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Literalism in music is a technique that emerged in the late 20th century. It involves composing music by utilising tangible representations of musical elements. With this approach, composers craft a diverse range of compositions, spanning from classical orchestral works to seemingly structureless instances of noise.^{[citation needed]}

Literalism is a technique of music composition that uses physical objects to represent musical elements. This technique was first developed in the 1960s and 1970s by composers such as Alvin Lucier, John Cage, and Pauline Oliveros.^{[1][failed verification]}

Stephen Davies's wrote a paper on the defence of literalism which considers the emotional descriptions of music. He believes that literalism posits that when a piece of music is described as 'sad,' 'happy,' or other emotions, it actually possesses the expressive qualities we attribute to it. Davies's literalist approach leverages the concept of polysemy, where the meaning of emotion words in descriptions of expressive music is connected to their primary psychological sense. Davies identifies this connection through music's presentation of emotion-characteristics-in-appearance.^[2]

• Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), uses the physical properties of a room to create a soundscape.^[3]
• John Cage's "4'33" (1952), which is a composition consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.^[4]
• Pauline Oliveros' "Tuning Meditations" (1974), which uses the physical properties of tuning forks to create a meditative soundscape.^[5]

• Driver, Paul William (1977). "Harrison Birtwistle". Oxford Literary Review. 2 (2): 44–48. doi:10.3366/olr.1977-2.017. ISSN 0305-1498.
• Durant, Alan (1984). "False Relations and the Madrigal: An Alchemy of England's Golden Age in Music". Conditions of Music. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 119–166. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-17591-8_5. ISBN 978-0-333-37277-7.
• Pruslin, Stephen (1965). "Maxwell Davies's Second Taverner Fantasia". Tempo (73). Cambridge University Press: 2–11. doi:10.1017/S0040298200033519. ISSN 0040-2982. JSTOR 942856. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
• Crowest, F.J. (1878). "Musical literalism". A Book of Musical Anecdotes: From Every Available Source. R. Bentley and son. pp. 196–197. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
• Mawer, D. (2017). "Musical literalism in portraying scenario 'Danse du rouet'". The Ballets of Maurice Ravel: Creation and Interpretation. Taylor & Francis. pp. 52–54. ISBN 978-1-351-54604-1. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
• Begam, Richard (2016). "Schoenberg, Modernism, and Degeneracy". Modernism and Opera. Hopkins Studies in Modernism. Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-2062-2. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
• Shelley, Peter James (2013). Rethinking Minimalism: At the Intersection of Music Theory and Art Criticism (Ph.D thesis). University of Washington. hdl:1773/24092.
• Ravasio, Matteo (2018). "Analytic Perspectives in the Philosophy of Music". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.