mystified13 (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mystified13) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} frgen,@ 2005-08-21 10:49:00 |
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Brian Eno on Generative Art, Part IV
Part IV
"Some of the works I've made with Koan sound to me as good as anything I've done. That's important: they work as music and are not- as so much computer-based art has been- just a 'neat idea'. They also symbolize to me the beginning of a new era in music. Until 100 years ago every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again. But Koan and other recent experiments like it are the beginning of something new.
From now on there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations- you can hear it when you want and where you want. And it confers one of the other great advantages of the recorded form: it can be composed empirically. By this I mean that you can hear it as you work it out- it doesn't suffer from the long feedback loop characteristic of scored-and-performed music.
Edgar Wind, in his 1963 Reith Lectures, said: "It might be argued that, in the last analysis, listening to a gramophone or a tape recorder, or to any of the more advanced machines of electro-acoustical engineering, is like listening to a superior kind of musical clock.' I too think it's possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, 'You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?'
The idea of generative music is not original to me (though I think the name is). There have been many experiments towards it over the years, and indeed a lot of my interest was directly inspired by Steve Reich's sixties tape pieces such as 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain'. I think, however, that this new linkage with and increasingly common technology will make this an area that many composers and listeners will want to explore."
From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", p. 332
Part IV
"Some of the works I've made with Koan sound to me as good as anything I've done. That's important: they work as music and are not- as so much computer-based art has been- just a 'neat idea'. They also symbolize to me the beginning of a new era in music. Until 100 years ago every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again. But Koan and other recent experiments like it are the beginning of something new.
From now on there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations- you can hear it when you want and where you want. And it confers one of the other great advantages of the recorded form: it can be composed empirically. By this I mean that you can hear it as you work it out- it doesn't suffer from the long feedback loop characteristic of scored-and-performed music.
Edgar Wind, in his 1963 Reith Lectures, said: "It might be argued that, in the last analysis, listening to a gramophone or a tape recorder, or to any of the more advanced machines of electro-acoustical engineering, is like listening to a superior kind of musical clock.' I too think it's possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, 'You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?'
The idea of generative music is not original to me (though I think the name is). There have been many experiments towards it over the years, and indeed a lot of my interest was directly inspired by Steve Reich's sixties tape pieces such as 'Come Out' and 'It's Gonna Rain'. I think, however, that this new linkage with and increasingly common technology will make this an area that many composers and listeners will want to explore."
From "A Year With Swollen Appendices", p. 332
