Wiardgroup

At 04:16 PM 7/1/04 +0000, "grantrichter2001" <grichter@asapnet.net> wrote:
> > Grant, is that you trolling... :-)
>
>Guilty as charged.
>
>However the reviewer raises an interesting point. To use an
>analogy of visual painting.
>
>Electronic music equipment designers have created a box of
>paints so enormous that you can't lift the lid anymore.
>
>Or, if you can get the lid off, the box is big enough to get lost
>inside.
>
>The point I see him making is that instrument design has
>progress far faster than the capacity to apply it musically. This is
>what I mean about "designs for Martians". I know mathematically
>that certain designs have application for music generation.
>
>But we haven't begun to understand how to apply the simplest
>ADSR from the 60's, much less advanced designs like a MARF.
>
>The designers of the 60's were designing for a future that has
>not occured yet, and I am designing for a future that may never
>occur at all.

Every instrument has taken a long time for its full potential to be 
discovered & utilized.  Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were 30? 50? years 
after the invention of the saxophone.  It took well over a hundred years 
from its invention for the romatic composers of the 1800s to get lost 
enough inside that large black box called the pianoforte to find its 
emotional potential.  The fact that Jimi Hendrix came less than 20 years 
after the invention of the electric guitar (not counting electrified steels 
[btw it is the LAP steel, not the pedal steel, which is commonly used in 
"Don Ho" Hawaiian music]) is probably a testimony to the massive popularity 
(and mass manufacture) of the instrument.  And those instruments all have 
extremely diverse usages - it even took nearly a decade to figure out the 
one trick in that pony called the TB-303.

The "electronic music synthesizer" complicates things by being an entire 
class of instruments, rather than a single instrument.  With the different 
classes ranging from the VCS3 to the Triton to the General MIDI Casio to 
the DSI Evolver to softsynths of every flavor, the situation is further 
complicated by the wealth of control interfaces (wheras most existing 
instruments, or even classes of instrument, have one control interface or 
combination of interfaces).  The possibilities aren't *infinite*, but the 
instrument *is* much more open-ended than any that came before it.

And again, with most instruments, there are also people who obsess over the 
"insides of the box" - the different woods, finishes & glues used for 
string instruments (not to mention the actual strings), or 
sax/oboe/bassoon/clarinet players' obsessions over reeds & 
mouthpieces.  Sometimes, the people who know the most about those are 
"non-players" (as were Bob & Don) whose expertise might be in woodworking 
instead of electronics.

It's true that there are many electronic pieces that fall into the category 
of "academic exercise" rather than art (and in my opinion, using an 
electronic music synthesizer to perform classical orchestral music IS an 
academic exercise).  But sometimes academic exercises are necessary to 
advance the state of the art (playing Hindemeth exercises sure as hell 
isn't art, but the pianist who has spent time playing them will probably be 
better-prepared to play artistic pieces more artistically - or might just 
end up like Nick - "Carpal Tunnel syndrome is all classical music did for 
me" is a great quote!).

So in conclusion, I must find the reviewer's criticisms to be mostly 
unfounded.  We must expect long waits before artistic breakthroughs on 
*any* instrument, and the complexity/open-endedness (and lack of market 
saturation like the electric guitar in the 1960s) of the synthesizer means 
that we may have to wait even longer than the not-quite-50 years the 
instrument has been around.  Every instrument, too, will have practicioners 
more concerned with the "nuts and bolts" or technological aspects than the 
artistic aspects, which is human nature; some people are artists, and some 
people are technicians (some are both, some are neither).  And while 
"academic" or "conceptual" pieces may not be art in themselves, they still 
may be necessary to advance the state of the art.

         -Doug
          jasret@mindspring.com