Questions
Concerning Music Technology
Up to the present day, both the scholarly study of music and more experimental
approaches have indirectly supported the ideology of technology just mentioned.
Being conceived as a human science, musicology has never really recognized
that there is a hermeneutic dimension in the tÈchne of music, not
to consider its cognitive and aesthetic dimension. The obvious consequence
is that, doing so, musicologists have failed to provide musicians with a
constructive critique of the tÈchne they live in, work with, help
designing - and perhaps they themselves design.
To tell the truth, that scenario is both the effect and the cause of the
fact that a simplistic concept of technology is widely shared among professional
musicians ("OK, now let's put this technical details aside and start
making music!"). Following such an attitude, a musician's free relation
to technology would primarily reflect into a plea for presumedly (more)
neutral resources readily applicable to the tasks raised by her/his unconstrained,
autonomous imagination.
Such state of affairs today is well reflected in the policy of many temples
and churches of computer music, and it is witnessed by a telling phenomenon:
the largest number of composers welcomed in these venues includes composers
who set out to employ the power of the computer at the service of their
mastery of instrumental music writing. They are literate composers
(a definition proposed by Barry Truax) exploiting an unconventional means
to strenghten the efficiency of their compositional process. This may be
a reason why today the live instrument + electronics medium is, for
many, the only thing meant with terms such as computer music or
electroacoustic music. The computer is seen as a device which enhances
the efficiency of the productive process. At its best, it can suggest novel
strategies to add on top of routinely applied strategies.
Observe how closely this resembles Heidegger's free relationship
to technology: technical objects and processes are Bestand supposed to enrich
and to perfect the artist's performance, still leaving her/his understanding
of art unquestioned. We could say that in the mindset of technological determinism
composers are spoken by music more than they speak it: They pretend to exploit
new technical resources while keeping their own composing and their knowledge
untouched. They simply need better tools in order to better do what they
already know how to do.
