UC Davis

Conceptual music has for decades posed intractable analytic issues for musicians and music theorists, forming a category defined by strangeness and esotericism with seemingly nothing paradigmatic uniting works as diverse as John Cage’s famous 4’33’’ or Johannes Kreidler’s Minus Bolero. What concept music seems only to have in common is some form of disruption or provocation, with most forms of analysis unavailable to these works. What these works do share however is a rejection of fundamental axioms, a rejection that manifests as a peculiar form of musical grammar. The grammar of concept music is non-syntactical, unable to be iterated and standardized the way all other musical grammar is. As a result, concept music retains a historic formal and social potency. Through a denial of syntax and the logic of the broader canon, works like 4’33’' bring social conflict into the material of the works themselves. This embodiment of social conflict through negation and contradiction work to create a peculiar form of structure of concept music, built not on constitutive elements but out of tension amidst competing forces.