Organization, Not Inspiration: A Historical Perspective of Musical Information Architecture

Abstract

The organization of musical resources in a piece of music is opaque for everyone but for those with the highest levels of musical education. For the average listener, the specific vocabulary of musical organization is usually replaced by metaphorical language relating to inspiration and musical affect, or by a social perspective that rids the music of its specific theoretical language and provides a more relatable perspective of the music as a historical and communal event. We examine the ways in which information architecture and organizational theory can surface the inner workings of music in a relatable and approachable way. We consider music as a series of design resources that composers draw upon and organize according to a series of constraints that create a sense of musical structure to which the listener can relate. After a general introduction to the literature relating to constraints and creativity, we use two historical anecdotes that provide accessible demonstrations of how musicians in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries organized their musical resources both for their own compositional needs and for the purposes of didactic communication.