because of this, composers aspiring to some radicality tend to “emigrate” into neighboring artistic fields like pop, improvisation, contemporary art, or theater.
The pandemic period was exemplary in this regard. Despite efforts to convince the public that new music fulfilled a need, part of the audience never returned to concert halls. Instead of engaging in deep discussions about this type of music and why it should exist, the entire milieu mostly invoked the social status of musicians as workers. At the time, this was probably the most important thing. However, just as the job security of pilots cannot justify the endless growth of air transport, the mere survival of the composer as a socio-economic class cannot ultimately be a sufficient reason to organize concerts.
Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible to accept the situation as it is and even rejoice in it. What we call contemporary music may well have run its course, and we must simply resign ourselves to seeing it disappear. Some have even formed the artistic project of “ending with style.” This certainly carries a certain poetry.
If, on the contrary, our dissatisfaction pushes us to look elsewhere, the question of what contemporary music is for becomes imperative. This question must be considered with radical integrity. The answer cannot be a vague platitude serving only to self-preserve the field. A profound answer to this question implies considering the answer: nothing—and bearing the consequences.
The concept of music
At the center of all this is the very concept of music, which is in crisis. The recent history of Western music has complicated the notion to the point where it now seems suspect. Everything and nothing at the same time is music. I will argue later that this is not fundamentally false nor necessarily regrettable. However, I believe this dispersion of the term is not ultimately a simplification of the composer’s task. On the contrary, I think I belong to a generation that, by losing interest in the question of what music is, is unable to know what it could be.
This should not be interpreted here as a call for a stable definition or unified value of music. The problem with definitions in the strict sense—i.e., “necessary and sufficient conditions” for a cultural production to be included in the set falling under the defined concept—is that they take into account only the music that exists. One considers the history of musical concretizations and induces a concept from them. A system or specific procedures are then selected and considered constitutive of an "essence of music." Fixing a concept in this way prevents considering music in its becoming. The most significant ideas of today’s music are then understood only as marginal cases. I seek instead a conception that would understand them as perfectly comprehensible continuations of the history of music.
Thus, a useful understanding here, capable of envisioning music to come, must by necessity remain incomplete and move away from considering the results of musical activity to focus on what generates them upstream. If a classical definition of music is closed and only possible ex post facto, one could perhaps use here the idea of “indefinition” as an operative concept. Such a characterization procedure would require recourse to speculation, situated at a level prior to current musical works. One must therefore find a beginning less tangible than history. Naturally, rigorous study would be needed to clarify several of the propositions that will follow.
Sketch of an indefinition of music
First of all, the manifestation of human thought through non-uniquely verbal sounds seems to be a cultural invariant. In other words, something assimilable to music is found in all cultures. The distribution of these activities and their grouping with others related to movement, language, or visual signs, for example, is subject to immense variation across different human groups. Thus, our determined concept of music (naively understood as the art of organizing sounds) is not universal at all.
One could take this as a sign that there are no watertight compartments in the human mind corresponding to the Western division of the arts. There is originally no “musical thought” engraved in the mind that would accord with our specific (absolute) concept of music and distinguish itself originally from other forms of “narrative,” “movement,” or “visual” thought, etc.
One could thus affirm that it is thought in general, in all its plasticity, that is mobilized in music, rather than a specific part or an essentially incomplete form of it. By thought, I mean something much broader than rationality, with the emotional and intuitive aspects of human mental life totally included. Such a stance opposes directly the romantic vision of Western music solely as a “private and absolute language of sounds,” which I still often sense implicitly in the milieu.
If there is no purely musical thought, the way human intelligence historically manifests itself through music is not necessary. What we call music is only one version among others of the diverse modalities through which thought actualizes itself in specific configurations over time. At this level, to speak of music is equivalent to speaking of art in general since the former is only a particular fold in the general fabric that the latter constitutes. Making the difference with other arts then becomes a comparison between different folds, each having taken its trajectories and specificities.
The actualization of thought into concrete objects such as musical works includes the formation of specific and mobile structures at various levels. We can mention, among others, the intertwined histories of instruments, modes of notation and music conservation, institutions, listening regimes, criticism and discourse, performance and teaching practices, in addition to categories strictly belonging to the musical “medium.” These elements develop jointly, influencing and being influenced by each other throughout history. None of these elements is reducible to another. Music is not reducible to the sounds it comprises, nor to the institutions enabling it, nor to any isolated element taking part in its history. It is as a whole that they determine a field of potentialities from which musical works emerge.
