Using Technology Rather Than Being Used By It

Recent comments on these pages about the supremacy of electronic and computer-generated sound and the obsolescence of acoustic wind, brass, and stringed instruments have given me pause. While I have welcomed electricity and computers into my own music-making process for my entire adult life, I will never stop loving the sound of so-called older instruments and, in fact, particularly treasure even older ones—e.g. harpsichords, recorders, etc.—and have found them to be extremely amenable transmitters of new musical ideas.

I have been attracted to synthesizers since I was a late teen—the first earned money I ever spent was on a Korg Mono/Poly 4-voice polyphonic synthesizer which still sits in my studio and which I still toy around with upon occasion, mostly to demonstrate to house guests. Yet few days go by where I don’t find myself wanting to interact with either my piano, my harpsichord, my violin, or one of my many guitars or mbiras. A committed microtonalist, I custom ordered a 211-key-to-the octave tonal plexus not long after I learned about it. And I truly love it, but I still prefer the timbres and tactile comfort of instruments with more limited pitch possibilities.

I bought my first personal computer, the touted-as-almighty Apple IIGS, upon its release in 1986, wiping out my entire bank account in order to do so at the time. The GS proved to be significantly less than almighty, but I stuck with it for many years. Rather than constantly be a neophyte with a brand new gadget, attempting a deeper level of understanding has always been more important to me. And the GS’s Pyware Music Writer program weaned me away from notating music by hand. I’ve rarely looked back since. At first my decision to use that software forced some weird restrictions on my composing: the software could only support six staves at a time which meant no orchestra music. If a piano was involved, a quintet was as far as I could go. I now use Sibelius and no longer have this problem. But it too has limitations that I have trained myself to work around. To some extent the notion of infinite possibility is a panacea, according to Discovery even internet URLs are running out.

But restrictions often inspire some of the most profound creativity: think of the sonnets of Shakespeare or John Donne, the haiku of Issa, paintings as diverse as those of Vermeer and Mondrian, Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Alban Berg’s Lulu, or the twelve-bar blues of Robert Johnson. On the other hand, having the license and seeming technological ability to do anything often leads to accomplishing nothing. It was also somewhat bizarre for me to read on these pages that if Felix Mendelssohn were alive today he’d be considered mediocre compared to today’s composers who have such a wider compositional vocabulary and technological facility. Yet despite my own advocacy for new music, I can’t deny that Mendelssohn continues to garner more recordings and performances all over the world than just about any living composer. There’s something about the particular set of restrictions within which he created—forms, structures, instruments—which still “works” for many people. I want to believe that many of the forms, structures, and instruments we are all using could and should “work” for many more people than they currently do, if only so-called new music was given more of a chance by a greater percent of the general public. Admittedly a large percentage of the general public finds Mendelssohn intellectually off-putting as well.

But I think it’s important that whatever tools we are choosing for creative endeavors are used because they inspire us, not because they are new. After all, technologies are only as good as what you can do with them. And the once spanking new Apple IIGS and Korg Mono/Poly now both seem much older than my 19th-century violin (which actually is from the 19th century) or my harpsichord (which is a Zuckerman kit from the 1970s).