So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.
Here is the fifth installment of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to more or less present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004).
Enjoy, if you can!
PREVIOUSLY:
Introduction, part one
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two
Chapter Two: Music and Technology (part one)
...ever since I’d been writing music I was dreaming of getting rid of the performers.
Conlon Nancarrow (qtd. in Carlson 2)
The American-born composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) is probably best known for his player piano works. A collection of over sixty pieces, these “studies,” as Nancarrow called them, employ the instrument -- originally intended as a turn-of-the-century source of popular entertainment -- to execute compositions so complex that they are beyond the technical abilities of even the best “live” pianist. According to James Tenney, these complexities include “rapidly changing meters,” “simultaneous different meters in two or more voices,” “changing tempos,” “simultaneous different tempos -- including independently varying tempos in two or more voices,” and so on (3-4, emphases in original). In "Study no. 42," for instance, there are ten voices that “appear to be in different tempos, and these tempos increase in the course of the piece, until -- at the end -- they are all moving very fast. The five voices comprising the bass resultant seem to be approximately in the tempo relations 7/8/9/10/12, although it is very difficult to determine these relations exactly, even from a score” (Tenney 7).
Describing how Nancarrow came to work with the player piano, Philip Carlsen writes of the “extreme musical isolation” that the composer found in Mexico City after he moved there in the early 1940s (a socialist, Nancarrow left the United States to escape a politically hostile environment) (2). More important, however, was Nancarrow’s “long-standing frustration at the inability of musicians to deal with even moderately difficult rhythms” (Carlsen 2) -- a view expressed nicely in the above epigraph, and more than likely informed by a series of concert mishaps early in the composer’s career. In the case of a 1941 performance of his septet, for instance, Nancarrow explained that “[t]here were two rehearsals. For one rehearsal, four [musicians] came. The second rehearsal, three, and one of the original four. So there wasn’t one session with the whole group. And when they played it, a couple of instruments lost their place right at the beginning. All through the piece, they were playing in some other place” (Carlsen 3).
Nancarrow was one of the first (and certainly the most dedicated) to turn to the player piano as a more productive response to such problems.
This view of the player piano -- that it “remov[ed] the personality of performers from the performance,” that it was “this thing that would play all these fantastic things by itself” -- deserves closer scrutiny. Note that it is not a view in which technology negates the human influence in art altogether (though critics of the player piano would often assume as much); in this case an individual artist -- Nancarrow -- is still assumed to be in control of the machine, though “performers” have become irrelevant. The fact that technology has not been disavowed here is not surprising; historically, the perception of an interrelationship between music and technology is not new. Even in the pre-industrial era, it was recognized that skills in both of these areas could exist in the same individual. Chanan notes that in the early years of organized instrument building, “[t]he typical instrument-maker was often a musically gifted artisan,” and very often was a professional musician (Musica Practica 167). “Great composers” too have typically been involved in various aspects of music technology. We have already seen Beethoven’s interest in heavier, louder pianos. And Albert Schweitzer tells us that Bach
had [...] the open mind of the self-taught man for inventions. He was not interested in scientific and aesthetic theories upon music; whatever related to practice, however, seemed to him -- even if it were concerned with the smallest detail -- important enough to be worthy of his serious attention. He was particularly interested in instrument-making. As one of the leading experts of his epoch, he witnessed the transition from the old to the modern instruments, though he saw only the beginnings of the new era, and still clung to the old with some tenacity (198-9).3
Mozart shared Bach’s interest in these areas. Despite the fact that he referred to the playing of his great keyboard rival, Muzio Clementi, as “mere mechanicus” (Einstein 237), Mozart would also note of the piano manufacturer Stein that “[h]is instruments have this splendid advantage over others, that they are made with escape action [...] without an escapement it is impossible to avoid jangling and vibration after the note is struck. When you touch the keys, the hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them” (238). These comments demonstrate a fairly sophisticated understanding of the machinery of the piano. Further, Mozart evinced what Alfred Einstein called a “pleasure in playing with figures,” and in particular a fondness for the eighteenth century fad
Taking this relationship to one extreme, however, twentieth-century critics have often perceived a danger that technology would, on its own, end up dominating the creation of music. For some, this perception has informed any work whose connection to technology is obvious. Consider, for instance, audience reactions to the musical productions of the EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) computer program created by David Cope. This program has the ability to create original music in the style of various classical composers, and “when not informed that the works were composed by machine, listeners spoke of being moved by the pieces as if they were ‘real.’ Yet, when informed that the music was composed by machine, they denied their own responses” (Edgerton 56). Such denial speaks volumes about a contemporary mistrust of technology. Perhaps a better example is the pervasive influence of muzak, the name for environmental music created by the company of the same name. Given that the purpose of muzak is “not to instill a love of music in those who hear its products, nor to improve listeners’ minds, nor to elevate their thoughts, but simply to create certain psychological and physiological states,” usually for some corporate end (Day 214-5), it is not surprising that many have perceived it as a form of pernicious machine-driven mind control.