What allows us to follow the thread of music is this complex but continuous movement, comprising interconnected elements moving at different paces, which allows music to differentiate itself at each of its stages while remaining solidly graspable as a unity.
Some Consequences
We then find important consequences for a standard understanding of music. First, this implies that there is nothing essential in musical concretizations that would mean something is, or is not, music at all times. To attribute the status of music to a cultural artifact involves neither simply considering its position in a specific context nor a series of perceptual qualities. A musical work positions itself (explicitly or not) in relation to the various stratified elements that dynamically constitute the history of music. In this sense, I would venture to say that even the audibility and temporal unfolding of music are not strict limits for all future music.
Thus, such a view includes, for example, radically conceptual music as a perfectly understandable historical development. It would mean that music could eventually become something completely different, yet would integrate itself smoothly thanks to numerous connections with past and present music. This does not in any way imply a value judgment concerning Western composed music up to now. Simply, no moment within it can claim to be closer to the “true essence” of music than any other.
This radical indefinition then implies no functional, structural, medial, or aesthetic unity running through all music. Different processes, systems, and understandings of music—irreducible to one another—can and indeed do exist both diachronically and synchronically throughout history.
New Music as the Indefinition of Music in Act
From this, certain conclusions can be drawn regarding contemporary music. An open conception of the concept of music demands a shift in perspective. If no “transcendent unity” of music exists, then contemporary music is not an anomaly but a coherent consequence of this absence of stable foundation. In this sense, there is no reason to actively assimilate it to other, more immediately recognizable musical forms in order to secure its legitimacy.
It may be precisely the comparison of different musical productions on the basis of concrete or perceptual aspects that fuels crises such as that of postmodernism, from which, it seems to me, we still struggle to extricate ourselves. The desire to render contemporary music more similar to jazz or pop—while entirely possible in itself—constitutes, in my view, a sideways step rather than a forward one.
Contemporary music possesses characteristics that radically distinguish it from other musical practices, often received with greater obviousness. It developed within a specific institutional framework, where a particular infrastructure—composer/performer relations, specific notation, formalized listening regimes, modes of presentation—shaped a specific mode of production and reception. This framework is not superior in itself, but it constitutes an autonomous aesthetic regime, hardly assimilable to the functional models of other musics.
It therefore has neither the obligation, nor even in my view the possibility, to conform to the criteria of readability, efficiency, or familiarity that prevail in other types of musical expression. Any attempt to force its assimilation amounts to ignoring what is properly irreducible in this music, and what it makes possible. One is then condemned to the repetitive creation of inauthentic caricatures.
The progressive institutionalization of the field has led to an extreme autonomy that is often perceived negatively. Yet one can also see in it a positive value. Its relative withdrawal from the market—especially when compared to contemporary art—allows contemporary music to escape, to some extent, the logics of fashion, media performance, or productivity.
What it loses in visibility and in private and public support (and thus in control), it may perhaps gain in speculative latitude. It constitutes a space where one can still experiment, risk, speculate, without having to respond to too many immediate utilitarian expectations. In this sense, I believe it remains fertile ground for a certain spontaneity of human intelligence and its unwavering and constitutive need for novelty.
Horizontality and Verticality of Novelty
Novelty for novelty’s sake is often criticized in new music. So-called “avant-gardist” behavior is readily seen as a futile competition of successive disruptions. The musical history of the twentieth century is thus schematically presented as a sequence of works increasingly denying, from every angle, the intra-musical categories of the traditional canon—a series of erasures and blind redefinitions of what music is.
One can name this conception of novelty—occurring within and between works—horizontal. It is based on the idea that the new emerges from the negation of prior concretizations, in a play of differences internal to the musical medium.
Yet I have attempted to establish earlier that remaining at the level of concrete musical works is insufficient. My hypothesis is that a deeper examination of the phenomenon shows that this apparently horizontal process implies an underlying verticality. The composers who truly invented something in the twentieth century did so by mobilizing transversal thinking, an understanding of music as the term of a movement of thought in relation to different forms of extra-musicality. In other words, they thought through music, rather than about music.
The resulting novelty does not stem from a will to rupture. It is symptomatic in that it imposes itself, by necessity internal to the process of creation. It is vertical because it involves an incursion of thought in general into the musical work.
This heuristic model is perhaps discernible throughout the history of music, and can be linked to the pair invention/innovation, where invention would designate the vertical irruption of a new idea—still schematic and raw—and innovation its progressive shaping through successive works, in a movement of horizontalization making it more sophisticated, mobile, and expressive. This pair could indeed help differentiate various archetypes of artists.
The challenge of novelty is therefore not a mere stylistic innovation but a significant moment of thought: new music makes sense only insofar as it continues to produce inflections in our conception of music that, consequently, transform our vision of art and thought itself.
Naturally, thought does not arise in a vacuum, and I would even say that it does not arise without the technical objects that sustain it. Invention, despite its vertical and profoundly 'new' character, remains inseparable from the state of a civilization’s development. It is shaped by a field of possibilities at a given moment. The fact that similar inventions often emerge in different places simultaneously confirms this: thought merely activated a latent possibility embedded in its conditions.
Sketch of a Program
It seems that we are stuck in an unfruitful horizontal process of infinite recombination of inventions, most of them long established and having lost any capacity to create an “event,” to make “a difference that makes a difference.” Differentiation currently seems to occur at the level of discourses around works, often without these having any profound impact on the sonic material or its treatment.
This text seeks to reflect on the conditions of possibility of a “true” invention. If music is not a collection of sonic qualities but the result of a concretization of a field of possibilities determined at numerous levels, novelty can only be found vertically. We cannot focus either on an ever-increasing sophistication of writing techniques or on a pure diversification of media and formats while leaving untouched the modes of thought that underlie them.
To compose then implies that the work constitutes itself as a continuous gesture across the strata of the field in a consciously organized manner. This is still composition, and a certain virtuosity may intervene in it. The greater the internal coherence of the “gesture” at every stage, and the greater the distance between its “most abstract” and “most concrete” points, the more the work can be considered successful.
Thus, the ideal work would extend between potentially vastly general and relevant ideas (in any domain of knowledge) and a precise realization that would make clear the necessity of passing through this medium rather than another. There might thus be no idea incompatible with musical practice.
However, it is not sufficient merely to illustrate an idea with sounds. The act of exemplifying through this specific medium must itself have an impact on our understanding of the idea. In short, the task is to create a maximally coherent and reversible structure between idea and realization, discourse and act, abstract and concrete, in which the two have equal value. In short, it is crucial that works think, leading us to think through them.
In this sense, it would not be a matter of “deduction” as in a purely conceptual practice, which, starting from the idea, produces a work as a kind of “shortcut,” without mobilizing the medium in its inherent possibilities. Nor could such work be “inductive,” as when a piece is composed through arbitrary subjectivism whose meaning appears only later. We might perhaps speak of “transduction” for the operation that would begin in the middle. The projection and its realization should therefore be in constant interaction, mutually determining each other throughout the process.
The question of beginning in the middle immediately poses the problem of certain mediations. The group of neighboring transits—between theory and practice, ideas and the sensible qualities of the work, linearity and gestalt, etc.— must therefore become central points of inquiry. A beginning of a solution demands, I believe, substantial and parallel work in practice and theory.
The intuition driving me at this moment is: to begin in the middle implies beginning with the gesture and not with the abstract and concrete terms between which it progressively develops. Clearly, I use the term gesture to describe something more immaterial than a physical movement. I try rather to describe mental operations that allow one to pass through the stages of the work’s production. These operations can indeed be of various types. One could also speak of schemata or diagrams, understood as intermediate abstract structures related to both the verbal and the formal, with a very high potential for mobility.
It does indeed seem possible to schematize almost anything in varied ways. Thus, one can interpret philosophical or scientific ideas, differences in identities, interactions between musicians and audience, sounds, musical forms, spatial movements, or metaphors as configurations involving movements of thought that can be mobilized at different levels. One could imagine pieces attempting to exemplify the same gesture as many times as possible, sometimes becoming a concept, sometimes a sensible configuration. One could also imagine works showing the transformation of the same gesture across the superposed levels of the work. What, for example, could be the aesthetic and epistemic force of coordinated manifestations of “feedback” that are simultaneously sonic, instrumental, notational, interpersonal, and institutional?
