News and Olds from the Electronic Orchestra Pit

When Nic Collins asked me to assist him in tapping into the "wisdom of the crowd" for a special section in LMJ19, I happily agreed to serve as a funnel for conveying the idea for the issue to the small crowd of knowledgeable people who honor me with their friendship.

As mixed a bag as the resulting section may seem, there are—at least to me—trajectories running between the respective articles (which somehow mirror trajectories of my own curi-osity), forming a grid of historical and thematic connections. Nevertheless it should perhaps be emphasized that I became aware of this grid post factum only, because at the beginning I wanted myself to be surprised with the ideas the authors came up with. Theirs is the wisdom I wanted to listen to.

The historical axis runs from the 1920s until the present: Rahma Khazam's paper, "Nikolay Obukhov and the Croix Sonore," marks one end with a consideration of an obscure cousin of the theremin, while Phil Stearns's description of the Artificial Analog Neural Network he designed and built marks the other. Volker Straebel's essay "Media-Specific Music for Compact Disc" covers some of the years in between.

Another axis could be described as "individual artistic achievements in intermedia art." Besides the above-mentioned articles by Khazam and Stearns, Jozef Cseres's account of the Slovakian artist Milan Adamčiak's practice, "In Between as a Permanent Status," has its place here.

A third dimension in this taxonomy deals with "instrument building," both as an art form and as a prerequisite of composition in the sense in which the German composer Helmut Lachenmann put it: "composing means building an instrument." Rob Hordijk and his "Blip-poo Box" find their place here as a fine example of recent analogue instrument design with a twist, but the Artificial Analog Neural Network belongs here, as does the Croix Sonore.

If all this reasoning still sounds bleak and unconvincing, the articles certainly are not and are, like any well-crafted tool, ready for use without reading the manual.

In regard, however, to this attempt to extract a taxonomy from other people's clever thoughts, I would like to conclude with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges's essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," which offers a much richer take on the subject:

These ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.