Bytes and Backbeats: Repurposing Music in the Digital Age by Savage Steve

Author:Savage, Steve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

New Directions in Performance and Composition

Classical music creation is also engaged in the techniques that have transformed popular music construction, although there remains considerable cultural capital in the idea of the score (along with the supremacy of the composer) as a marker of status for Western art music. As noted, Lewis contends that “cultural power clearly rests, for the moment, with the ‘bringers of structure.’ In Euro-American art-music culture this binary is routinely and simplistically framed as involving the ‘effortless spontaneity’ of improvisation, versus the careful deliberation of composition—the composer as ant, the improviser as grasshopper.”59 But many in the classical world wish to elevate the joys of improvisation and spontaneity into the realm of both classical composition and performance. There have been subtle developments beyond the standard level of performance interpretation—such as contemporary conductors’ propensity to release tempo control briefly to orchestral soloists60—but there are also many classical composers who seek a much closer affinity to the improvisational ethic of jazz. Michael H. Zack contends that listening to jazz improvisation—especially of the freer kind—is partly “a matter of tolerating ambiguity and equivocality [and finding] it to be a source of beauty, exhilaration, and creative freedom.”61 Composers in Western art music are seeking to make similar demands on their audiences.

The avant-garde in classical music has long incorporated elements from mass culture, and contemporary computer-based musical experimentation finds some of its most interesting applications within the classical ranks. Certain elements of jazz improvisation, as well as a fascination with the unintentional, have inspired recent interaction between classical musicians and computers. Zack quotes Ryle's description of improvisation and suggests that “the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against unprogrammed opportunity, or obstacle or hazard seems to be right on target. The contention is around what we mean by ‘unprogrammed Page 125 →opportunity.’ ”62 A new genre within contemporary classic music, sometimes called “interactive composition,” incorporates computer capabilities and borrows heavily from jazz and the notion of “unprogrammed opportunity.”

The participants in this new genre are using the computer to actively break down the roles of composer, performer, and audience. Modern composers from Stockhausen to Cage have written “composed improvisations” where the abstract instructions require considerable improvisation on the part of the performers. Initiating the debate on where composition ends and improvisation begins was one of the motivating factors behind such scores. Contemporary composers are using computers in interactive ways—that is, the computers are programmed to respond to musical performances—so that musical input results in a response from the computer in the form of musical output. This inspires a response by the performer, thereby triggering new computer-based responses and on and on in a riot of artificially intelligent improvisation. The result, further pressing those boundaries between composition and improvisation, is the “interactive composition.”63 Where one draws the line between composition and improvisation is less important than the motivation, which is to shift the emphasis from the composer or performer to collaboration between the two. This is a motivation that resonates with many popular

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