Isomorphism - The Phenomenon of Sound Organization

Yesterday as I was expounding upon my "Master Core Value" from the curriculum, a specific thought occured to me regarding what goes IN to music. We know a lot about what comes out, of course.

The word isomorphism refers to an "information-preserving transformation." Isomorphisms are everywhere in our world, even if you didn't specifically think of them this way. I'll give a very brief example:

Cat.

You read three letters on the screen (which in themselves are an isomorphism for the finger motions which prompted my computer to create them!), and you got a representation of a full and living being. If I asked you to think about a "cat," you would actually reproduce in your head, and from the letters only, what you know to be a cat. Not the letters "cat," but the actually being itself. Isn't it amazing that a cat can be condensed into one word?

Despite the incredible complexity of a living cat and the relative ease of which we are able to condense it, there are others which are far more veiled, far more ethereal. Such is sound organization, or music.

Let's take a composer at random (impossible) here and say Stravinsky. Now, Stravinsky himself, just as a stand-alone human, is already full of information. Then you add on his entire life-story, his parents, his potential pets, his first girlfriend (or boyfriend), the most embarrassing momemnt he has ever had, his favorite food, the most interesting thing he's ever seen, and everything in between and we realize that when Stravinsky or any person gives an output (whether it is thoughts, art, etc), it comes in the shadow of everything that is the person.

Imagine taking all this information, this entirely uncountable collection of events, and condense it into something like a piece of music. There is a lot of pressure involved in creating a compaction of this magnitude! Yet sadly, more often than not when we go to open the condensed-life, we don't extract everything that went in.

There is a general tendency with composers to view them as "names on the page"; unapproachable genius which simply take instruments and sounds and put them together well. But in truth every musical creation is the collection of events and information that went INTO the music, just in a very very compacted form. We complain about a Mahler Symphony being an hour and a half, but given the sheer emotional volume that Mahler experienced in his life, I'd consider his symphonies as a very dense pack of Mahler (albiet a little less dense than most, but who can blame him!).

Every time that I read music, I make an effort to blow it back up into the sheer information-bearing force that it is meant to be. I ask myself, "was that phrase hollow, or was it packed with life?" Whether we realize it fully or not, when we hear a great performance of any music, we find it great simply because it emulated living in some way. We "connect" to a piece of music when it takes our lives and makes a sound of them.

You WILL engage your audience if you create a sound-product that does justice to all the information compacted inside a sound, or a piece of music. Music that lives and feels is the music worth paying for.