Sept. 16 Reading Response / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Sept. 16 Reading Response.

Sept. 16 Response

jbuennig 16 Sep 2015 01:18

The articles for this week's discussion proved a strong connection to last week's discussion regarding reception of new music technologies. In particular, these articles resonated with innovations of two of my major musical influences: Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis (Pinch and Bijsterveld specifically, as many of their innovations dealt with synthesizers and similar equipment). Albums such as Miles In The Sky, Bitches Brew, Mwandishi, and Head Hunters were groundbreaking in their use of cutting-edge musical equipment, namely Moog synthesizers. Such recordings of this era (the 60s and 70s), later categorized as "jazz fusion," were (and remain) extremely controversial among jazz musicians. Perhaps one of the largest modern critics of this music is Wynton Marsalis, whose influence over the Ken Burns Jazz videos was extremely controversial, as he often glosses over these major milestones in jazz music (often with little evidence to back up his case).

As a musician with a degree in performance, I am inclined to agree with the majority of Sousa's argument (and the similar ideas presented by Pinch and Bijsterveld) that musical interpretation should be left to humans rather than machines. Composers such as Varese and, even more so, Boulez and Babbitt focus so much on accuracy and precision that their music is often left without any semblance of humanity (having said this, I am a fan of the music of both of these composers). Sousa's argument that composers should be able to copyright the underlying idea, spirit, or "sound" of their composition, though, is a point with which I have a problem. While such a scenario would be ideal, it is hardly viable to suggest that this could (and should) be enforced. Many of my own compositions are written to capture the essence of another composer's work, albeit tweaked slightly. Therefore, communication between composers and a sense of shared knowledge is important.

Sept. 16 Response

Dana O 16 Sep 2015 04:24

The important themes I see running through this week's readings are ownership and materiality.

1. Gitelman's essay resonated with me as I have been thinking a lot about how tension is needed to make anything positive (harmony) happen in my artwork and in life in general. Gitelman discusses how the materiality of developments in music technologies are so important for the development of both the sound and the technologies. That grit, or that tension, is needed in order to push a dialogue further between what the technology (tool/hardware OR software) can create and what the music can do with it or against it. Also, ideas about intent (what the musician/composer wants to say) and perception (what the listener hears) might be worth talking about in class. Gitelman discusses how the specifics of materiality will always be more important to the producer/maker (anyone invested) than to the consumer.

2. Sousa: yikes! He sees his work as a living, breathing entity. And with the mechanical advancement of music, that living breathing thing is threatened. His writing is beautiful, and some of his thoughts on the life or breath of art resonates with me. I always want my own work to have a sense of "failure" to it. That "failure" makes it living and gives it humanity. Sousa really puts mechanical musical devices on a fearful pedestal. He questions the sincerity of this new, mechanically-inclined sound. And, considering this was 1906, that is a not a surprising response. Also, interesting discussion above about composers and musicians. That in itself is a slippery discussion (Gitelman coined this) about materiality/ownership. There are plenty of composers who rely on aleatoric writing. Where is that line of ownership? When does a voice fall through and become someone else's (be it machine or person)?

Last edited on 16 Sep 2015 04:26 by Dana O Show more

Wendy P 16 Sep 2015 06:37

When listening to the synthesizer work on Thriller, it is difficult to argue that those sounds are mechanical and lacking in technique, art, and passion. Nowadays, artists need technologies to create a more original natural sound in order to appeal to today's tastes. When it was comparing with the different styles, it is not a problem. For example, in pop music. There are plenty of interesting points going in music, people just have to go looking for it. Beside, whether music is the result of being technically skilled or not is not an issue. Music is a thing that is enjoyed purely for the feeling and sound. Also, hiring musicians is expensive, need to be called in all the time, and they are fallible. Mechanical Musics are expensive once, are always there, and they will always get the perfect sound. There's not an allergy, its just people want a clear cut sound, people are afraid of the honesty of real musicians and live instruments because of what can go wrong relates to their own insecurities. People aren't willing to put themselves out there in the same way as they used to be.