Yet, as if responding to this perceived threat of machines “taking over” music, discourse on music and technology often attempts to tilt the scales in the other direction, arguing for a uni-directional flow of control in which technology, no matter how advanced, is entirely manipulated by composers or performers. In the process, such discourses end up reaffirming the idea of the solitary artist, who in this case controls not other musicians but machines. To return to the case of Nancarrow, the rhetoric of genius is clearly intact, as is demonstrated by Tenny’s comment that “Nancarrow does not need the help of other musicians in order to make his music, and thus the whole ‘politics’ of musical performance is happily avoided” (3). Consider too Charles Amirkhanian’s depiction of Nancarrow as a godlike figure: “What the computer now is beginning to make possible for ordinary mortal composers, Nancarrow has been able to accomplish with his bare hands, guided by an innate musicality and intelligence as well as an ornery persistence which would make Sisyphus blush” (13). In such comments, technology is defined quite narrowly as a lifeless machine. Like the reification of music addressed in the introduction, technology in this conception “becomes a thing” -- an end product that can be acted upon, but nothing more. This view also suggests that technology follows art. Charles Rosen, for instance, argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries piano technology evolved to “meet the demands of the music,” adding that “[i]t is a familiar mistake to think that a composer writes only for the instruments available to him” (209, Critical Entertainments). The implication here is that composers write for whatever instruments they can imagine, and technology simply has to keep up with compositional desire.
But this argument would fail to explain Nancarrow, who not only wrote “only for the instruments available to him,” but wrote mostly for an instrument that was, for all intents and purposes, “obsolete” (the popularity of the player piano began to decline during the Depression; Nancarrow’s first studies began appearing in the late 1940s). Thus it might be more accurate to posit a mutually reinforcing relationship between technological and musical imagination. As Michael Chanan argues, “technology is both agent and symptom of change” (Musica Practica 166). Paul Theberge also indicates that the relationship between musicians and “manufacturers is [. . .] one of mutual dependency: Technological innovation is, in this sense, not only a response to musicians’ needs but also a driving force with which musicians must contend” (4). Thus, it is not that artists manipulate “inert” technology for their own ends, nor that they are controlled by such technology, but rather that “[m]aterial culture and abstract systems of musical thought and organization [. . .] form a dialectical relationship of the utmost importance in music-making” (166).
Perhaps more importantly, the “inert technology” view overlooks that technology is a conduit for both direct and indirect (i.e., contextual) collaboration. Thus when a composer like Nancarrow (or, later, Frank Zappa, whose work with the Synclavier synthesizer is important in this sense as well
It may be that one of the reasons this kind of contextual collaboration through technology is typically overlooked is that it is assumed that since instruments are mechanical, that the processes that produce them must also be. This is perhaps especially true of instruments like the player piano, which clearly obviated the need for traditional performers; it may have been easier to assume (however illogical such an assumption would be) that the player piano also obviated the need for people to build it. And yet the long history of mechanized instruments in Western culture has been dependent upon labor-intensive craftsmanship traditions associated with clock- and watch-making, and the manufacture of all manner of automata.
