Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
with different delays are never going to generate the richness, cadences, and
wild climaxes of Roxy Music. Whatever aesthetic appeal ambient music might
have—“this accommodates many levels of listening attention and is as ignor-
able as it is interesting” (Whittaker 2003, 47)—has to be referred to its own
specific properties, not to its place in any conventional canon.
78
And further,
such music has a quality of constant novelty and unrepeatability lacking in
more traditional music.
In C
varies each time it is performed, according to
the musicians who perform it and their changing preferences;
It's Gonna Rain
depends in its specifics on the parameters of the tape players used, which
themselves vary in time; the computerized system Eno described above is
probabilistic, so any given performance soon differs from all others even if the
generative parameters remain unchanged.
79
Perhaps the easiest way to put the
point I am after is simply to note that Eno's work, like Alvin Lucier's biofeed-
back performances (chap. 3), raises the question, Is it music? This, I take it,
again, is evidence that ontology makes a difference, now in the field of music.
I should add that, evidently, Eno has not been alone in the musical exploita-
tion of partially autonomous dynamic systems, and it is not the case that all
of his colleagues were as decisively affected by reading the
Brain of the Firm
as
he was. My argument is that all of the works in this tradition, cybernetically
inspired and otherwise, can be understood as ontological theater and help us
to see where a cybernetic ontology might lead us when staged as music.
80
Fourth, these remarks lead us, as they did with Beer himself, into questions
of power and control. Usually, the composer of a piece of music exercises
absolute power over the score, deciding what notes are to be played in what
sequence, and thus exercises a great deal of power over musical performers,
who have some leeway in interpreting the piece, and who, in turn, have ab-
solute power over the audience as passive consumers. In contrast, “with this
generative music . . . am I the composer? Are you if you buy the system the
composer? Is Jim Coles and his brother who wrote the software the composer?
Who actually composes music like this? Can you describe it as composition
exactly when you don't know what it's going to be?” (Eno 1996b, 8). These
rhetorical questions point to a leveling of the field of musical production and
consumption. No doubt Eno retains a certain primacy in his work; I could not
generate music half as appealing as his. On the other hand, the responsibil-
ity for such compositions is shared to a considerable extent with elements
beyond the artist's control—the material technology of performance (idio-
syncratic human performers or tape players, complex probabilistic computer
programs)—and with the audience, as in the case of computer-generated mu-
sic in which the user picks the rules. As in the case of Beer's social geometries,
