I. Hyperinstruments, music on demand, multi-channel distribution.
Hyperinstruments, designed by a group headed by Professor Tod Machover of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, are a hybrid of traditional musical instruments and computer technology. They include a sensor chair wired for sound, a piano tutor which corrects bad notes and remedies idiosyncratic rhythms, and a joystick device that allows operators to mold their own music. Musical creativity has, traditionally, been wedded to technical expertise. Even to a synthesizer requires basic keyboard proficiency. But with Machover's machines, simple physical gestures reveal a sound-world. Machover says, "Everyone has the capacity for an incredible amount of expressive information. It's a matter of providing usable means. The hyperinstruments don't require traditional technique so much as a new type of subtility . . . the expression of the arts should not be passive. Most people experience music through the action of inserting a CD into a disc driver or switching on a car radio. Technology is now in the position to allow people to participate in a way that they'd maybe only dreamt about" (Guardian, 1.3.1996).
The advent of digital media has also increased the possibilities of reaching audiences in new ways, while facing broadcasters with new challenges and competitors. In a traditional broadcast, one transmitter sends the same signal to all users, who are unable to interact with the signal other than by switching to another frequency. In the digital system of point-to-point transmission there is one-on-one, and often two-way communication between the sender and the receiver, arriving at the point where both parties become senders and receivers, as in a telephone conversation.
One of the main consequences of the 'digital revolution' is the convergence of media. Once sound, text, pictures and video have been converted into digital streams of data, it is inevitable that they will be merged and will be used as one multiple medium. Sound, text and video are used together, while the transmission system employed is still only one.
Let's take an optimistic look at the near future, from a public media perspective:
New York, October, 2011. Evgeny Kissin is celebrating his 40th birthday with a concert in Carnegie Hall. It features a mature keyboard work: Bach's Goldberg-variations. Subscribers to The Piano Channel, available on the Internet, can be there live, with static-free sound. The Piano Channel is the result of global cooperation by public broadcasting stations. Of course, the audio-visual kiosk with its thousands of media offerings has purely commercial piano music programs, too. Alone in the industry, The Piano Channel has uniquely pledged itself to quality, seeking to select the best for its subscribers from the flood of available media products.
Essentially, the new music services can be divided into those with catalogue character and those with selection character. Catalogue character means that the media user selects a particular music recording from a range and pays for it on electronic delivery. Selection character implies that a specialized music program planned as a dramatic whole, such as a Piano Channel, is accessed or subscribed to. There are hundreds of specialized channels where only Maria Callas sings, nothing but Mozart is played, or all works are performed on authentic instruments. No musical taste, however obscure, is neglected. In addition, thousand of individual recordings can be loaded onto one's home server as audio files. Musical 'multi-channel' or 'on demand' repertoire is also available in video form, of course. Operas and concerts are available as individual video files, or in the form of thematically structured TV music channels. Everything from classical, pop, jazz, and ethnic tastes can be supplied via a decoder, and at price. What Marshall McLuhan had predicted in his visionary study Understanding Media at the start of the Sixties has come true on a global scale. The media nomad, seeking musical nourishment around the world, urgently needed a map and compass. This gave the public media institutions, committed to the provision of information, education, and culture, a key role. They assumed the function of independent navigators in a boundless sea of musical product while developing into a communications and opinions forum, where others merely cried their electronic woes. High quality and fair representation were the cardinal rules for public music channels or 'music-on-demand' services. Apart from specialized music supplies and niche programs drawing on their own archives, public media institutions continue to broadcast full-spectrum classical, jazz, and ethnic music programs; offering a carefully chosen selection of worldwide musical output while providing regular information about high-grade music services and how to obtain them. The architects of these brave new music channels have also recognized that provision and presentation form an inseparable music-and-media whole.
The state of flux, characteristic of a music channel, in contrast to individually downloadable audio files, includes an intense cultivation of the oral tradition. Musicality and narrative quality were the keywords of an organic programming flow that is focused on listening. The point is to stop sacrificing the attractiveness of the medium on the altar of content and start seeing the 'what' and the 'how' of media activity as two sides of the same coin.
The development of new music services was helped enormously by the increasing dialogue with and between media users. Interactivity was an important requirement of Berthold Brecht's radio theory long before the start of the multimedia era. Brecht saw radio not just as a medium of distribution but as a medium of communication. It was digital technology, however, which opened the way to wide-ranging interactive measures in the media landscape. They are found in the music sector in constantly refined forms, providing access to specific media products through analysis of usage, calculated by 'hits' to website files. But more than this, they allow the development of exchange forums about the beauty of music, and of its channels.