Until records and radio shut them up, music boxes were everywhere, in scent bottles, beer tankards, fans, chairs that sang when sat on, even bustles like Queen Victoria’s which played “God Save the Queen” when she sat down. They were very large, like the coach Kuznetsov and Dubasnikov built in 1785 whose wheels powered a barrel organ, or the Gavioli Orchestrion of 1908 with its 112 notes and its dozen stops. And they were very small, like the pocket watches from which birds or dogs emerged to chirp or bark the hours (229).
The custom nature of these instruments -- one presumes that the market for bustles that played “God Save the Queen” was quite small -- suggests that they were created with small-scale manufacturing, and that they involved artisanal techniques.
Of course, unlike these curiosities, player pianos were mass produced. And yet even after the piano industry began incorporating machine production techniques at the turn of the twentieth century (Roell 72), the manufacture of player pianos did not exploit key characteristics of mass production. For instance, each company used a distinctly different hole punch system to code its piano roll performances (some of these methods have since been lost), claiming theirs was the most “accurate” or “life-like.” As a result, James Edwards writes, often “one company’s rolls would not play properly on another company’s piano” (Edwards 36). Such variation ensures that nowadays the restoration of these instruments requires highly skilled enthusiasts, conversant with original companies’ idiosyncratic methods, and able to replace and refit thousands of tiny parts. In the introduction to his handbook on the subject, Ord-Hume explains how this artisan aesthetic is then necessarily replicated by modern users of these instruments: “Proper restoration is a job demanding skilled man-hours and is thus very expensive. Player piano engineers do not really exist today because few owners would be able to pay an economic price for their labours. This means that the player piano owner must fall back on his own abilities to bring an instrument back to life” (RPOSPP xiii).
Andre Millard points out that the early years of the recording industry were propelled by a similar manufacturing aesthetic centering on “the ideas and ambitions of independent inventors” (156). Despite charges of dehumanized, mechanized mass production, Millard implies that the industry has been characterized by a cyclical relationship in which important advances are generated by artisanship / independent invention, which is then moved to a corporate environment until a new idea comes along. Thus, while “organized research programs in company laboratories” took control of the technological direction of the industry in the 1930s, two decades later, the
crusade for higher fidelity was [...] the work of an army of amateur phonograph builders. In the 1950s building amplifiers and loudspeakers became a very popular hobby. Stores which sold radio components began to stock parts which could be assembled into home players. Their customers were often servicemen who had been trained to operate electronic equipment during World War II and had maintained an interest in it. Some of the engineers who had also worked in wartime electronics founded small companies to provide the components. After the decimation of the Depression, there were only about thirty concerns producing audio equipment, but in the 1950s this number increased dramatically as new companies entered the business, many with the aid of GI loans. These were start-up companies established by inventors and entrepreneurs -- the same kind of people who had founded the industry of recorded sound in the 1880s and 1890s. (Millard 209)
Of course, to the extent that technology has been recognized as a conduit for contextual collaboration, its defenders often overcompensate by romanticizing the inventors or artisans involved. Theberge, in discussing “accounts of electronic music,” writes that “[s]uch accounts remain firmly within a tradition of histories of ‘great men’ and their accomplishments in technology and art. Indeed, there is a kind of symmetry in these accounts where inventors and their machines share a certain (though subsidiary) glory with avant-garde composers and their music” (6). We can see evidence of this sort of romanticization during the online “factory tour” of Martin guitars; readers learn that “[t]he art of making quality instruments has been handed down across generations of craftsmen and lives in the many mothers, daughters, fathers and sons who skillfully craft our beautiful guitars. Our prestigious guitars and the craftsmen who build them are the stars of the tour [...] In many areas of the plant you will see guitarmaking skills that go beyond craftsmanship to art in its purest form.” Note the excessive emphasis on “craft” in not only every sentence, but every clause. This romanticization is similar to that often expressed about famous inventors like Edison (in marketing descriptions of Edison’s cylinder-manufacturing process, for instance, copywriters would emphasize the mystery and power of the inventor, writing about how at a certain point “Mr. Edison would emerge from his private laboratory carrying a small paper bag filled with [a] critical secret ingredient, whereupon he would walk to the vat of molten wax, dump the contents of the bag therein, and wait until he had seen it thoroughly amalgamated with the other ingredients” (163)). These examples demonstrate that, like the collaborative theory of art, whose positions (initiating acts, direct and contextual collaboration) can be defined in different ways, the rhetoric of genius is adaptable, even cropping up in discussions unrelated to art per se. And yet using this rhetoric in relation to technology is no less problematic than using it in relation to music.
