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Robot Music
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bob
>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
>