Blogger Book Club: Bach to the Future

By Marc Weidenbaum

Matthew's previous post got me thinking about a lot of different things, starting with the possible illusion that remix-based music production is inherently simple to accomplish. While the effect of a turntable can be approximated with a mouse click, to equate the two is to miss the qualities inherent in vinyl manipulation (and other such means of working with recorded sound, from John Cage's sliced tapes, to CD mixing, to real-time digital synthesis). A turntablist actively working with the vinyl is very different from someone using a "reverse-LP" effect, and just because someone can add that preset flavor to a track doesn't mean they really can cook. (I'm a big fan of Paul's Boutique, too -- the 20th anniversary just came out. The Dust Brothers are an incredible team, and I prize my MP3s of the instrumental versions of those tracks; they're eminently listenable to in their rap-less form.)

I agree that Lessig doesn't focus on those implications. I think, in the end, he's really talking about "popular" culture in its myriad forms, and most specifically popular culture (1) as a product and (2) as an activity. When it comes to popular music as a product, my sense is he isn't -- and probably needn't be -- concerned with the manner in which it is produced, because that would fall into his "professional" bucket, which is mediated by legal systems of creative attribution and publishing agreements and so forth.

It's popular culture as an activity that's really where he's doing his thinking. (That is, popular culture as it's consumed, and especially as that consumption becomes a form of creativity -- the "W" in "RW.") That's the realm where digital literacy is key, both as an interactive-creativity opportunity for a new generation (and old ones, if they wanna play along), and as a necessity in education. I think the closest he gets to this is in his discussion of that video literacy program in Houston.

When it comes to less-popular music (I'm kind of avoiding the term "art," or at least I was trying to and have now failed), me, I'm not particularly concerned that some percentage of kids who might have picked up a violin will now fiddle, instead, in digital synthesis software. I do get the concern -- the atrophy of physical production of music as computerized tools make realization of musical ideas a more fluid and easily accessible opportunity. I'd be hard put to see the result as anything but positive. But as for the atrophy part, I guess I'm not expecting that to happen. I mean, I saw the Pixar movie Wall-E, yeah, but I don't think we'll all be floating around on hovercraft synthesizers, and shooting each other our casual remixes via Bluetooth as we slowly lose the ability to walk or even move our previously nimble fingers. (Sorry to overstate it. It was just kinda fun to run with the image.)

When I fear the future, I look to the past for precedent. (Yeah, not always with comforting results, but it's a good reality check.) A hundred-plus years after the rise of photography, painting is still in full force. I have never walked into a gallery and seen a photo of a tree and bemoaned the artist's loss of necessity to have used a paint brush to realize it -- no more than I think any less of impressionist painters who had the benefit of train tracks to get them to those lovely natural seaside scenes they so loved to paint.

I also take pleasure in the reverse -- transporting the past into the present: imagining what my cultural heroes of the distant past would do today. Would Bartók appropriate folk songs as raw field recordings (and be something of a rival to Steve Reich and Scott Johnson)? Would Tallis compose motets for near-infinite voices, and work with producers Manfred Eicher or Brian Eno? Would Bach have a day job at Google, and spend his time working on advanced algorithms that perpetrate wild varieties of melodic and rhythmic transformations?

In each case, I think the answer is yes. But those individuals today just as likely might, despite the tools available to us that they didn't have, take comfort in the more traditional materials, techniques, and technologies. Again, the art gallery is a good reality check. Today, handcrafted art is everywhere. Galleries are full of soft sculptures, and drawing is taken seriously as an art unto itself (a peer to painting, rather than a step in the process) as it's never been before -- in part as a reaction to the rise in digital technology, but also because despite the availability of 3D modeling and Photoshop and so forth, yarn and pencil are the tools these artists have found speak to them.