The Folded Map is a project about Renaissance polyphony. And yet it is also about philosophy, art and science. It’s the claim that polyphonic music is part of the world, part of knowledge and inextricably bound to the histories we inhabit.

With a map we may wander, evade cul-de-sacs and hunt for treasure. A map is a provisional thing, reflecting the varied topologies of each time and place. And so it depicts not terrain as such, but our circuitous attempts to parse it, to navigate it and to know it. This is its true territory.

Polyphonic compositions also toy with terrain, staging and exploring that gap between representation and actuality. They behave like conceptual art, commenting upon the conditions of creation and their own perilous reception.

Seeing polyphony as a map, is to hear an age of discovery—visual, geographic and scientific. It means positioning these works within a “paradigm shift”, one that upended what was untimately knowable, and how we see our arts, and ourselves, in realtion to the unknown.