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Re: Robot Music
Commander Data: I am programmed to emulate the playing style of 6,000 different artists, including you Mr. Gould.
GG: Really?
Data: Yes.
GG: Data, would you complete this tour engagement I have, a little make-up and some contact lenses and we just may get away with it.
Data: hmmm.
On Friday, November 2, 2001, at 01:08 PM, Elmer Elevator wrote:
I've bought an awful lot of electronic/computer music. It's not the same kind of exercise as buying Human Music. Buying Human Music is like wandering up and down a huge buffet or smorgasbrod at a fine hotel -- most of the time, you're going to wind up with something very tasty on your plate. Buying Robot Music is like trying to find something to eat in a flower garden store -- mostly you starve or get sick.
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In "The Horse's Mouth," when the painter Gully Jimson completes his masterpiece of a mural, he steps back in dismay and asks, "Why is it never on the wall the way it was in my mind?" (It looks gorgeous to everyone but Jimson.) I think some people, like Gould, set such outlandishly perfectionist standards for their own artistry that they begin to dream of a Robot that could go directly from musical score to actual sound with no chance for any Human Error or Inadequacy. Great technicians progress from 8th notes to 16th notes to 32nd notes and must begin to aspire to play 64ths and 128ths and 256ths. A Robot promises to make Paganini seem slow and clumsy by comparison.
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It's a good argument for the existence of the human soul, because now, after about 35 years of all sorts of people inventing all sorts of musical robots, mostly what you get out the other end can best be described as soulless. The ear and the heart reject almost all of it.
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You can hear Carlos trying in "Switched-On Bach." He (then) searched for every moment of emotional emphasis and had his Robot super-emphasize them, in a way he was surely convinced Bach would have also wanted to emphasize, but just couldn't because of the limitations of his fingers, feet and instruments.
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But the effect is like a Dating Robot who shows up at your apartment at precisely 19:00:00, rings your doorbell 400 times, and hands you 12,000 roses and 600 boxes of chocolate, expecting you to fall 200 times as much in love with it.
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Kubrick was sharp enough to hear how well these robotic renditions of the classics worked in the soundtrack for "A Clockwork Orange," and time hasn't made that at all a bad or dated choice. He was trying to find a rendition of the classical music Alex loved that also highlighted that there was something defective, quirky and soulless, albeit very sincere, about Alex's love of this music. Alex would naturally have thought that Beethoven would improve if you could take all those icky people out of it.
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At his most involved with and impressed by Robot Music, I suspect Gould always chuckled to himself that these Robots weren't likely to ever put him out of business.
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But the Robots have certain advantages that must have captivated the perfectionist in Gould. Acoustics and sound recording are such inexact and frustrating sciences. Sending music through the air to the human ear is just, well, an incredibly sloppy sort of thing, and even throwing huge sums of money at it isn't always a guarantee that the results will sound much better.
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The Robots don't need air or microphones or finger pressures or poise, or the right kind of reflective walls. They work entirely in pure numbers of attack = a, sustain = b, decay = c, amplitude = d. They get the same results on a damp, hot summer day as on a crisp, dry winter day. They don't demand you scour the forests for rare, vanishing kinds of wood for your instrument; an old, beaten-up PC can add and subtract as well as a supercomputer.
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A cheap old player piano moves the human heart better than Robot Music, because the master rolls were originally cut by a Human, not a Robot, and all the pianist's nuances of humor and sadness and dignity and love and surprise and aspiration come through.
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Does anyone have some electronic/computer music he/she loves, and spontaneously enjoys listening to again and again? I'm really not trying to bash musical Robots here. I wish them success, but I just think it's a hopeless quest, as long as the Judges are still going to be Humans, with hearts and souls.
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Bob
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-----Original Message-----
From: Juozas Rimas <JuozasRimas@TAKAS.LT>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Friday, November 02, 2001 12:10 PM
Subject: GG on WC :)
>I've just read Gould's article on Wendy Carlos. Frankly, I didn't know what she
>was before - I was interested in electronic music several years ago but never
>reached her and when I got hooked on Bach, I somehow didn't reach her from this
>end too. And that's fine by me :)
>
>Was Gould joking/writing sarcastically or was he serious? I can think of only
>two reasons why he was so kind ("a recording of the decade"?):
>1. Electronic music was still very unusual back then and the mix with Bach was
>absolutely original - the sounds different from any other performance of Bach
>ever.
>2. Gould dreamed of having the voice separation that only computer may produce
>(I listened to some Carlos and heard things that can be barely heard in the
>usual recordings - and I got one voice in the middle, one on the left, another
>on the right etc - freaky).
>
>Voice separation is a great thing, one of the main Gould's valuable traits. But
>he has a load of other good traits (capability of playing very slowly and
>tenderly or fast and vigorously, very clean trills etc, great momentum, creative
>alternating of staccato/legato and so on and so forth).
>So how could he seriously marvel at a frigging junk that happened to have one
>good feature?
>
>Juozas Rimas Jr (not the one playing)
>http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/141/juozas_rimas.html
>