[porkmarras]

What happens when music-making machines and computers are added to the mix?
In the maelstrom of popular culture machines have had an immediate and rather drastic effect. First, the respective roles of concerts and recording have been switched Recording is the norm and concerts are glorifications of recording. 'For the first time in a decade, the Rolling Stones, live!' But concerts are often pale substitutes for recording, because the illusion has to become incomplete reality, and is usually an orgy of celebration for the new album. There is consequently a deep dependence on music machines: 64-track mixers, synthesizers, computers, to create magical illusions, which in certain areas become the prime ingredient of success. Undoubtedly that the amount that Michael Jackson spends on technology and its overhead in one year would probably feed all of our digital habits for a long time, with plenty left over for a big party, and he has to constantly spend more just to survive But the magic fades quickly and more is always needed to sustain the illusion. The music industry responds adroitly with new musical wands which have a typical lifetime of eighteen months and as a result, the field is constantly in "tradeshow-mode." It is significant here to note that automation has created a healthy swelling in the ranks of performing composers and composing performers and shrinkage among the ranks of servant performers. (This latter fact is deeply disturbing. In the near future, if not already, the ability of a violinist to make a living in commercial areas will virtually disappear. It remains to be seen whether this predicts a decline in performance study, but it is troublesome.)
This raises interesting questions. It is now easy to make a lot of noise, and pretty fancy noise at that. But is a youngster sequencing eight tracks using four synthesizers and a drum machine really doing something nearly as complicated and rich as another who is struggling to reproduce a Van Halen lick on his electric guitar? Isn't this so-called democratization of music in popular culture really no more than a new generation of under- educated intelligent instruments which is basically automating and perpetuating a simple view of music and its accompanying habits? In many cases, despite their obvious power, drum machines, synthesizers and sequencers are being raised to a level only slightly above the chord organs where you only needed a left hand with one finger. Automation has certainly become a potent player in the studio, but has there been a conceptual gain which effects the lives of those who consume the product? For me, designing a technological leading edge for an effort which cannot see beyond existing musical and social positions is a corrupt endeavor. (It is interesting to notice that recent trends which have a revolutionary feel in this context make perverted use, at most, of new technological tools. Consider rap music, for example.) To my mind there is no correlation between automation and musical virtue. The music doesn't get better simply because one person can do the work of fifty in a fraction of the time. It probably gets worse. There is also no virtue in the fact that we have come to accept the sound of machine-made music as reality in our media. As a matter of fact, I think we will pay a very stiff price in the loss of generations of people who can make wonderful sounds with their mouths, fingers and toes.
There is fundamentally not much that is different or new in the musical- social structure of popular music as a consequence of the use of technology. What is worth noticing is how many young people are involved in music making, but I contend that this has more to do with distribution than with instrumentation. Aside from that, there is arteriosclerosis in the channels between composers, performers and listeners.
It is extremely arrogant and unfair, however, to sound off about popular culture in this way, particularly when the accuser is a denizen of what should probably be called unpopular culture. So let's now look at our own glass house of cards. Let's think of the classical epistemology of our composer-performer-listener paradigm in the following terms: The composer utters brilliant thoughts with great clarity and skill. They are ideally delivered to the listener by the performer in a manner which assures that the listener will have the best shot at understanding them. Clarity and precision are axiomatic virtues in classical models of explanation. This view rigidly reinforces the social structure of the composer, performer, listener network. It also indirectly characterizes essential aspects of musical thought. You expect to engage the music as a document whose manner of presentation is one-sided. It is easy to think of music as something which behaves discursively under these terms. A composition takes on the trappings of reasoned discourse. We begin at the beginning, proceed to the middle and finish up at the end, and at each point our sense of place time and place has to be stable. How many times have pieces been criticized because they end too soon or too late, or begin in the 'wrong place'? While this characterization is exaggerated, it is a view which is easy to substantiate in limited terms, and is therefore not entirely unreasonable. But with machine-made music, it quickly and easily becomes unreasonable. With respect to the traditional paradigms many of the terms of engagement become absurd, contradictory, uncomfortable. We can no longer sit so comfortably in the same seats.. It is more than that there are new thoughts being uttered. There are important differences about the ways in which they are being conceived and transmitted as well. As a symptom, consider the difficulties in presenting concerts of recorded music. Very often the music is not composed with this context in mind. Sometimes it is, however, and consequently sounds peculiar there in that it merely mimics the motions of human concert performers without the physical effort. Audiences are made uncomfortable by the unrelenting intensity of machine performance and this absence of physical motion. Contradictions are created by inappropriate contexts, and clearly a concert is now an inappropriate context. It is as if an agreement has been violated, or an illusion has been misunderstood. It is as if the being within the machine is more ghostlike than real. What becomes painfully obvious to many of us who have become sensitive to these issues is that the context in which you hear powerfully affects what you hear and understand. As a result, the power of machines now encourages us to think about musical shape and content in terms which are not necessarily discursive and self-explanatory, primarily because there is not necessarily any dependence on classical social venues for the music to survive. It follows that if your conception of the listening environment for your composition is modelled along different lines, then the ways in which you express thoughts are going to change. Mumbling, being evasive, indirect, elliptical, talking to yourself, hardly talking at all, being redundant, elaborating excessively, hinting, -- all become reasonable metaphors for musical engagement in that the consequences of misunderstanding time and place, formerly tied to environments which had strong time-place implications, are no longer fatal, and perhaps even interesting. Removing the music from classical models of explanation has substantial consequences for the ways in which we engage issues of time and unfolding.