Questions
Concerning Music Technology
According to Heidegger's arguments, technology should be considered a human
activity extraneous to the artist's work, as in fact this latter is rather
presumed to contrast the essence of technology and to limit the predominance
of technological understanding. Clearly, things like electronic art
or computer music - and, even worse, computational approaches to
artistic creation (e.g. algorithmic composition) - would account
for among the least desirable manifestations of technological understanding,
for they testify a change in - and even a betrayal of - the function of
art as described by Heidegger.
In which sense could we, then, take computer music and the diverse manifestations
of electronic arts as a domain of genuine human creativity? Where Heidegger's
account would be flawed? Is it in the function and the notion of art? Or
is it in the function and notion of technology?
To circumscribe the whole matter, I think we'd better ask the question:
How do artists (musicians among them) transform concepts and visions into
tangible, audible, perceivable objects called (musical) works? How do artists
implement ideas (2)?
The area of inquiry opened up by such questions is of primary interest for
studies in cognitive musicology and, especially, composition-theory. In
these areas of concern, it is widely accepted that composers either invent
new methods or apply inherited methods in order to transform their concepts
into percepts, to make ideas become sounds [Laske, 1991]. What they do is
modelling their own experience - an activity which involves an incessant
struggle between the conceptual and the perceptual [Di Scipio, 1994]. This
modeling requires the development of strategies and techniques. To say it
with Heidegger's own words, poets do speak language - and are not spoken
by it - because they have the means and the knowledge for doing so, the
knowledge that is necessary to challenge and provoke language. According
to a well-known Chomskyan distinction, that knowledge is of a double nature
- action knowledge and knowledge of the field. And, more important for our
present discussion, it is captured in the design strategies and techniques
employed in the making of art.
There is no reason to believe that Heidegger was not aware that any artistic
endeavor always implies some form of technology. But evidently that was
of no importance for him (3). An explanation for this would be that
his was a narrow focus on technology, as Feenberg observes [Feenberg, 1995],
even though the concept of technological understanding of being would
seem to enlarge the scope and purview in his arguments and not to narrow
them.
(2) My adaptation of a statement made
by the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt [LeWitt, 1967]
(3) The opinion of conservative music commentators who,
in the '50 and '60, condemned the advent of electronic music as a dehumanisation
of music (see discussion in [Borio, 1993]) is perfectly understandable if
we admit that tÈchne has nothing to do with art. Indeed, those denigrators
based their attack against electronic music on arguments very similar to
Heidegger's arguments against the primacy of technological understanding.