Music and the future

Text: Friedrich Geiger, 6 April 2025

Nowadays, the term »future music« usually refers to an idea or project that is deemed unrealistic, utopian, or at least still a long way from being realised. The fact that this expression has become part of everyday language – rather than terms like »future literature« or »future painting« – is largely due to the popularity of Richard Wagner, the term being coined in criticism of him some 175 years ago. But there is another reason why it is perfectly suited as a synonym for the visionary and the not-yet-realised: musical art is made from sounds, an immaterial, intangible and non-conceptual medium. It is uniquely positioned to give voice to what does not yet exist, to dream, and to gesture toward what lies ahead. This makes the interplay between music and the future especially rich and varied.

Programme highlights to close the season: in this edition of the five-week festival, the great Hamburg orchestras and star guests explore the theme of »Future«

Since the time of the philosopher Plato – who, as early as the 4th century BC, emphasized music’s vital role in shaping the ideal state – music has held a prominent place in literary visions of better societies. Artistic movements like Italian and Russian Futurism, which aimed to break with tradition and embrace radical innovation, placed music as a means of expression at the heart of their ideas. In 1913, for example, the composer and painter Luigi Russolo built special sound generators, so-called »intonarumori«. Their machine-like sounds were intended to replace conventional instruments in a new, technical world. Around the same time in Russia, composers such as Alexei Stanchinsky and Arthur Lourié – building on the pioneering legacy of Alexander Scriabin – experimented with piano music that departed from the conventional major-minor tonal system, pushing boundaries into uncharted harmonic territory.

And to this day, unusual sounds are still central to the soundtracks of science fiction films and fantasy video games – used to evoke futuristic worlds.

If we take a closer look at how music is used in such contexts, it quickly becomes clear that, beyond its immaterial nature, there are three other qualities that make music especially powerful when imagining the future. First, music’s ability to evoke emotion allows listeners to connect deeply with utopian ideas. Second, it has the capacity to describe non-musical concepts. Basic descriptive analogies – such as high and low, fast and slow, flowing or bouncing – have been used since antiquity to convey space and movement through sound.

Music has also developed conventions of meaning over time that can give visions of the future a sonic form. Consider the tam-tam in Alban Berg’s »Wozzeck«, symbolising death and eternity, or the solo violin often used to represent the human soul. This potential became so refined that the composer Richard Strauss once half-jokingly claimed he could compose the sound of a glass of beer so precisely that one could hear whether it was a Pilsener beer or a Kulmbacher beer.

A particularly unique strength of music lies in how it can depict temporal relationships and processes. Since Ludwig van Beethoven, musical form has embraced complex new techniques relating to time: backward references, anticipations, accelerations, pauses and directions. For larger works in particular, the ideal emerged of purposeful, arc-like developments leading to a meaningful conclusion. The finale of the symphonic movement cycle, which until Beethoven was usually a cheerful finale, gradually evolved into the climax of a dramaturgical curve. Ever since Beethoven, the setback, the overcoming of obstacles towards a triumphant end, has been a basic feature of symphonic composition. This concept – moving »through the night to the light« – as epitomized in Beethoven’s 5th and 9th symphonies, proved ideal for musical expressions of hope and future possibility. It also, unfortunately, lent itself to political appropriation, used to promote ideologies promising golden futures.

It is not just music itself that invites visions of the future – so too do the ways we speak and write about it. Discussions around musical innovation often carry an undercurrent of unease and deep-rooted fear of the unfamiliar. At times, this fear turns into outright hostility, as seen in the reaction of composer Hans Pfitzner. In 1917, he published a pamphlet titled »The Futurist Danger«, directly attacking fellow composer Ferruccio Busoni and his book »Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music«. Pfitzner obviously felt threatened by Busoni’s influential thoughts on where music could develop, interpreting them as a »rejection of all that had come before«. 