II. From the Greek concept of mousike to the sampling technique
What has happened to music, to its expression and to its meaning in the age of digital media? There is no quick answer to this question, so I will try to highlight some of its important aspects. Originally the Greek concept of mousike combined poetry, dance and music in a single entity related by rhythm and offered by the muses. The myth of Orpheus tells us about the magical power of music: the song and the lyre vanquish men and animals. For Pythagoras and his school, music most obviously confirms the universal harmony of the cosmos which, just like musical consonances, is the function of a numerical ratio. Plato emphasized the moral effect of the mousike, its ability to strengthen the veil and to threaten human morality. He condemned the music of mere pleasure and asked for a moral music (The Republic). For Aristotle, too, the first task of music was the formation of moral character by way of musical imitation. Moreover, he emphasized the cathartic quality of music, its healing purification of all passions, and he appreciated it as an activity without a specific purpose, as a pleasure and a game. Music, for Aristotle, is also a 'poietic', that is to say a work that produces practical knowledge. Before 1800, the Aristotelian doctrine of art as imitation of nature was fundamental to both artistic creation and evaluation. Elaborating on the mimetic theory, the doctrine of the Affections related music to rhetoric. It was thought that music could imitate both animate and inanimate nature, the inflections of speech, and the emotions. This imitation was accomplished by rhetorical method, and its aim was to arouse the listener's consciousness.
Arthur Schopenhauer's metaphysics describes a world with two basic components: a system of eternal ideas and an unquiet will. The arts other than music symbolize the ideas, but only music reveals the will, which is the more fundamental of the two. Schopenhauer described music in The World as Will and Representation ('52) as the immediate objectification of the will, ". . . music does not express this or that particular and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without any accessories, and so also without the motives for them." Schopenhauer thus assigned to music a deeper cognitive meaning than any other philosopher before. Music was now no imitation of nature but rather an incarnation of nature. When, in 1877, Thomas Edison applied for a patent on his phonograph, the pioneering step in the development of sound recording was taken. Up to this time recordings of Occidental music were confined to their "logos", i.e., to a musical notation of its rational structures. Only the phonograph offered the possibility to record and reproduce the sensual, random and material aspects of music which are beyond any written notation. Unlike the phonograph's mechanical recording of voice and sound the electromagnetic sound recording of the tape recorder could manipulate the recorded material by way of cut, montage and filter.
The digital sound recording finally cleared recorded material of all limitations caused by recording and broadcast media. Thus, the sound of acoustic material could be reproduced authentically, for the-first time.
The musical work of art is only complete when performed. But performance is dependent on a certain place and time. Mechanical sound recording freed music from its performance conditions. Every musical act used to be a unique, separate, unrepeatable event. With electromagnetic sound, recorded music was no longer dependent on a unique concert-performance. Manipulations of recorded material, such as collages of several performances, created sound results no single performance could ever produce. In spite of the high-tech facilities that offer the possibilities to record, reproduce and manipulate sound, there was an audible gap between the performance and its recording, which has been eliminated by today's more sophisticated digital sound recording. Thus the auditory difference between reality and simulation disappeared altogether.
The "pre-digital" broadcasting and recording media took music out of its traditional context and established the non-musical sound in music. Pierre Schaeffer, for example, born in Nancy in 1910, is one of the pioneers of musique concrete, which allied itself to the new media techniques. In 1948 Mr. Schaeffer, who called himself a composer, theoretician, broadcasting engineer, writer, sound researcher and teacher, began hunting for sounds of everyday life to capture them on a tape machine, arranging them in complex sound compositions. Mr. Schaeffer's Musique Concrete inspired many modern composers, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, to work with electro-acoustics.
Microphone, loudspeaker and amplifier, as well as the electric guitar, made the body audible, particularly in rock music. "Roughness, le grain, is the body of the singing voice", says Roland Barthes. The microphone gave the roughness of the voice back to an Occidental music characterized until then by its discursive forms. The electric guitar modulations created by the slightest twitch of the finger brought back the roughness of the instrumental sound. It was a come-back of everything Occidental music had successfully abolished in its scores, instruments and instrumentalized voices: the come-back of the non-musical sound, of all things transitory, spontaneous and physical.
