fluteman makes some really interesting points about the state of flux we find ourselves in. Philosopher Christoph Cox, who's written
a cool book on the subject, describes sonic flux as "the notion of sound as an immemorial material flow to which human expressions contribute but that precedes and exceeds those expressions" (2018, 2). Here's a talk that may be of interest:
Cox identifies the origin of sonic flux as Edison's 1877 invention of the phonograph, which unintentionally submitted a world of sound beyond music/speech to aesthetic attention. The sounds phonographers wished to capture were made ontologically equivalent - in other words, put in the same category - as environmental noises such as the hum and crackle of the phonograph itself. You can see the impact of this discovery in the work of Luigi Russolo, Edgard Varèse, and Pierre Schaeffer in the first half of the 20th century; Cage's
4'33", but also the 'gradual processes' of minimalism and drone installations by La Monte Young, Éliane Radigue, Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Maryanne Amacher, etc. in the '60s onwards; and the emergence of ambient/noise music in the '70s and '80s.
Before Edison, sound was "bound to presence," to what was occurring here and now. Audio recording, however, overturned the usual logic of time/space by allowing the "here" to be transported elsewhere; the sounds of Antarctic seals, for example, could be heard in a car while traveling on a Norwegian freeway. Trippy stuff. As Cox says, "audio recording involves an ontological flattening of its source material" (ibid., 56). This is because audio recordings elude the present moment - they are "always at once past and to come, registering bygone sonic moments and casting them into an indefinite future that is never exhausted by playback in the present" (ibid.). Simply put, audio recordings record events of the past but can be manipulated in the future like no other medium. After Schaeffer's "noise studies" of the late '40s, recorded sound became a prominent tool for creation and composition - see the tape delay systems of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, and Brian Eno but also the adoption of tape collage and musique concrète by the Beatles, Frank Zappa, and Miles Davis. The musical object was transformed into fluid, open-ended auditory material, and the boundaries between "composer," "performer," and "recording engineer" became increasingly blurred. Hip-hop recognizes this blur by calling anyone who alters the sonic flux a "producer." (Speaking of hip-hop, sampling is one of the genre's greatest innovations.) In the Western art music (for lack of a better term) tradition, jazz's golden age and the availability of magnetic tape subjected the classical score to deconstruction and dissolution; indeterminate compositions and graphic scores dismantled the musical object's fixity and encouraged real-time invention. See Stockhausen's
Klavierstück XI, Boulez's Third Piano Sonata, Cardew's
Treatise, and Brown's
December 1952, among many other examples.
To summarize, the second half of the 20th century saw audio recording dismantle the classical score, initiate the practices of sampling, mixing, and remixing, and reevaluate improvisation. In the 21st century, mp3s and the easy copyability of digital data "deals the final blow in the assault of recorded media on the original" (ibid., 73). As mikeh375 pointed out earlier, recorded sound can be manipulated more easily than ever before through DAWs - I disagree, however, that this has led to music being "cheapened creatively."
So... where does the classical concert hall, with its rigid separation of "music" from "noise" and object fetishism, fit into our current state of flux? Hint: it kind of doesn't.
Anyways, this is a huge topic and no forum post - or thread, for that matter - can do it justice. One may observe that experiments with indeterminacy and graphic scores aren't as prominent in Western art music as in the '60s and '70s; I'm curious as to why this is, but I'm sure that publishing costs and the rise of music notation software (with its ossification of CPT-era notational practices) have played a significant role.