Demoscene as UNESCO cultural heritage and unperformable music

Table of Contents

Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands and topic about unperformable music
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The Dutch inscription is continuing the success story of the demoscene as first digital culture accepted by the UNESCO. Previously the demoscene became cultural heritage in Finland, Germany and Poland.

For Dutch community ‘RamonB5^dSr’ aka Ramon de Bruijn, ‘@zeno4ever’ aka Dave Borghuis and ‘havoc’ aka Peter van Rijn were mainly responsible for submitting the application

Check out the official entry at the inventory and the safeguarding plan, which was the core of the application.

The Dutch inscription will be a big push for other pending applications like in Switzerland. And also it’s making a joint international application more likely.

But let’s talk about something more obscure

fr-08: .the .product by Farbrausch

But let’s talk about impossible music
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WTF? tldr

There are some musical works which are, in some way or another, impossible to perform, viz. they are ‘Unperformable’.

At the very least, several types of unperformable music
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Music which I do not like… Listen on daily basis

The Bull of heaven American experimental/avant-garde band. Between the end of 2010 and 2011, the band started creating various music puzzles, anti-music, and even lengthier pieces of music. Examples include MP3 files that are actually RAR archives, password-encrypted files, pieces embedded within other formats, such as pdf, jpg, txt, exe and jpg, pieces listed with negative song lengths, and a variety of SWF files.

Also they publish “Unperformable music – an ontological approach” Improbable.com. May 9, 2016. Retrieved May 14, 2016.

Medical Unperformability:
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“Given biological limitations, no actual organism can generate a genuine performance.” e.g. Ligeti’s Étude No. 14A: Coloana fara sfârşit (Column without End)

More example:

U.N. Owen Was Her? U.N. Owen Was Her? or U.N. Ooen wa kanojo na no ka?) - is a theme song composed by ZUN for the sixth Touhou Project game Embodiment of Scarlet Devil that’s associated to Flandre Scarlet. His comments on the song imply that it was his favourite during the time of the game.

“Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz” presented by CSMTA - This “musical piece” (and I use the term lightly) has been considered unplayable, but here is a full-fledged attempt. Resplendent with directions such as “Release the Penguins”, “Sell Mute”, and “Watch for Slippage”, the Aurora division of the Colorado State Music Teacher’s Assoc. brings this almost-impossible performance to the stage, to the delight and chagrin of the 2009 State Music Conference attendees.

Finally was played by several people:

The above piece uses “Night of Nights” as an introduction and shifts into “Death Waltz” or “U.N. Owen Was Her.” As a challenge for a select 14 of my students for our annual recital I assigned these two pieces. We are not professionals and this work is meant purely as a learning experience and for the enjoyment of our audiences, but after a year of intense practice and coordination, we are proud to have made this finished product.

Synthesia - Night of Nights - another “musical piece”, which can’t be played by 1-2 people

the quick brown fox speedkore 4 kidz - a track with a higher than 300 bpm tempo that cannot be played by a human, but the computer has changed the rules of the game

Read more How to Perform Impossible Rhythms or local

So here we are with technical unperformability

Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes. So in terms of unperformabel music - these days we can write, but we can’t play some of the black midi tracks.

Nomic Unperformability:
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“Given the actual laws of nature, there can be no genuine performances.” e.g. Bull of Heaven’s 2014 work 310: ΩΣPx0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k, (with a running time of 3.343 quindecillion years. So we can hear a small pice, but not the whole work)

Another example is “Traveler” by Dr Wesley Cray. It is an illustration of the idea of unworkable works. It has a score with sheet music in it. And a note on it says that the musician has to play 10 years back in time. back in time. Such a piece, in theory, could be performed in another universe.

Logical Unperformability:
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“Given logical constraints, there can be no genuine performances.” e.g. Tribute to I.F. Kilmister: (three musicians each, individually and simultaneously, play a single note [on electric guitar, electric bass, and drum kit, respectively] louder than the other two play their notes.)

Dr Wesley Cray wrote a score that said the musician must play the note “A” while refraining from playing any note.

The professor’s paper also alerts us to ‘Unperformable Works for Performance’ and ‘Trivial Unperformabilities’, going on to argue that :

“- the very possibility of such works is ontologically significant. In particular, the possibility of these works raises serious problems for type-theoretic accounts of the ontology of music as well as certain mereological or constitution-based accounts.”

see: “Unperformable Works and the Ontology of Music” (2016, British Journal of Aesthetics, 56(1): 67-81). A full copy may be found here. local

In March 2011, the band released a series of pieces of extraordinary length. This series, ranging from their numerical ordering of 238–260, is similar to the Longplayer idea – each sound is the length of a prime number, and each subsequent piece creates near-infinite lengths of time before they’re synchronized. The final in the series, 260: lcm(2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71,73,79,83) would last 8,462,937,602,125,701,219,674,955.2362595095 years before all the pieces synchronized.

But for what?
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Avant-garde artists break the rules in music, their works are recognised as music, and now the whole world perceives music a bit more widely. If nobody ever broke the once-established boundaries, music would stop changing. Writing unplayable music is also a trespass and the existence of such works is part and parcel of the development of music as an art.