Sept. 16 MJSmall

MJSmall 16 Sep 2015 06:48

First, let me breathe a sigh of relief after reading these articles with ease as compared to last week’s Adorno and Horkheimer. I read the Sousa article first and I strongly connected with his feelings. Joe, while I admit you have a point about Sousa’s financial concerns, I do believe that he made some wise statements about how mechanical music can be harmful. The quote “Will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?” resonated with me. I am not a parent but I know this to be true today. Many babies that I know fall to sleep with the aid of a musical mobile or stuffed animal. It is true for adults too. Some hotels now offer sound machines next to the bed to produce nature sounds and/or light music. Sousa’s overall concern, to me, rests more on the idea that mechanical music will break connections between people and remove them of their own voice and agency. I agree with him because I feel that we’ve already seen many of these things come true. While the illustrations are amusing, I think they help make the connections to today even clearer. Babies are more and more soothed by sounds produced/played by machines as opposed to people who are present. Looking at the picture on p.280 “With a gramophone, caroling love songs from amidships,” think of the current viral proposal videos. I haven’t seen all of them but most of them are lip-syncs or flashmobs set to recorded music. If I imagine some of the most profound moments of life such as holding a precious new baby or professing my deepest and most passionate love and in that moment using recorded music to attempt a personal connection as opposed to the expressions my own genuine heart and soul, then yes…I think that mechanically/digitally produced music can be harmful to society.

Joe’s question: • Can a synthesizer be considered an instrument, or does it lack “mastery of technique and control over interpretation, for romantic passion, expression, variation, and uniqueness” required to define it as such?

Yes, I think that a synthesizer can be considered an instrument. Someone plays it and can offer interpretation, passion, and uniqueness. Yet, I am more interested in how to co-existence of synthesized and traditional instruments have influenced each other. It seems that as our society listens to more synthesized and heavily produced music, the expectations are raised for live performers to be perfect and always in control. Or, we’re expected to make it look easy like it does in a music video. What I wish would happen is the opposite. I think that we need to push ourselves to grow. Often some of the best music is that which mentally, emotionally, and physically taxes us as we perform. To connect this back to Sousa, I think people are realizing how music that is technically perfect cannot always connect people or touch the soul. I’m reminded of the Les Miserables movie from a few years ago where the actors sang live on screen as opposed to lip-syncing. No, they were not perfect with their singing but I think the emotion and character they gave was more than the music could have done alone. On the other hand, many people were upset about this…likely because they define music as technical mastery and control.

Lily Gaetgaeow 16 Sep 2015 13:44

To address Megan’s response to the picture on page 280 of Sousa’s article, I, too, do not understand the appeal of viral proposal videos. However, what came to my mind was “the boombox scene” from the movie Say Anything. I have to admit that I’ve never actually seen this movie, so I may be misinterpreting it, but I’ve seen this scene referenced in TV shows enough for the image to be seared into the back of my mind. Whenever I saw a reference to this scene, it was championed as a highly romantic gesture. After the female protagonists inexplicably cuts off contact with the male protagonist, he becomes despondent. Desperate for her attention he drives to her house and blasts Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” on his boombox outside of her bedroom window. In the real world this gesture would be considered pretty creepy. However, he uses recorded music in an attempt to profess his love and, at the time, the audience bought it. I don’t think people watching this movie thought he was being insincere because he didn’t serenade her with his guitar or hire a string quartet.

When Pinch and Bijsterveld discussed how the Switched on Bach album was perceived and accepted as 'real music' despite being nearly impossible to perform live, I was reminded of Small’s discussions of works. In achieving a great deal of success, Switched on Bach has been accepted as a work (Pinch and Bijsterveld even add that it was seen as a monumental achievement in the history of keyboard performance). While Switched on Bach doesn't join the ranks of “The Great Works” its success does demonstrate that musical interpretation and expressivity can be mediated by both man and machine. I think this shows some degree of mastery, to bring this to one of Joe’s points of discussion.

Personally, I really latched on to Gitelman's discussions of disembodiment, especially in regard to the female body. During the era of player pianos and player mechanisms, "the playing of the piano remained…an extension of the self on the piano stool, while that self, normatively a woman's self, became at once dismembered, handless, and subject to the fragmentation of attention and agency across body and machine" (206). This quote resonated with me, especially in relation to this quote from Pinch and Bijsterveld: “manufacturers saw an opportunity to ‘interest men in music,’ since ‘what could be unmanly about operating a machine?’ ” (543). Was anyone else struck by these two statements? When I reached those moments in the article, I was really hoping they would pursue these gendered ideas further; it may be a stretch to use these as the driving force behind mechanizing piano performance, but I think it’s still relevant to understand how the prevailing gender norms impacted (and were impacted) by these technological developments.

