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MORTON SUBOTNICK
www.creatingmusic.com/subotnick

Photo courtesy Morton Subotnick

The speed of information access and the amount and low cost of memory will make MIDI output devices unnecessary in the performance of my music. More and more I am ONLY using a computer. I think we will see a major evolution in the recorded media. It will change to DVD with surround sound and interactive information access. My dream has always been that the recording media will become a new chamber art and have dedicated a great deal of my creative time to this end. Now I believe it is not only possible but, even, probable.

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WILLIAM DUCKWORTH
www.monroestreet.com/duckworth/wdhome.html

Photo by Paula Court

Music at the end of the 20th century is on the cusp of a major technological revolution. Unlike previous advances in technology, which centered on new sounds created with new electronic instruments, the next advance will focus on the internet. With the storage and retrieval of music well underway on the Web, some of us are already beginning to develop new virtual instruments and to conceive of ways to facilitate live performances on line. Given the speed at which Web technology is advancing, it seems likely that all composers will soon consider making music on-line a normal part of their creative activities. The Web, of course, will define its own new concert paradigm for music. But already we can see that interactivity will be the watchword, and that the boundaries currently separating composer, performer, and listener will become increasingly blurred. As for my own work, I expect to be highly involved with creating music on the Web, whatever the reigning technology in 2025.

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PAMELA Z
www.pamelaz.com

Photo by Lori Eanes

Technology (whether "high" or "low") has always had an effect on my work, and I have no reason to believe that will change in the next 25 years. I think that all artists are to some extent influenced by the tools they use to make their art. In my case, those tools have included digital processors, Macintosh computers, software, samplers, a wearable MIDI controller, and (perhaps the most technically sophisticated of all) the human voice. Each time I have introduced a new tool into my arsenal, it has resulted in new ideas and added new colors to my palate. Recent forays into composing for ensembles using conventional acoustic instruments have sent me off in new directions, and my current attempts to create performance works that use MAX MSP software have initiated new ideas as well. For the past sixteen or so years, I have been creating a body of electroacoustic work. Not only do these works require the combination of electronics and voice (and/or other acoustic instruments) but the works would have never developed in the same way had I been using a different set of tools.

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PAUL LANSKY
silvertone.princeton.edu/~paul/

Photo courtesy New Albion

I'd like to reply by first rephrasing the question: how do you think your music will change as a result of technology?

I haven't the faintest idea.

All I know is that technology has already had, and will continue to have a radical effect on the music I write and the processes I use to write it. Very little I've done would have been possible without the radically different perspectives and working methods offered by computing technology.

But just as we no longer notice that the bends, bobs and weaves of some electric guitar playing are the result of a technology that allows the use of a lighter gauge string, for example, or that the construction of the modern flute was facilitated by the industrial revolution, I would hope that the music I write will ultimately hide the technology used to create it and that its technological underpinnings will consequently be uninteresting. I hope that new technologies will continue to influence the music I write, but I will do my best to write music which succeeds in hiding them, or at least making them worthy of a footnote at best. My feeling is that music succeeds only when it transcends its machinery.

  

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