Why musicians are joined at the hip with technology
In the late 1950s computer engineer Max Mathews commissioned the first piece of music to be written and performed on an I.B.M. mainframe titled 'The Silver Scale'. His idea was that computers would allow people to be more creative, not necessarily to just be more productive.
The tools we invent initially have practical uses, but can also be used to discover novel ways of making new things, not just making copies of data or simply organizing or processing data.
Computers have become essential appliances in our lives that are ubiquitous in the background, but the first sparks of an idea in which a computer is involved are essentially creative and artistic in purpose. The Silver Scale was more of a rough prototype (an étude, as it were) than a finished piece, but was a demonstration of the fun things we could do with hardware and software.
I bought my first synth in 1983, a Roland Juno 106, the first Roland synth with MIDI. The first peripheral was a Yamaha QX7 sequencer, a real brick with no onboard memory, that required saving and loading data on cassette tapes.
At the time I recall being jubilant with all this 'power' to create. One of my first projects on the QX7 was to input the entirety of Ravel's Sonatina in F Sharp major in step mode, which took days to complete. It didn't seem tedious at the time, as the idea of being able to notate digitally, and play back what you wrote, was extremely novel.
From the perspective of my musical generation, this was the vanguard of music computing. But the roots go back as far as the Stravinsky ballets, Cubism and Dada--insofar as music being influenced by a new industrial age, spinning off new mediums such as still cameras and cinema, and now in contemporary times, Bjork’s exploration of the possibilities of the smartphone with her Biophilia project.
In college I worked as a music copyist and engraved music with pen and ink, many years before Finale or Sibelius, although some composers were using MOTU's Professional Composer software on the diminutive Apple II at the time. Like any new hardware or software, the possibilities are exciting, allowing us to reinvent creativity and productivity. While it may be enlightening to revisit old technologies (I still notate with pen and paper if I need to), artists will naturally embrace the latest and greatest to see what it can do to push creativity forward.
