Music has geography–
located in a place,
rooted in a set of coordinates,
mappable onto interpretive grids.
Like a spinning globe
music’s time moves from left to right,
it’s melodies fall from high to low,
it’s bass and treble create near and far.
Music has depth–it’s 4D.
Music also has inner coordinates.
Imagine smashing that globe
into a thousand small shards
that scatter around a room.
Each shard is a set of instructions
for a style, a tradition, a movement.
Take a small shard
and zoom in on its instructions–
binary script that describes
how this sound
will evolve into that,
one rule at a time
built upon or broken,
while musicians proceed
as if they’re the ones doing the thinking.
brettworks 