Scott Rickard is a mathematics professor at Dublin College. He also has a keen interest in music, which makes sense, as the two fields have some common points of interaction.
Repetition is a common trait to all music. I’m not just talking about Philip Glass and his tedious 2-hour arpeggio exercises; recurring patterns, no matter how tenuous, can be found in even the most complex music. It’s hardwired into our brains somewhere.
As an experiment, Rickard endeavored to write a piece of music “devoid of any pattern,” one in which there’s no repetition whatsoever. He’s not the first to try this. Schoenberg and others have resorted to questionable mathematical and arbitrary systems to avoid conscious choice in the past, but nowadays, we’ve got technology on our side. Oh, what a bleak and horrible future we live in!
Does it work? Yes. Is it music? Technically, yes.
So…art? As Zappa once said, that’s for the critics to decide. Continued...