This could be a specifically artistic way of dealing with knowledge, not merely illustrating or using ideas derived from elsewhere. It would be an extremely fertile ground for thinking in general about modes of operation upon the world before they confront the concrete obstacles of daily reality. The admittedly overused notion of “laboratory” would here find renewed pertinence.
This “compositional verticality” naturally also has an impact on the reception of such works. On the one hand, the act of vertical indefinition by the incursion of a new idea into the musical medium has an aesthetic value. This value is well known to anyone who discovers the history of contemporary music and is struck by the power of this or that work, forever transforming what one believed possible and thus forming an “event of thought,” at least on a personal level. On the other hand, the consideration of abstract ideas in different modalities, in different forms and contexts, has an epistemic value. What is at stake here is nothing less than intensifying our understanding of the world. Finally, the conjunction of these values could make the experience of such a musical work comparable to that of a mathematical or philosophical concretization. For all three, the choice of a starting point both significant and original, the necessity of each element, the elegance and clarity of the passage between them, and the power of what emerges (according to the modalities of each discipline) can elicit not only an intellectual but also an emotional response. Perhaps it is not shameful here to speak of beauty. In this sense, music would rediscover a form of transversality by which it again becomes comprehensible to other spheres of thought, without bypassing what has made it what it is today. This has certainly a "cost" on the aspect of music. It could only stay as it is under very specific and consciously determined conditions.
Conclusion
I have here attempted to see the composition of new music as an act founded neither on the mere sonification of concepts nor on arbitrary subjectivity, but on the progressive elaboration of a mental structure through the medium itself whose aim is to transcend it. This process is seen as a conscious, schematic trajectory that traverses, articulates, and determines the abstract and concrete strata of the work. This implies ensuring that the different dimensions of the creative process (contextual, conceptual, sensory, formal, technical, notational, performative, institutional, etc.) condition and respond to each other at every stage. Such a work would thus produce meaning through the specificity of its medium, while acting upon our way of thinking, making perceptible the very articulation between thought and matter that brings it into existence. In this sense, it may be understood as “thinking.”
It is clear that in the current climate, such a proposal is almost defenseless against the “ivory tower” argument. It will surely appear so to those who believe they must hypnotize the masses or save the planet with their works. I personally believe that contemporary music cannot be substitute for purely practical action upon the conditions of life. We see this in the world of contemporary art, where institutional critique has already for some time been the institution of critique, whose impact is at best debatable. Yet I also believe it is insufficient to see the impact of contemporary musical works as some vague “butterfly effect,” leaving purely to chance the effect of a work on the world.
Through these few remarks I hope to have opened a door to understanding the artwork as a vocabulary of operations, as a concentrated and transparent model of action, and above all as proof of the possibility of a radically mobile thought capable of inspiring and guiding practical action. There is thus an implicit ethics that emerges, touching upon the radical integrity necessary for the composer and for the creation of non-utilitarian knowledge.
Given the specialization (in my opinion irreversible) of the field of contemporary music and its profound incompatibility with music understood as a mass-consumption good—whether as background sound or as the signaling of prefabricated emotions—it is, in my view, necessary to fully embrace this autonomy. However, I am not here calling for its retreat into increasingly sterile academic models, formatted and goal-oriented. I believe in the possibility of thinking through music and once again understanding it as part of knowledge in general.
Like any other, this space of human freedom is precarious and cannot be taken for granted, nor allowed to fall into automatism. I therefore understand the role of contemporary music as continuing to actualize the potentialities of music’s indefinition. For if music is not limited to sounds, but includes an entire field of practices, tools, and apparatuses, then all of these elements can become themes of a thought in act, concretizing itself in the works. To indefine music is thus to reconcile it with thought—to think it as capable of producing meaning on par with any other elaborated form of human reflection.
One could then, in conclusion, consider more finely the typology of towers. Though of ivory, this tower would not be fully closed. There would be openings. With caution, one might consider the lighthouse—not metaphorically as a luminous beacon guiding humanity through darkness, but at a more operative level. It emits without guarantee of reception: that there may always be a receiver is not the principal reason for its existence. It does not tell where to go, but how far one can go, to who is in a position to receive.
This text was first presented publicly as an Open Space lecture at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse on July 25th, 2025.