Today, because of electronic technology, we listen to unaltered music only rarely. The sounds we hear have been not only performed by musicians but also interpreted by audio engineers, who have reinforced the acoustics of concert halls, spliced together note-perfect recorded performances, created artificially reverberant performance spaces, projected sounds across the world via satellite broadcast, greatly amplified rock concerts, and created temporal continuities that never existed "live." The audio engineer is almost as highly trained as the concert performer, and can be just as sensitive an artist.
Most musicians using sampling have played it safe, legally speaking, by distorting their sound bites or keeping them brief, and by not crediting their sources. Some people estimate that the majority of pop music recordings released today include some sort of sampling. Canadian composer/producer John Oswald, on the other hand, has made sampling not a surreptitious activity to enhance recorded sound but his artistic credo. Oswald's use of sampled sounds has created massive legal difficulties. In 1989 he produced a compact disc called Plunderphonics, which includes 24 "revisions," as he calls them, of well-known works, many protected by copyright.8 Although there are imaginative and artistic alterations, the sources are recognizable, because the quotations are quite long and because the sources are from mainstream popular and classical music-the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Captain Beefheart, Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, James Brown, Franz Liszt, Count Basie, Stravinsky, Beethoven, Bach, Over the Rainbow, and Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.
VA The 100 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music 2011
Today, most compact disc players can be programmed to play the selections on a CD in any order; some are able to select the order randomly. This process may seem innocent enough when we consider a disc to be a collection of short pieces, but sometimes a CD contains one long composition. For some audio artists the distinction between a CD and a piece of music is meaningless.
The ubiquity of recordings has influenced performers as well as composers. Performers routinely learn pieces not just from score but from recordings. I know some major conductors who always learn new pieces from tapes, if they are available. The conductor who refuses to listen to a recording until he/she knows the piece is a phenomenon so rare as to inspire respect bordering on awe. Is it any surprise that performances tend to become standardized, that performances imitate other performances, that many performers subconsciously seek to perpetuate what they view as a definitive performance by a revered master? I was both amused and disheartened a few years ago when I walked into the library of a noted conservatory and saw several young people standing, holding batons, wearing headphones, and vigorously "conducting" the music they were listening to. Who was leading whom?
Not only did tape recording bring to the audio engineer the ability to splice together artificial continuities, but it also brought to musique concrète and synthesizer composers the possibility of working directly with sound materials. From the simple act of putting razor blade to tape came the most powerful musical discontinuities as well as the most unexpected kinds of continuities. A composition can move instantaneously from one sound-world to another. Just when a splice might occur can be as unpredictable as the nature of the new context into which the listener is thrust.
A couple of years ago, I had a personal experience with digital editing that was most instructive. The London Philharmonic recorded one of my orchestral pieces.13 This is a wonderful orchestra, but the music was very difficult, and a three-hour rehearsal plus a two-hour recording session were not sufficient to produce a usable tape. With digital editing, my engineer was able to clear up ragged attacks, change balances, correct accentuation, create sudden splices and gradual cross-fades, and even remove the noises of page turns.
Discontinuity has affected the temporal texture of every Westerner's life. Consider one example: broadcasting. Radio stations present montages of advertisements, announcements, news, weather, sports, features, traffic reports, and music. Television can be equally discontinuous. In a flash viewers are transported from an animated fantasy world to on-the-spot coverage of a real war in a distant land, or from the artificial (but does that word mean anything today?) world of a quiz game to the laundry room of the Typical American Housewife. And think of children who grow up watching 15,000 hours of television between the ages of two and eleven.15 Consider the program "Sesame Street," a major formative influence on young children in the United States: extreme discontinuities, as one short scene leads without transition or logic to a totally different short scene. Watching "Sesame Street" is not unlike listening to the most heavily spliced tape music.
Literary critic N. Katherine Hayles, like Hardison, sees the discontinuities of music videos as essentially postmodern. Her ideas can with few changes be adapted to postmodern music, whether technologically composed or not.
