Always Incomplete: A Mixtape after Moten and Harney (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
In an essay titled "I Want to Find The Music, Not to Compose It", Tom Johnson writes about a type of musical minimalism he remembers as "process music", saying that "in [all] these cases the "composers" are not really composing so much as simply letting music arise out of circumstances that they can not personally control. They are finding music which somehow already exists.”i Johnson is referring to the music of composers in 1970s downtown NYC, but he opens up the discussion to reflect on an approach of “found” music that can be applied to what one could consider a "musical catalogue". Taking this idea of “found music” as our starting point, we can offer a sufficient definition of what we mean by the term "musical catalogue" that, while necessarily incomplete, can serve as our guide: