texts
"It is the nature of the society
in which we want to live,
that is in question."
Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Edited by Roger Reynolds and Karen Reynolds
Copyright © 2001 Jean-Baptiste Barrière and the Composition Area, Department of Music, the University of California, San Diego
Published by Permission
The following TEXT was commissioned by the Composition Area, Department of Music, University of California, San Diego for its SEARCH initiative. The TEXT is copyrighted and appears in its original publication here. While links TO this TEXT from other sites are welcome, the TEXT itself may not be reprinted for any reason without express agreement in writing from the copyright holders [Please contact Roger Reynolds: info@rogerreynolds.com to facilitate this.].
SEARCH EVENT II, 16 February 2001, University of California, San Diego
PART I
What will be the future of music? When considering this question, many approaches are tempting. Many of these would be elusive, more or less sophisticated strategies to avoid the question. One strong temptation would be to try to avoid the burden of such a task by refusing it, refusing the question as it is asked. After all, one could argue that it requires a fantastic arrogance, or at least an enormous presumptuousness, to pretend to answer the question.
In fact, it would be quite legitimate, but far too easy, to refuse the challenge and to pretend that there will simply be no future.
Another temptation would be to set up a happening, to transform as a show the staging of an impossible answer to this impossible question. Let us then imagine that the voice of the speaker would progressively be transformed, as well as his image morphosed, but only at some precise moments, in a very subtle way that would prevent you from being totally sure about what he is saying, and therefore making even more impossible the understanding of his answer to the question. It would be a parable about communication in the future, distorted by an increasingly overwhelming number of communication technologies, and all the while with people having less and less to say to each other.
I must admit than I am really attracted by this form, which would mean transforming the answer into a multimedia piece, that might have been called: "The Adventures of Cassandra in the Wonderland of Techno-Science and Art".
But besides the unrealistic amount of work that this would represent, this would be another strategy for refusing an answer.
I would like today to accept the challenge, knowing that there is no way to succeed in fullfilling the contract anyway. I will do it with my "bare hands", that is to say without artefacts or mise en scène. I would like to conceive of it as a subject for mutual reflection, under the more conventional but hopefully still effective form of a talk, that may use the structure of a rhizomatic scenario, or, if you prefer, a series of considerations or aphorisms concerning only a few of the very many issues that the question may imply.
This form, I hope, should not exclude all sorts of possibilities of distantiation (in a kind of Brechtian sense) with our aim, as well as with the peculiar situation that we accepted to put ourselves in, while thinking about such subject matter. And it should not exclude humor. There is no doubt that this is a very heavy subject. Let us, therefore, try to say serious things with a little bit of humor. This could take place in the form of a character, a little girl called Cassandra, who reads a little bit too much science-fiction, and who has the bad habit of interjecting unpleasant things that we may not want to hear, as we follow her train of thought.
Enough formal considerations and disgressions, let us step inside the heart of the discussion.
...Cassandra considers active nihilism...
Will there be a future for music? Who knows? Nothing can be said for sure. But let us consider just for a moment that there is a serious possibility, actually several possibilities, that there would be no future for music, at least as we know it today.
Art, as generally considered in Western societies today, can be considered a middle-class concept inherited from the Romantic Era. There have been many other conceptions of art in the past, and there will be many others in the future. Even today, in Asia, and Africa, though we tend to forget it -- or to consider that we have nothing to do or share with them -- there are others, very much alive. Another conception, under Soviet ideology, was in place during most of the 20th century. As with many other issues, it has given way today to the total victory of what can still be called Capitalism, for lack of a better term, and therefore to another conception of art -- market-driven art as entertainment -- which is the dominant conception all over the world. Let us be clear, liberalism has won everywhere, and what we call socialism, for instance in France, is nothing other than a mild form of liberalism, a "liberalism lite", and the most lucid ideologists of this movement call themselves "social liberals". In this model, art is a business like any other. It can be a good or a bad business. Good art, by immanent market necessity, should be good business. Bad art, by way of its consequences, is bad business. Exceptions are just accidents that can be explained away as the result of the wrong marketing strategies.
Do we have to accept this vision, and the cultural and economic consequences of it? We can, as do most members of the cultivated middle class with political and economic power today all over the world. But we should not. Artists, have another vision of the world to defend. Art is or should be formative, "world-making" (to echo on the reflections of Nelson Goodman).
There is, in fact, nothing nearer to politics. The artist's responsibility may be considered in some ways less risky than the politicians'. But he still has responsibilities to handle, things to fight for, beyond just money-making and survival.
André Malraux, the writer and cultural thinker, has said that civilizations have to learn that they are mortal. Art, and music specifically among the arts, because it is the most abstract and therefore irreductible form of art, has to learn a similar lesson.
So why exactly should we fear the possibility that art could vanish? There are several clear and present dangers.
The first is the process of deculturation. We hear globalization spoken of all the time, its values and its risks. This is indeed a very important phenomenon, which has positive effects, and at the same time very dramatic ones. Another global phenomenon, somehow linked but also not necessarily correlated, is deculturation. We would have a hard time finding positive sides to it. It is the process by which a society loses its culture. It used to happen for displaced groups, moving from agrarian contexts to cities. It happens today inside cities, with the formation of ghettos. One of the paradoxes is that these ghettos often happen in order to protect a cultural identity, which for good or bad is thought to be at stake.
Losing culture through deculturation is like losing memory. Without memory, one cannot develop and grow.
What does this mean for us from a musical standpoint? That we have to consider art and music history through a learning process that includes a critical (and not simply a blind) apprenticeship, that provides us with tools to understand not only techniques, but also their artistic meaning through their uses. And because everything is tied together, we need to understand the "structure that links" all these things (cf. Gregory Bateson: Mind and Nature -- A Necessary Unity, Bantam Books, 1980), which ideally means that a musician should also be acquainted with anthropology, as well as with sociology, and all possible other disciplines necessary to understand the linkages of the cultural network in which music is embedded.
One important issue that underlies this argument and arises here is this: to live and exist together we have to share values. And culture can be considered as a way to share them, besides being a way to develop and test them. In this vision, culture is therefore an experimental laboratory for values. That is why it is an important social and political activity that imples a consciousness of all the ramifications of the context in which it unfolds. Musicians have a responsibility to protect musical culture, in all its forms, and at the same time to make it progress, to develop it, to drive it to new paths without losing their points of departure. This is a task that they cannot achieve without taking on the responsibility of memories. Here is the important apparent contradiction that they have to overcome: memory is or can be a burden. They have to build on it, by learning to be free of it. It is something to forget, just for a moment, rather than not to know in the first place.
But let us try to be more specific. What are the exact dangers that music is exposed to? Let us discuss just a few.
Computer programming technologies and methodologies, like "artificial life", or "genetic algorithms", are -- or will be in the near future -- one of the tools of creation. They offer fantastic artistic potentialities. But like any tool, they can be misused. Soon, "automatic music" will be everywhere. It will replace Muzak. All of the so-called utilitarian forms of music -- for elevators, waiting zones, commercial malls, social spaces, bars and restaurants -- can become automatically generated music. It is a field, but also a market, that will explode very soon. Radios will have channels dedicated to "generated music", that is music whose sound and structure both will be synthesized and self-generated, and that will be more or less sophisticated. It will also become adaptative: thanks to technologies such as neural nets, intelligent agents, and, later, more elaborate processes, it will analyse your taste as well as your mood and will produce music to satisfy your supposed needs at a specific moment.
In Hollywood and elswhere, synthetic means will be used first to produce musical arrangements, and then progressively to compose the entire music for a film or other audiovisual product. The directors and producers will just have to give instructions concerning the "feeling", the "mood" they want for the specific context of a scene or part of a film, and the generators will compose accordingly. They will even be able to replicate a given musical example and develop it tirelessly. These new forms of synthesizers, capable of generating and therefore replacing both the score and the instruments, will never complain, or strike, and they will be cheap.
What has already been happening with samplers -- which in many musical situations have replaced instrumentalists, causing some to be unemployed -- will happen with music "generativity", that is the automatic generation of musical structures, by explicit (specified by a human) or implicit (self-implied by analysis) rules of composition.
