make – share – repeat

Contemporary scholarship in music composition has always born a close relationship to technology. From mechanical improvements in acoustic instruments, early developments in computer music at Bell Laboratories and the current glut of inexpensive “off the shelf” software and hardware solutions for non-linear audio editing and signal processing, composers such as Beethoven, Stockhausen and Radiohead have integrated the newest technologies into their output. This affinity with technology now raises questions about the very nature of the composer. The laptop I’m using to type this page has many times over the audio processing and synthesis power of all the computers at Bell Laboratories in 1957 where Max Mathews created MUSIC, one of the first computer programs to play electronic music. This growth in computing power (and related telecommunications technology) reaches across domains, transforming the manner in which people find, create, experience and use music (and all media), affording those with access the freedom to create and share their work and identity as a multimedia artist with unprecedented ease. This begs the question, “Why would someone want to limit themselves to being a composer?”

For the student composer, emphasis falls on preparation for making a living off of and contributing to the classical canon, while the cultural authority of this music wanes . This approach ignores the realities of modern cultural production where the artifacts created and the artist that create them are increasingly difficult to describe within traditional disciplinary boundaries. Internationally recognized creativity scholar Ken Robinson stated in his 2006 TED Talk, “Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.” If one may count on the consensus that composition is in fact a creative activity, then certainly music scholarship may profit from interdisciplinary work.  The broader social benefit is clearly described by biologist and social theorist Edmund O. Wilson,   “Most of the issues that vex humanity daily – economic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, poverty – cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is . . .”

So – What does it mean to be a composer in world where an inexpensive laptop grants easy control over audio, video, photographic content, graphic design, text and the means to easily share your products in a space where physical proximity will eventually be of  no hindrance at all? My current work addresses this paradigm from the perspective of music composition, a point of view often neglected in multimedia arts. Commonly this portion of the audio component is hired out to composers tasked with creating a work to specification and in service of the other media elements. More often audio is selected from batches of banal pre-fabricated clips in a manner similar to selecting from stock photography. Devices to capture, create and manipulate media are growing in power and connectivity while shrinking in size and we are creating the content.  Humans create, share and engage culture through what’s in our pocket, on our kitchen tables, in rows by the dozen at university computer labs.  Modern Scholarship in music composition must embrace this paradigm or leave matters to the media conglomerates where monetary returns are the only obligation.

Below is film_2: role strain. Taken with film_1: three variation, these films begin the narrative that will form a self-reflective exploration of what happens when an expensively trained composer tries to reach out beyond his sphere – when music in a multimedia work is central to the formal and aesthetic constitution of the work – not just clip art.