Sept. 16 response

kkmcginnis 16 Sep 2015 14:22

In Sousa's diatribe against soulless machine-generated music, he seems to imply that the machine does not record… it recreates. In recorded music, he saw the return of the enslavement of music by the "mathematical and mechanical." He references the rebellion against "musical automatics" in the 15th and 16th centuries, offering Palestrina and Luther as exemplars of advocacy for the emotional and soulful in music. The implication is that the polyphony of the 14th century and before was not expressive and soulful… but I won't follow that rabbit trail.

My point is that Sousa conflates the concepts of "recorded music" and "machine-made music." He writes, "the ingenuity of a phonograph's mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryonic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners…" Notice that he refers to the playing of a record is a "phonograph performance." Sousa did not consider the phonograph to a conduit, but a robotic musical performer that threatened to make the human performer obsolete. We may dismiss his opinions as the ranting of an alarmist (or as Joe suggested, greedy) composer, but his concern for the future of amateur music-making parallels those of ethnomusicologists who note that western art music is (perhaps increasingly) dominated by a strict divide between musician and non-musician. It is possible that recording has managed to make this line more distinct, and to put more individuals in the rigid category of "non-musician" or "audience." As recording has improved, no one must learn to play Beethoven piano sonatas in order to have them "performed" in the home. We have sound systems built into our living rooms so that we can simply connect our devices and have a home filled with whatever music we would like to hear. These recordings, of course, are made by virtuosic, "professional" performers, and we are content to let them do the music making in a recording studio, producing a static performance that we can enjoy as often as we want.

I found it interesting that Sousa connected the rise of listenership with the disappearance of amateurs and educators: "… without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely, and with him a host of vocal and instrumental teachers, who will be without a field or calling."
I agree that amateur music making has been on the decline (at least, "amateur music making" in the most traditional sense) for a long time, that there is a deepening divide between musician and non-musician, and perhaps that recorded music has acted as a catalyst for these phenomena during the 20th century. I'm still skeptical, though, because I'm not sure that the role of the amateur music maker was ever really to "fill our homes with music." Do parents have their children take piano lessons because they enjoy hearing their child pound out finger dexterity exercises? Perhaps this is a cynical point of view, but my understanding is that piano lessons and musical training became popular because of middle-class bourgeois sensibilities. Sousa writes specifically about the girls who make music in the home, cautioning that we should not "let the mechanical music-maker be generally introduced into the homes" because "hour for hour these same girls will listen to the machine's performance, and, sure as can be, lose finally all interest in technical study." Of course, he fails to recognize that many of those girls were given piano lessons simply because of the societal value of being "musically trained." Some of these girls would become quite accomplished; few would have careers as musicians. As I said, the view of amateur music that I've just presented is informed by politics; Sousa was trying to point to an inherent moral good in making music. "Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment," he laments. "Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?" I can't help but find these comments ironic, since at this time, the "national voice" was technically only that of its white males… but that's a separate issue.

9/16

ChristineAugspurger 16 Sep 2015 16:01

I have often thought of the development of percussion (specifically solo percussion and the percussion ensemble) as parallel to that of electronic instruments, and that both often faced similar questions of “is this music?” and “does this take skill to perform?” Percussion has become widely accepted, whereas electronic instruments seem to experience resistance even today. The obvious parallel is that they both developed in roughly the same time frame: the 20th century.
In Pinch and Bijsterveld's article, they mention Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises and his idea that he could build a machine that could create its own music using noises. This paired with discussing and listening to Antheil's Ballet Mecanique are often the beginnings of seminars or lectures on the origins of solo percussion and the percussion ensemble. Russolo's idea of a noise machine fragmented into those who tried to create music through actual machinery, and those who tried to recreate the sounds of machinery live through the use of percussion instruments. A great example of this is Varese's Ionisation (1931) – widely considered the first piece for an ensemble of exclusively percussion instruments.
Back to the questions “is this music?” and “does this take skill to perform?” I would hope we would all agree that the answer to both questions is yes. Especially for synthesizers and other electronic instruments, they still require extreme technical proficiency, and often technical skill as it relates to electronics and programming, beyond the scope of our own skill as musicians. They also require a sentient human to operate them in real time (usually), thus making them just as “human” as any other instrument. The sound itself may be digital, but the origination of the sound still comes from a living being.