Due to Busoni’s Italian heritage, Pfitzner also saw him as associated with radical futurism and the abandonment of all tradition. However, Busoni does not suggest this at any point in his writings. On the contrary, he explicitly states that all valid achievements of music history should be preserved. Something that Pfitzner, in his fear-driven furore, chose to ignore.

Where Pfitzner championed a staunchly traditionalist view, the other end of the spectrum was marked by an explicitly progressive outlook. This forward-thinking approach can be dated fairly precisely to the mid-19th century. It was only at this moment that music began to be discussed with a sense of prognosis – or pre-knowledge (»Vor-Erkenntnis« in German). The idea of sketching out and even shaping its own future.

The most powerful form of this is the production-aesthetic program, the composer’s term for a kind of artistic blueprint in advance of their own compositional plans. Richard Wagner founded the genre between 1849 and 1851 in his writings »Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft« and »Oper und Drama«. In these works he outlined in great detail the principles that would guide his future compositions. This kind of programmatic self-description – projecting a creative vision before it had been realised – was unprecedented in music. So new that 1850, the year in which »Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft« was published, has been described as the birth year of the musical avant-garde.
 

Wagner didn’t merely set out the principles for his future compositions though. He painstakingly derived them from the previous course of music history. This approach reflected the spirit of the 19th century, an era steeped in historicism, which sought to shape visions of the future based on insights from the past. Wagner instrumentalised historicist thinking to legitimise his own artistic agenda, casting the entire trajectory of music history as inevitably culminating in his work. In doing so, he established a strategic view of the future in which a logic of development is derived from retrospect – according to which his own artistic goals appeared as necessary, logical outcomes of everything that came before in music history.

This model of compositional proclamation had a lasting impact. The very structure of Wagner’s theoretical writings and manifestos laid the groundwork for a tradition of future-oriented musical thinking that would transcend both place and time. Along this line, one can trace influences extending from Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils to the global strands of Futurism, John Cage’s 1937 manifesto »The Future of Music«, and the self-reflective commentaries of Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The French composer Pierre Boulez, born a century ago, was perhaps the most radical proponent of a forward-looking musical philosophy. In the early 1950s, alongside Stockhausen and others, Boulez embraced Arnold Schoenberg’s concept of using a strict twelve-tone row to structure compositions, ensuring that all pitches were treated equally. This method aimed to eliminate any lingering traces of traditional tonal hierarchies.

Boulez took this idea even further. He began to apply serial principles not only to pitch but to other parameters of sound – such as duration, volume and articulation – removing them entirely from any familiar musical associations. »I wanted to eradicate absolutely every trace of tradition from my vocabulary,« the composer later reflected.

Boulez’s aim was to create music purged of history, »which was not tainted from the outset by any foreign contamination – and stylistic reminiscences in particular«. And, in many respects, he succeeded: his serial compositions possess a shimmering, crystalline clarity that continues to captivate listeners today. The downside, however, was an aesthetic dogmatism that led him, among other things, to the negative conclusion that »any composer who places themselves outside of serial endeavours is unnecessary«.

Even though this kind of radical progressive thinking has almost completely disappeared from the history of music, there are still ideas for the future that scare some people and provoke their resistance, while at the same time inspiring others. This includes the discussion as to whether artificial intelligence means the end of intelligent art or whether it opens up completely new possibilities. It is true that music has always evolved alongside technological innovation, from the invention of the valve trumpet to the rise of the synthesizer. And even the most tech-driven movements, like musical Futurism, never fully replaced traditional, handcrafted music. Yet despite these reassurances, many musicians and composers remain concerned about being replaced by cost-efficient AI systems in the near future. Still, anyone who listens to the confident, imaginative ways in which today’s emerging composers are engaging with AI – turning it into a tool rather than a threat and proving that the human touch remains as irreplaceable as ever – will find plenty of reasons for optimism looking ahead to the future.

As part of the Hamburg International Music Festival 2025, artists explore the intersection of composition and artificial intelligence in their work.