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Technology is ubiquitous. Thus it is hardly surprising that it has had a profound influence on the art of music in the twentieth century. It has altered how music is transmitted, preserved, heard, performed, and composed. Less and less often do we hear musical sound that has not at some level been shaped by technology: technology is involved in the reinforcement of concert halls, the recording and broadcast of music, and the design and construction of musical instruments. Many church organs, for example, now use synthesized or sampled sounds rather than actual pipes; instruments are now available that have what look like piano keyboards and make what sound like piano timbres, but which are actually dedicated digital synthesizers; virtuoso performers whose instrument is the turntable are now part of not only the world of disco but also the world of concert music (John Zorn, for example, has written a piece for voice, string quartet, and turntables).1 Technology is changing the essence of music, although many musicians still do not appreciate the extent of its influence.
Technology came to music with the advent of recordings. Thomas Edison invented a crude cylinder phonograph in 1877. By the end of the nineteenth century, companies in the United States and England were manufacturing disc recordings of music. Prior to recordings, home consumption of all music-whether composed for keyboard or not-was by means of private piano performance. The possibility of preserving musical performances by recording utterly changed the social and artistic meanings of music. The invention of the tape recorder a half century later made sonorities not only reproducible but also alterable. The resulting techniques allowed recorded sounds to be fragmented, combined, distorted, etc. Such manipulations could affect not only sound qualities but also timespans. By changing recording speeds, for example, a composer of musique concr?te could compress a Beethoven symphony into a single second or make a word last an hour.
Consider Hal Freedman's composition Ring Precis, from the mid '70s. Freedman has taken a recording of the entire Ring cycle of Wagner-some eighteen hours of music-and arbitrarily cut it up into three-minute segments, all of which are played simultaneously.2 The resulting sound is, doubtless, utterly unlike anything you have ever heard, but I am more interested in the temporal implications of Freedman's compositional procedure. He has compressed by superimposition eighteen hours into three minutes, and thereby created a new piece out of an old one.
An earlier example of the new sound and time worlds opened up by electronic technology. The composition U 47, written in 1960 by Jean Baronnet and Francois Dufrene,3 is one of several compositions that use as their sole sound source a brief spoken utterance. In this case a voice says, in French, "U 47." The composers have fragmented this sound, so that we hear the tiniest segments of the spoken text. Occasionally the voice is elongated. As in Ring Precis, the sounds are fascinating, but so is the idea of isolating in time brief instants of speech.
Today, because of electronic technology, we listen to unaltered music only rarely. The sounds we hear have been not only performed by musicians but also interpreted by audio engineers, who have reinforced the acoustics of concert halls, spliced together note-perfect recorded performances, created artificially reverberant performance spaces, projected sounds across the world via satellite broadcast, greatly amplified rock concerts, and created temporal continuities that never existed "live." The audio engineer is almost as highly trained as the concert performer, and can be just as sensitive an artist.
Recording technology has forced us to reconsider what constitutes a piece of music. It is unreasonable to claim that the printed score represents the musical sounds. The score usually gives no indication of how the audio engineer should manipulate his/her variables. Two differently mixed, equalized, and reverberated recordings of the same performance can contrast as much as two different performances of the same work.
We might think conservatively of recordings as means to preserve performances, but recordings are far more than that. They are art works themselves, not simply reproductions. Thus people who buy records and cassettes rightly speak of owning the music. "Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto is yours for only $1.00," says an advertisement for a record club.
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