Editor's Notes

The character of technology, both within and without academia, is such that it almost necessarily calls attention to itself. "Look, I'm new, I'm different. Bigger, better, faster, more lifelike, more otherworldly." And yet ultimately the arts that utilize technology most strongly must address issues different from the technology itself. They must address, as all arts must to remain viable, issues of value and meaning--that is, if they wish to remain art and not sink into cultural commodity. That they use technology, or what technology they use, is not so important as how they use technology--to what human, cultural, and aesthetic ends it is directed. The essays gathered here do not speak with one voice about the role of technology in music, nor do they even reflect any common repertoire--they each draw on works from very different camps. And yet, with one exception, each essay presents, as one of its primary themes, the human impact of that technology. The exception points up the difference; the essay by Martin Supper arises from a less humanist, more positive branch of modern aesthetics. Its concerns are more with the objective characteristics of a work than with its cultural or personal impact. It takes as its starting point the contentious assertion that computer music is music that requires a computer for its composition. It then proceeds to an ostensive definition of this ontology by enumerating several representative computer music works.

This broader theme, the relation of a human artist or listener to the musical process, while most clearly presented as such in my own article and that of Horacio Vaggione, can be discerned in the article by Stan Link in such statements as: "Namely, the illusion of human performance that Tables Clear allows us at its beginning is, indeed, incontrovertibly broken by the work's technical accomplishment, and yet the underlying sense of human presence is never entirely dispelled." And while Simon Emmerson takes a very different aesthetic as his basis, his article nonetheless also stresses the impact of the art on some human constituency: "So what is needed is not a defense of art in a historical setting at all, but an advocacy of the need for its values--available to everyone." The reference here to "historical setting" brings up another major theme embedded in this collection of essays: the relation of present aesthetic ideas to past ideas of modernism. While such global debates have already raged in other art forms, particularly literature and the visual arts, still, the degree of preoccupation within the computer music community with distancing oneself from previously prevailing aesthetic ideas points up perhaps the special challenges of an art form so intertwined with the modernist icon that technology itself has become.

Given the breadth and difficulty of the issues tackled, I shall be disappointed by this issue of Computer Music Journal only if it rouses no strong response--either for or against--but merely slips into the vast stream of flowing discourse, neither washing anything clean, nor sweeping anything away. I have tried, by my own article and by the selection and juxtaposition of the other included articles, to stir the computer music community from what seems to me a largely apathetic embrace of established, and even establishmentarian, notions of quality, goals, means, and significance of those arts that use the computer to create music. I heartily welcome, and hereby solicit, feedback--whether a short note or a substantial critique.

--Guy E. Garnett, Guest Editor

[Editor's note: Readers' responses will be considered for publication in a future issue as letters to the editor. Please direct responses to cmj@mitpress.mit.edu.]

...