Music and Technology

/, Sound, Blesok no. 35/Music and Technology

Music and Technology

Glass: Could you suggest some ways which young composers and, to some extent, interested listeners can get a grasp of fundamental concepts of new music technology?

Miller: I think that young composers need to think about the world around them. It’s an environment made up of wireless networks, cellular relays, hybrid systems, rootless philosophies, immigrants from countries on the verge of transformation, etc., etc. Too many people are looking backwards to the 12-tone stuff and the Wagner stuff. (It’s amazing how many movie soundtracks sound like really heavy-handed treatments of Wagner’s overtures.) The “fundamental concepts” of new music technology are just as much a part of this world as, say, Palm Pilots or laptop computers. In the industrialized countries, your average child understands video games, how to use a telephone and how to navigate the urban superstructure. They are a part of the quotidian, constantly updating landscape in which they live. Composers, maybe, should check out what the kids are up to. It’s a real eye opener.

Riesman: The fundamental concept can be expressed in one sentence: anything we can hear can have a digital representation and be stored and transformed and reproduced, subject to the limitations of the input (microphone) and output (speaker) devices. Beyond that, there are books and there is the Internet, and there are schools with programs in music technology.
I think for a composer, it’s not necessary to understand the concepts of the technology. He or she can just make use of it in the most appropriate way. The same goes for interested listeners. The technology has gotten pretty inexpensive and it is not beyond the means of many to have hands-on experience with it, and doing so will provide the most rewarding level of understanding.

Moran: I think that the same way composers like Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky began expressing “realistic” ideas with music (for example, thunder or a bird singing), composers can express the nuances of very specific events, in ways that are at once musical and realistic. I think that the implications of the idea are extremely interesting.

Glass: Does new music technology imply a different way of listening?

Riesman: No. There is only music, and there is only listening. I don’t believe there are different ways of listening; there are only different delivery mechanisms and different levels of attention. Unless someone can invent a delivery technology in which we don’t have to use our ears anymore… Now, that would be a different way of listening for sure.

Miller: Not to me. Humans have a certain perceptual architecture — the basic structure is the basilar membrane of the ear, the sense of gravity and balance that we have comes from there, and the frequencies that we can or cannot respond to come from there too. Beyond that, I’ve always been an optimist — I don’t think we’ve engaged how much we can hear. We’re conditioned to accept the social ramifications of the various technologies as “constants” in the environment, but they’re just as open to fluctuation as the societies that generated them. All of which points to the fact that it’s not so much new ways of hearing that are needed, but new perceptions of what we can hear.

Moran: In as far as digital sampling goes, one can find musical expression in anything. Of course, some people are going to say “that sounds like noise,” but people have always said that about new music. I think that in general, people are becoming pretty open to what new music can be — until they want to make money, or course.

Subotnick: Many of us in the world are still listening to older music. Because of the technology of recordings, the past has permanently blended with the present. I don’t think there will be as big a change in concert hall music but rather in music that exists only in the loudspeakers and on the computers.
In this area, digital technology has become totally democratized because of how cheap it is now. Compared to buying a piano and taking years of piano lessons, you can buy an incredibly good computer at Radio Shack for $500 and be equipped to create music. This in itself is a huge change. Making a complex statement musically has never been more possible or accessible. On the other hand, until recently, anyone writing with instruments has had a similar musical background and training. Now, you can do all of this without a musical background and so the kind of music that’s being made is going to be different.
The people making the music are coming not out of Beethoven and Brahms, but out of pop music. Their bias to history is completely different. We tend to think that avant-garde music always grows out of fine art music. The irony is that today, at the electronica festivals, they are producing soundscapes and noise, the kind of raw stuff that you would associate with the Futurists from the beginning of the last century. But they’ve come out of the pop music and techno world. The worlds are separating now because of these different contexts of music making.

Glass: Admittedly, new developments in digital technology have been largely positive for the composition and recording of new music. What impact can and will this have on how composers and performers make a living?

Subotnick: I don’t see a big problem. The big opera companies and orchestras are not going to disappear from the concert world, and the potential to make a living isn’t going to diminish much. There is going to be a lot more opportunity from the composer’s standpoint as they move into technology. I’ve had people study with me who ended up making music for cartoons for Nickelodeon. They’ve gotten big jobs to make a living, and they’re still making their music. That’s new to us. Philip had to drive a taxi cab. Now there are a lot of opportunities for the composers who have adequate technological chops. The instrumental composers are always going to be in the same boat. My advice to young composers is to stay connected to technology. Not necessarily for their own music, but for the chance of broadening the possibility of making a living, and therefore being able to stay in the music world. Without knowing the technology that’s going to be hard to do.

Moran: When I was a very young man, I was writing works for both synthetic instruments, and also orchestra. After investigating the costs and logistics of even getting an orchestra to rehearse a piece, I quickly turned to the idea of creating the orchestra passages with digital samplers — it was the only thing I could afford. I think if I hadn’t gone that route, I would still be struggling to even hear those first pieces.

Miller: I see a lot of talented people waiting to get noticed, and I see a lot of talented people putting their material on the web for free. Both categories of people aren’t making that much money. They do it for the love of the music. I like that position, but I hate being broke… I think that there will be a lot more opportunity to work in an environment where basically everything you do is like shareware. That’s already happening, but if you’re on the cusp of this, it can be difficult to make a living doing it. At the end of the day, people have to be creative about how they look for gigs that pay: composing music for cell phone ring tones, for movie soundtracks, for TV commercials, to Web site jingles… you name it. The world definitely needs a lot more new music. People just have to figure out how to make it all work for them in a way that lets them make money. That’s where I think new composers need to explore — especially to make money from music that might not be commercial in the “normal” sense. A lot of times I go on line and I see that my music is available everywhere as MP3 files and I’m not making any money off of that. As soon as you put music out there, someone can copy it and it’s gone, so the main thing is to figure out alternatives. I try to diffuse what I do into a lot of different contexts and platforms. That makes for a lot of multi-tasking, but it certainly beats being broke.

© andante Corp. June 2002. All rights reserved.

AuthorPhilip Glass
2018-08-21T17:23:27+00:00 April 1st, 2004|Categories: Reviews, Sound, Blesok no. 35|0 Comments