Digital recording bridged the auditory gap between the reality of musical performance and its simulation on, say, compact disc, so perfectly that it created a musical hyperroom, with the inherent potential of all possible acoustics - the one already realized as well the one to come. The postmodern composer or the Rap musician takes this musical media produced hyperreality - in Baudrillard's sense of the word - into account by using anything and everything - style copies as veil as direct quotations or digital samples of existing recordings and other ready made sounds coming his way by using only acoustic things as material for his musical collages.
III. Modern and postmodern styles of composing music
"The first technician of music was the first to stop being a good musician," wrote Theodor W. Adorno in an essay entitled Musik und Technik, commenting on the symphonist Hector Berlioz. Adorno accuses Berlioz - as well as his successors Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss - of having transformed the "negation of meaning into meaning" - by means of "technification" and "technique of surprise". In the "Symphonie Fantastique" Berlioz applies this "technique of surprise," by extending the instrumentation of the orchestral sound (e.g. real church bells are used in the "Dies Irae"). But for Adorno a style of composing that manipulates its musical material only in a technical sense risks losing its musical content to the advantage of a technical virtuosity producing mere musical effects. Adorno labeled modernism as a painful, intrinsic movement of musical material by someone desperately composing in a time devoid of all meaning(Arnold Schoenberg's music comes to mind. In his essay Philosophie der Neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music) Adorno claimed,
The inhumanity of art has to outperform that of the world for the sake of humanity . . . Out of the veil known for something that has never existed, the technique of art achieves its seriousness. It is all the more nowadays, as the attention intrinsic to the consistency of art technique constitutes the very content of a work of art. The shocks of the incomprehensible caused by art technique in a time devoid of all meaning become the opposite. They illuminate a meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this. It burdens itself with a deep sense of guilt, with all the darkness of the world. To recognize misfortune is its happiness; to refrain from the mere illusion of beauty is its beauty.
This is no longer true for the postmodern composer who loves playing games in a musical hyperroom. He keeps arranging his samples, his musical filing cards. Everything is ready and waiting. "Gimme two records and I'll make you a universe," says DJ Spooky (Songs of a Dead Dreamer, 1996). Compared with Adorno's gloomy ethic-aesthetic dictum, John Zorn's poetological reflections seem more like a Froehliche Wissenschaft (a "gay science" in the sense of Nietzsche) of music and media:
I grew up in New York City as a media freak, watching movies and TV and buying hundreds of records. There's also a lot of jazz in me, but there's also a lot of rock, a lot of classical, a lot of ethnic music, a lot of movie sound-moments, in disparate sound blocks, I sometimes find it convenient to store these "events" on filing cards so they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort. (John Zorn Spillane, 1987).
IV. Is music in the age of digital media an anaestheticizing sound/wallpaper, or an aestheticizing sound game?
Let us go back to our original question: What has happened to music, to its expression, and to its meaning, in the age of digital media? In his essay Media Aesthetics in Europe, the philosopher Wolfgang Schirmacher wrote, "in media we write our autobiography . . . 'express yourself' is the advice of the media icon Madonna, and don't ask for permission . . . the difference between real and simulation has disappeared. The distinction between the original and the reproduction has become meaningless . . . media in all forms and with any kind of message are merely material for a personal collage (Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk on a small scale)." This is true. "I consider the mixes created by a DJ to be mood sculptures" (DJ Spooky). This is also true. But it is due to today's media that music is not only universally available, for musical collages for example, but has also become a universal presence, turned into a musique d'ammeublement, as the composer Satie put it, which we cannot avoid, and which we do not listen to, but simply hear.
Richard Wagner's Rheingold prelude begins with an E flat-major triad in the basses and then strides across the overtones of its root-note E-flat without developing melodically or even thematically. Shortly before the invention of the phonograph this music already approaches a murmuring drone state, leaving behind the discourse of musical speech, its vocabulary, or significations, and thus becomes a flowing cornucopia of no specific fare but with the inherent potentiality of all forms(just like the Rhine that keeps flowing with a murmuring drone.
Media opened music to sound, and made it universally available material for personal collages. At the same time media puts music in the state of a constant murmuring drone, an incessant flowing.
Music in the age of technical media continues to move between these two polarities. Digitization potentializes only the possibilities of mediated music from one pole to the other. The outcome depends upon our creativity, and our competence, in both our music and our media.
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