I will not even take the time to try to argue if this is good or bad. One sure thing, is that it will happen. It already is happening. Composers will have to adapt. Some will provide the generative engine-makers with data and knowledge and will make their living from it. Only a few will succeed in surviving on the side, and even fewer will be able to develop artistically. But was not it always the case? Is this a catastrophic scenario? No, it is going to happen just like that. So what should we do about it? Once again, we have to be very conscious of it; we have to anticipate it by contributing to its development so that we can partly control it.
We must develop the antidote for this poison which is going to contaminate the whole of society. We have to assume the responsibility for balance, for equilibrium; in order to do so we will have to proceed with what researchers in systems theory and systems thinking are calling ago-antagonism (cf. E. Bernard-Weil, Précis de Systémique Ago-Antagoniste; Limonest, L'interdisciplinaire, 1988 ; for a presentation in English of related works, see: Elie Bernard-Weil: "Management of Chaotic Systems with the Model for the Regulation of Agonistic Antagonistic Couples", Proceedings of Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty, 1990, 498-507).
We must participate in the process of developing automatically-generated music, in order to be able to influence its objectives. Is this playing the sorcerer's apprentice? Maybe. But we have no other choice. It is our only opportunity to make it a partially positive process. We have at the same time to establish some form of generative music ethics, in a very similar way that biological research may need to be controlled by ethics.
But we also have to stop obsessively seeing conspiracies everywhere, a syndrome that nourishes science-fiction, but also applies to real life. We have to try to be more constructive and transform a lucid awareness of potential dangers into something creative, not fall into paranoia. Generativity in music, which after all is at the very origin of computer music (cf. the works of Lejaren Hiller), may also be very positive, if handled properly.
...Cassandra attempts to "think positively"...
What are the ideas we have to defend, or, rather, to promote, to insure the future of music? The importance of research, of collaborative efforts, the necessity of centralizing problems to decentralize solutions, is to sum it up in a formula, to "say what we do and do what we say". Too many composers are hiding their "recipes". We should always publish our recipes. One of the things we have to retain from modernism, is that we have to conceptualize what it is exactly that we are doing, or at least trying to do.
...Cassandra visits the psychoanalyst...
One positive, even if also dangerous, side of computer aids to composition is certainly the "mirror effect". Formalizing one's own composition techniques is exteriorizing them (making explicit what is usually implicit and even sometimes hidden), allowing one to achieve a distanced perspective in which everything becomes possible. It can be dangerous when we are weak, and get lost in critical loops. It can become sick if we harbor illusions about the power that this may represent as an instrument for dominating others. But it can also become very fertile in allowing others to evolve by developing their own analytical and critical abilities and turning them inward. Computer-aided composition -- as a broader template including generativity -- is also a fantastic educational tool: with extensive, embedded knowledge, one is allowed to play with all sorts of styles and techniques, to learn about form by experimenting with structural models, etc.
And it can be a very important tool for developing originality, while making one more conscious of similarities and differences. Generally speaking, it can help us by making us more conscious about the meaning of what we do.
...cassandra explores synthesis...
The future of music will also be found in synthesis. Sound synthesis is, these days, very paradoxically -- at least if we consider its unused potential -- considered "out". It remains, to my feeling. tragically undeveloped. After fantastic progress between the 60's and the 80's, developments have nearly ceased today. Not that there are no interesting developments. There are plenty everywhere. But synthesis is not valued as it should be by composers: they do not invest enough time, investigate enough its potentialities. Besides, it resists industrial packaging and exploitation: too complex to use, too difficult to imagine what to do with. It remains the unknown continent, where so many pioneering discoveries are left to encounter.
Here, too, musicians have their role to play. Not only composers but instrumentalists as well. They must engage themselves deeply in this endeavour. An extensive contribution from performers to the physical modeling of traditional instruments, for instance, would cause the field to expand tremendously. And the interest and validation of composers will help to provide the right control formalisms. Their absence is deadly today, causing most of the existing tools to be unusable for musical purposes. Synthesis, like so many other aspects of computer music, should not be left to engineers alone. There was a time, not so long ago, when musicians had to become programmers to be able to make computer music. Today, one expects music software to be as standardized as the instrumentation of cars: you should be able to open them up and drive immediately without even noticing the brand and model, and more specifically without knowing at all how they work.
