Machines for making music
We are in continual thrall to sounds that are digital, radiophonic or electrified
From early instruments made of reed and bone to the latest digital gadgets, music and technology have always been inseparable, writes Tom Service
When I was at university, back in the now-unimaginable pre-internet days of the mid1990s, there was a difference between courses called ‘music’ and ‘music technology’. It seemed to stand to reason at the time: ‘music’ meant musical history and theory, performance and composition with pens and paper; ‘music technology’ was computers and software, wires and recording.
★ow wrong we were. The idea that you can separate ‘music’ from ‘technology’ is a profound fallacy. The vast majority of our musical traditions are the result of a symbiotic dance through the centuries of music and technology, the one inspiring and feeding off the other to create new ideas, languages and kinds of expression. That story began when we started to shape the environment around us to make new sounds millennia ago, turning caves into resonating chambers, making the first instruments from bamboo reeds and animal bones. And it’s a technological truism that’s as much the case for acoustic musical cultures as it is of any music that’s made with machines today.
But hang on a minute: what about the piano, organ, violin or flute? These are all machines for making music, it’s just that we think of them as inert instruments which are made musical through the quickening of human breath, fingers and bodies. Yet each of those instruments is a technological marvel. Take the piano. Today’s concert grands are the latest in a history of keyboard instruments designed to play soft and loud (piano and forte) that evolved from the start of the 18th century, whose dizzying, experimental variety of forms and sounds were exploited by composers from Mozart to Beethoven, from Chopin to Liszt. These composers released the expressive power of the instruments they knew, and pushed their piano-makers for more. Whatever else it is, their piano music is a story of an ongoing exploitation of pianistic technology.
It’s the same in the orchestra. Berlioz dreamt of new instruments, while Wagner commissioned them. Forward through decades of innovation – 20thcentury composers from Edgard Varèse to Kaija Saariaho, Karlheinz Stockhausen to The Beatles, have conceived new ways of combining the technologies of the recording studio with live performance.
Today, all of our music is mediated by technology. We are in continual thrall to sounds that are digital, radiophonic and otherwise electrified. And we are in a new musical era in the early-ish 21st century. So many of us carry around machines that have the potential to record, create and synthesize pretty well any sound we can imagine: our smartphones represent the utopias that generations of musical thinkers have dreamt about. The question is, what are we going to do with them? It’s up to you…