Abstract
From the middle of the 20th century onwards, musicians increasingly looked to the world of science for new ideas. In this chapter we look at the influence of science on new musical trends such as the serialism of Stockhausen and Boulez and the “stochastic music” of Xenakis. Scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg were cited as sources of inspiration in the way that poets or philosophers might have been in an earlier age. By the end of the 20th century, musical works were being composed using real astronomical data—as in Fiorella Terenzi’s Music from the Galaxies—or, moving from outer space to the Earth’s oceans, the songs of humpback whales.
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Notes
- 1.
Interestingly, in light of Clarke’s fictitious Lamentations for Atlantis, the Black Box CD of Vox Balaenae includes another piece by Crumb entitled “From the Kingdom of Atlantis, circa 10,000 BC” [47].
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May, A. (2020). Scientific Music. In: The Science of Sci-Fi Music. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47833-9_4
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