David Toop's "Ocean of Sound"

This book was fantastic. There is a lot one could say about it, but the first thoughts that struck me concerned my work as a composer. It made me think a lot more about the idea of music as simply sound, or a collection of sounds, and that composing is really more about making interesting sounds than simply making something "cool" out of sounds. Afterall, a piece should stand on its own, shouldn't it? Why is it that some pieces need to have extensive program notes in order to be interesting? No matter how interesting the processes that go into the composition of a piece, if the sound is shit then the sound is shit. Perhaps more complex, organized, and intellectual, but still shit.

Inner structure and organization can be useful to the composer but these things aren't necessarily of immediate interest to the audience. Why would they care?

This line of thinking leads me to previous questions concerning contemporary, academic computer music and the insular nature of that scene. As Ben Neill wrote in his article "Breakthrough Beats: Rhythm and Aesthetics of Contemporary Electronic Music" (Leonardo Music Journal 12, 2002), much of this music "...remains elitist and disconnected from the larger cultural sphere, rendering it largely ineffectual as a 21st-century art form." If the music doesn't reach an audience beyond the sphere of its creation does it exist? Similarly, if composers can only reach their audience with the help of program notes something is missing. I think back to my first experience hearing Brian Eno's "On Land." Beautiful! Then, on reading the liner notes and doing a bit of research on the production of both it and "Music for Airports" I was really captivated. However, I arrived at an appreciation of the music before learning about its compositional process. I think this is an important quality to consider in all music.