But there are obvious dangers in the progressive standardization that is occurring in computer music. We must fight to maintain an understanding of how things work. More generally, we must fight to preserve computer music tools that are as open as possible, and the same goes for computer tools in general.
That is why computer music programs, which are toolboxes or languages rather than packaged applications -- software environments such as Max, PD, Patchwork, Open Music and others -- have to be preserved and encouraged. The future of music depends on our ability to resist standardization and give appropriate artistic and aesthetic answers to these needs.
One should not have to choose: as in front of the window of a ice-cream shop, one should be able to look at all the flavors, and make freely his or her own combination. Which supposes, to push the metaphor to its limits, that one knows what these flavors are, how they are made; which ultimately means keeping the possibility to go back home and to do it yourself, reconstructing it with the recipe, or possibly inventing a new one. In our domain, this implies fighting for and preserving knowledge and openness. It is said that a child needs to taste a flavor 600 times in order to categorize it, to put it in his conceptual map. So it requires a tremendous amount of time to learn, master and explore. But pushing for sound synthesis should never be opposed to, for instance, sound processing. The future will proceed by searching for continuity between all sonic materials, as well as between the various dimensions of our cultures. All forms of sounds and musics will be unified in a continuity, which should not be a chaos but a network where everything is linked.
The sonic materials of music that instruments and voices can represent constitute an accomplishment that has taken several centuries, even several millennia, within a culture which proceeded with a slow maturation, a natural selection of some details rather than others, and in which everything makes sense. The cultural -- "acculturated" -- ear is fascinated by these non-explicit constraints that underlie our artistic practice.
Even if one wishes to reject the stratification, the sedimentation of culture, it is not possible to ignore it totally; any attitude of refusal still positions itself as a reflection, even a negative, of what it is refusing. It is in this sense that one can come to conceive that there is, in any artistic approach, a cognitive enterprise that ignores itself, the search for an absent structure -- deep, hidden -- that the artist, with other means than the scientific researcher, is trying to exhume, to exhibit. So any approach to sound synthesis by computer must construct itself in continuity with collective memory, in a dialectical movement between memory and creation, tradition and invention.
This is what justifies the use of simulation as a methodology for the comprehension of musical phenomena. Simulation can be seen as a "mimesis", whose remarkable property -- distinctive when compared to pure and simple imitation -- is to make available in the computer, for the artist, a body of knowledge in perpetual evolution. This applies even more specifically to the part of knowledge which is ususally left implicit by a lack of adequate tools for its formalization. This knowledge once made available -- precisely thanks to the unique tool of formalization that the computer represents -- the artist can in turn reconsider it, build on it, develop it, enrich it with new meanings, adding to it his own creative potential.
This approach also allows one to reestablish from inside composition, hierarchies, orders of importance, which are sometimes confused in the cultural process of sedimentation: such arbitrariness makes room for a logic of continuity in the creative process. The artist can indeed, if he desires it, control all the phases of creation, be all at once the instrument-maker, the composer, and the instrumentalist.
However, this mastering of the totality of the creative process, can end up in an embarrassing freedom: the composer is not prepared for it by its training, and he can fail to take into account all of its consequences, or lose himself (or herself) in technological detours, having started with a tool whose fascinating complexity can be the worst of mirages. He can be obsessed with mastering an instrument which he has not completed, because he has not succeeded in giving necessity to its use in a work. Novelty is never, as such, a significant criterion in artistic production; it can not be confused with progress. For that consists in an accumulation process which starts from foundations constantly re-evaluated and rebuilt. Novelty taken as a value, condemns discourse to the sterility of merchandise, quickly produced, quickly consumed.
The composer who turns himself towards the computer, as is true with any other artist, will only find in synthesis what he has brought to it, and in any case, no answers to questions that he will not have previously and correctly asked. There can, of course, be meetings, that is, true vocations that realize themselves only in the presence of the tool itself, but these events are very rare, and they cannot be used to deduce any generality.