In 1988 the late Marvin Minsky wrote a book titled The Society of Mind. In it he put forth the idea that our conscious minds are made up of a bunch of smaller bit, each unconscious, that compete against each other while also working together resulting in the thing we call the conscious mind. Just like individuals live with each other in competition and cooperation resulting in a society.
It’s a nice metaphor or model for thinking about thinking. There’s a lot of interesting things in the book but one that drew me to it was the form. The book is divided up into some 200 essays each no more than one page long. Each essay exists as a discrete essay though they are collected into groups (chapters) according to subject matter. You do not have to read the book in order, like you do with most books, but can jump around as needed. Taken as a whole the book illustrates Minksy’s model for conscious thought with each essay being a discrete entity that works with all the other essays to generate the model. The form of the book serves as an analogy for the model.
I wanted to write a piece of music for his book. After some false starts I came up with the idea of assembling a group of performers (equal to the number of chapters in the book) and devised a means by which they would have to compete against and cooperate with each other in order to “win”—to have their music stand out over everyone else’s. The music is not a model for the book. The process of the performers creating the music is analogous to Minsky’s idea.
The original version I came up with 15 years ago had each page of a performers score have only one note. I wanted the process the performers were following to be the most noticeable aspect and felt that if each page had more going on that this would distract the audience from this process.
I still think this is probably true but decided to create variations, or mixes, that have more going on. The first mix is called The Original Mix&rdquo. The other mix included in this score was formed by taking music that I know Minsky likes (based on his writings and a playlist of his I found online) and cutting it up into tiny bits. This is the Minsky Mix. There’s going to be a Dave Mix which uses music I like and then also a Multimedia Mix which will include performers other than just musicians like dancers, carpenters, poets, painters, and so on. This last mix perhaps creates a more obvious connection with a society. Unfortunately I haven’t finished the latter two mixes yet, but like I said in the lede there are two here and you can only perform one mix at a time anyway. Unfortunately I do not have 30 musicians at my disposal to record a performance of this work and doing it on computer would be too difficult for me at this time, so I have not uploaded an audio recording. But you do have the score and it’s pretty cool looking.
Copyright 2017 David Bellows