About This Issue

The articles in this issue of Computer Music Journal approach the topic of aesthetics from various angles. Guy Garnett, an assistant professor of composition and theory at the University of Illinois, served as the guest editor for these articles, selecting potential authors, soliciting manuscripts, gathering review comments, and suggesting revisions to the authors. In his editorial, Mr. Garnett explains his concept for this issue and invites the reader's response (which can be directed to cmj@mitpress.mit.edu). We supply an additional summary of the articles' subject matter here.

Simon Emmerson's opening article continues some of the themes from the Winter 2000 issue of Computer Music Journal. Mr. Emmerson expounds upon the historical dichotomy between vernacular and serious art forms, arguing that electroacoustic music is well positioned to help counter the monocultural threat of commercial, dance-based music by enriching popular culture with the contemplative values of art music. Mr. Garnett's own article treats interactive computer music as a vessel for injecting humanist values into an art form that was dominated in the 20th century by an objectivist yet ambivalent awe of the machine. Stan Link's essay romanticizes noise, in a manner reminiscent of, yet different from, Kim Cascone's article in the previous issue. Whereas Mr. Cascone focused on noise as a sonic resource for the composer, Mr. Link dwells upon the philosophical implications of analog recording noise (and its metaphorical extensions) for the listener's experience. In what could be viewed as a contrasting stance to some of the other authors' explicitly postmodern and humanist thinking, Martin Supper's article confers an elevated status upon algorithmic composition. Finally, Horacio Vaggione warns against excessive abstraction. Mr. Vaggione says that music cannot be reduced to a formalized discipline, because linear, problem-solving algorithms form only one component in a complex network, the composer being another. For Mr. Vaggione, the computer music composition takes form only in a specific, concrete situation involving multiple layers of operations and a nonlinear interaction with the musical materials.

Assembled by James Harley, the Reviews section of this issue includes evaluations of six books: a Csound textbook, a volume in French on Pierre Schaeffer, a critique of the recording industry, a study of numerical principles in composition, an interdisciplinary examination of sound art, and a textbook on audio. As usual, numerous recordings of computer music are also reviewed, and the issue concludes with descriptions of various new products.

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