A composer most of whose output depends on technology is Conlon Nancarrow. His works for player piano are full of rhythms of a sort and complexity that could never be rendered accurately by performers. But the music sounds exciting and unproblematic, because of the precision of the player pianos. Nancarrow has, for example, written music in two or more simultaneous tempos, in which the tempos are related by such complex ratios as 2 to the square root of 2. His Study Number 19 is a three-voice canon in which the voices proceed at independent tempos, related by the ratio 12:15:20. 21
Nancarrow's multiple tempos can result in large-scale polyrhythms. Global polyrhythms are found in other twentieth-century music, not composed technologically but surely influenced by technological aesthetics. In the first of Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet, for example, there are repeating cycles of different durations, producing a polyrhythm of 23:21. Similarly, Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies uses one complete cycle of a 133:77 polyrhythm throughout its twenty-minute length. Such polyrhythms depend on the subdivision of large timespans into a large number of equal parts. Similar procedures can produce surface rhythms of daunting complexity, as in some of the early Stockhausen piano pieces or many of the pieces of Brian Ferneyhough.
Several experiments have demonstrated the nature and extent of rhythmic irregularities that musicians naturally-indeed, unavoidably-introduce into performance. These nuances are foreign to electronically generated rhythms. Performers do not render even the simplest of rhythms exactly as notated. For example, we would expect a series of half notes each followed by a quarter note to be played in the ratio 2:1 (durations from the onset of one tone to the onset of the next). But, in fact, the 2:1 ratio is virtually never heard, except when electronically produced. Psychologists Ingmar Bengtsson and Alf Gabrielsson found that, in 38 performances of a Swedish folk song in 3/4 time with most measures containing the half/quarter rhythm, the actual ratio averaged about 7:4. They discovered different types of systematic variations in different performers, but not one musician came close to mechanical regularity. This explains why it is easy to distinguish the rhythms of an electronic realization from those of an electronic performance of the same music. 22
There is one remaining area of musical technology I would like to mention briefly. It is in a sense the most important. For the next three days the Association for Technology in Music Instruction will hold a series of lectures, demonstrations, and workshops covering the varied uses to which computers are being put in the service of education. In addition to familiar ear-training and pedagogical programs, recently developed software is serving to teach students how to listen. Using Robert Winter's Voyager programs on Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, students are able to hear instruments in isolation and then in orchestral context, to compare expositions and recapitulations directly, compare variations with their underlying themes, compare similar phrases, juxtapose conflicts with their resolutions, hear imitation demonstrated, learn the timbres of instruments, etc. This software, recently proclaimed for its sophistication, is already being superseded by other CD-ROM programs.
Technology has become an integral part of most aspects of our lives, including the ways we hear, compose, and perform music. It used to be fashionable to speak of our era as one of transition. Today we can be fooled into believing that the transition is ending, as postmodernist aesthetics have produced superficial (and more apparent than real) returns to earlier styles. I believe, on the contrary, that the transition in the arts will end only when people-artists as well as audiences-confront the full impact of the technological revolution. Whether our music is to be tonal or atonal, chaotic or ordered, harsh or gentle-these are not the important questions. What our music (the music we perform, hear, and produce) tells us about our technological culture is a far deeper indication of our society's temperament.
Omari Imhotep Abdul-Alim is a classically trained violinist from the Seattle area currently offering music lessons and freelance performances around San Diego. He is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, having finished his masters degree at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music in violin performance in spring 2020. As an instructor, Omari uses his experience in classical music to build a fun and enriching curriculum for his students. Aside from his passion for education, Omari is a dedicated performer. He is resident violinist at First Lutheran Church of San Diego and in the last year has appeared as a guest artist with the Martin Luther King Choir, the Old Globe Theater, Synergy, NeoTuesdays and more. 2ff7e9595c
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