Sep. 16 Sukyung Yang

Sukyung Yang 16 Sep 2015 16:26

Gitelman adressed the issue between the materiality and royalty of intellectual productions. The piano player caused the material meanings of music rolls making the disembodiment of performances. The mechanical reproductions that Sousa alerted "little black spots of notation might be symbolic but they were not real music". What made me interesting was Gitleman's consideration of sheet music and piano rolls into a "software" and this idea also broght the digital construction like eBook, ePaper and MP3 files.

So all three articles related with last week discussions and the devlopment of technology featured new forms and possibilities as well as the issue of real music or art. Gitelman mentioned democratization of piano player and the hierachical propagaion of piano distinguished the wealth of society. Pinch and Bijsterveld approached this problem in a similar view "One commentator was afraid that memners of the lower level of society would copy the cultivated class in order to advance themselve".Also explained this phenomenon "The blending of personal achievement with democratized leisure in effect helped create a market for the player piano".

During reading Pinch and Bijsterveld I resented and agreed at the same time as a performer. According to them the apperance of piano forte which was "unwaranted intrusion by a mechanical device" to a harpsichord is a good example in applying the player piano in the history. They well developed their discussions following the influence of technologie in music. So the question between instruments and machine is also my question as a performer and teacher because we alreay use electronic piano or sythesizer replacing the restriction of piano for an educational purpose. And also losing distinctiveness and uniqueness of each performance is what I'm afraid of the most concerning mechanical music productions. I support the idea of using mechanically innovatied instuments in education, but I can adress hundreds of good reasons opposing to Willem Pijper and "performers and music teachers probably also feared for their jobs".

It seems like electronic instruments nd noise instruments expanded the elements of art by combining noise to open new possibilities. Especially synthesizer has been successful in a various aspects including the greater range of sounds, controlling sound, wider musical genres and entertainments. But the same debate happened " whether th synthesizer is a machine or a musical instrument is" as the success of the player piano did. When many synthesists rejected the idea that it can can replace musicians, I reminded me of the church band I played synthesizer. I used various sounds such as a brass, string, organ sound to make music richer. But if anyone ask me whether it is possible to replace those player or not, my answer is No.

Thus the relationship between new medium and mass consumption eventually is inevitable to a digital era and the debate of is on going as long as the technologie exists upon music.

Bo Atlas 16 Sep 2015 16:54

Cyber culture: the social conditions brought about by the widespread use of computer networks for communication, entertainment, and business.

To the idea that listening to imperfections somehow make a performance more human, I say in the way least becoming of a grad student…

PSHHHHHHHHHHH

Really, we've been talking for 3 weeks about authentic music performance and realizing the true meaning in a composer's score. Now mistakes have to be made for a performance to have that 'human' touch? This is a ridiculous idea.

Sousa:
-Mechanical reproductions of live performances do not have the soul and inspiration of a live performance.
-Use of canned music will reduce the amount of amateur music making in the home
-the composer should have the copyright over the idea and spirit of the music

Gitelman provides additional commentary on the Sousa article and the idea of materiality

Synthesizers:
Buchla: Building instruments, not machines. Each one unique
Moog: built to be mass produced. Utilized the keyboard
Perfection=machination? Imperfections in the modular moog as opposed to the perfect minimoog

Too bad about Russolo's noise machines. I'm sure after both World Wars they would've been in even greater demand in modern music.

I feel like composer's should be granted complete sweeping rights to their works unless commissioned/paid/salary by an outside source as it is today. Although, I probably only think that because that is the environment I live in.

All 3 of these articles bring up many salient points about ownership, use of music technology, and what actually constitutes music. I can't help but feel like the entire first month of this class has been spent in a philosophical gray area cleverly fit into the title "Cyber Culture." Yes, it is important what constitutes an authentic performance versus not, yes it is important that the human characteristic and touch has persevered as a desirable quality in music for the past 110 years, it is important that we perceive music as the actual intent of the composer as opposed to the physical manifestation of those ideas. Even the bits about the history of copyright laws and the player piano were very interesting. These topics would be even more appropriate in a "music and technology" "philosophy of music in the modern age" "Organology of instruments in the 20th century" class. Yes, the idea that sousa was not receiving royalties and was involved in a copyright case at the level of the supreme court set the foundation for the sale of music today and charging for just the audio (not even the physical manifestation as was argued in the court case). However, wouldn't this topic be even more salient for our class topic if I was reading an article about napster and it's blatant copyright infringement and later legal issues that resulted from that? I'm just saying, that actually directly involves "widespread use of computer networks."

Last edited on 16 Sep 2015 17:47 by Bo Atlas Show more