Of course, one can avoid such traps by defining “technology” more broadly -- it becomes harder to impose the rhetoric of genius on either technology or music when the distinction between these things is blurred. Clearly even “traditional instruments” are not only examples of technology, but function technologically -- like player pianos, phonographs, and compact discs, they have served as tools of musical propagation (Albert Schweitzer makes this point when he paraphrases Liszt’s comment that the piano “is to music what engraving is to painting; it serves to multiply and disseminate works of art” (319)). And this semantic broadening can also be taken in the other direction, technologically redefining words that are typically associated with music only. Consider for instance Frank Zappa’s habit of referring to the guitar as a “machine,” or the potentially wide application of the word “play,” which can be used to describe the action of operating anything from a bassoon to a stereo system.
Notes for this section
1. Note the hostility suggested when Nancarrow refers to musicians as “instruments” -- in contrast, Ellington would label instrumental parts with the names of specific players.
2. The composer Henry Cowell, writing in 1931, long before Nancarrow’s own explorations of the compositional potential of the player piano, also mentions Nicolai Lopatnikoff, who “experimented in works for all kinds of recordings, such as mechanical orchestras, organs, violins, and pianos.” The pieces he wrote for such instruments “can only be performed mechanically, making the mechanism necessary to the composition. He has player piano passages which are impossibly fast, and combinations impractical for the hands of players, no matter how many should take part in a performance.” Lopatnikoff also had an interest in making “phonograph records of various factory and street noises, synchronizing and amplifying them as a percussion background for music written for keyboard recordings” (Cowell 255).
3. It is interesting in this context to consider Bach’s use of the term Inventions to describe some of his piano pieces, as well as the argument, advanced by Schweitzer and others, that his music is “architectonic.”
4. This fad obviously predated (by two hundred years) the similar but more celebrated “chance composition” techniques of John Cage. Haydn is also known to have displayed an interested in the relationship between randomness and composition.
5. Consider for instance various games in which a random number generator (typically a pair of dice) could be used by “any amateur to compose music without having to know the techniques or rules of composition” (Peterson). The best known of these games, attributed to Mozart and published the year after his death, is Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game), in which players create a sixteen measure waltz by rolling dice to select individual measures from sixteen columns of eleven choices each. Of course, although the resulting tunes “have a recognizable Mozartean flavor,” many scholars have rejected the idea that Mozart actually had anything to do with this particular game (Peterson). And yet there is other evidence of Mozart’s pursuits in this realm: in K. 516f (Noguchi), he “wrote down long strings of measures, grouped into two-bar melodies, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet and a number (1 or 2)” (Peterson) -- an apparent puzzle that scholars have only recently begun to figure out (See Noguchi). Einstein also refers to “a page of musical sketches on which [Mozart] had begun to figure out the sum which the chessplayer would have received from the King, in the famous Oriental story” (25).
6. In his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa revealed that his admiration for the Synclavier was based on the idea that it could do for him what conventional musicians could not: “Anything you can dream up can be typed or played into the Synclavier [. . .] With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages, and the ‘little guys inside the machine’ play them with one-millisecond accuracy -- every time. [. . .] The Synclavier allows the composer not only to have his piece performed with precision, but to style the performance as well -- he can be his own conductor, controlling the dynamics or any other performance parameters. He can bring his idea to the audience in a pure form, allowing them to hear the music, rather than the ego problems of a group of players who don’t give a shit about the composition” (172-3, emphases in original). For Zappa, then, the Synclavier became a tool for the “purest” possible expression of the mind’s ear.
7. In the case of player pianos, many intriguing mechanical problems were only solved over long periods of time and with the input of many minds. How, for instance, to power the music roll drive (PHSSP 107)? How to make sure the paper roll stayed in perfect alignment with the tracker-bar holes that allowed it to be read (110)? How to get the instrument to play musical accents (116)?
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