Eliminating Human Error In Music Doesn't Guarantee Sensory Interest
The Age
Wednesday July 10, 2002
MUSIC Review: AUSTRALASIAN COMPUTER MUSIC CONFERENCE 2002, Victorian College of the Arts, July 6-8
It has been 21 years since Melbourne hosted the International Conference on Music and Technology, one of the more powerful and concentrated experiences for devotees of contemporary music-making, and a rare platform for up-to-the-mark composers.
Last weekend, the Victorian College of the Arts and RMIT University brought together a wide range of lecturers and presenters dealing with modern-day fusions of computers and creativity. Representatives from leading universities - Monash, Swinburne, Melbourne, RMIT, Waikato, Edith Cowan, Sydney - presented papers, as did a few individuals from outside the academic world. But, as at the 1981 conference, the real interest for an observer lay in the musical events.
The five evening concerts demonstrated what progress has been made in computer music. While the conference set up a thematic focus on form, space and time (bringing in the discipline of architecture), much of the discussion material focused on individual pieces of software.
Room 113 at the VCA has been the venue for many public concerts since the college's foundation. Of course, in these financially straitened times, it would have been a tall order for there to have been different performance areas for each of the concerts - setting up electronic equipment makes the seating of a symphony orchestra look like child's play. Still, it might have made for less deadening sameness if one of the events had been held somewhere else.
The programs contained a sample by two leading lights of computer music, both of whom had recently died: Jeff Pressing and Ian Fredericks. This double loss leaves a large gap in the sparsely populated ranks of experts in this form of composition.
After 50 years of development, music generated by or with the aid of computers has changed not so much in content, but considerably in rapidity of execution and an awesome purity of detail.
Even when listening to motor-rhythms or regular pulses, you have to be impressed by the computer's power to eliminate human error - even if such admiration can be exhausted by a composer's over-use of repeated patterns, in some cases as debilitating to the ear as the circumscribed vocabulary of a rock drummer.
We were offered works relayed through an audience-surrounding battery of speakers, issued from a central work-station, requiring nothing except a kind of aural immersion. These compositions have a concentration of focus, putting no mediating element between sounds and listener. This sort of experience, where there are no distractions at all, resembles listening to an unpredictable CD in a darkened room.
Of more sensory interest were works that combined live musical performance with pre-recorded tracks or with computer-generated treatments of sounds being made by the musicians at their work: real-time computer composition.
Gordon Monro's Many Worlds Theory best exemplified the first of these pairings. It employed a harpsichordist performing from a score and being aurally escorted by taped noises, both sound sources interweaving with exemplary disregard for the disjunction between an ``old" instrument and cutting-edge technology.
Paul Doornbbusch's Continuity 3 juxtaposed violently aggressive sounds generated by percussionist Timothy Phillips with a contemporaneous commentary that employed the musician's material as a basis for elaboration.
Along the same lines, Brigid Burke's Lands Collide utilised computer, live performance from the composer and percussionist Wendy Couch, and a series of slides that, in the context of the opening concert, shone out as humane in intent, making its individualistic and quiet statements on cultural intermingling and juxtapositions.
At other times, the musical content moved into the past, albeit a recent one, in particular when the sounds coming through the speakers took on the boppy cuteness of Hollywood music written for scenes with benign robots.
Every so often, this listener's receptivity channels became muddled with reminiscences of Forbidden Planet, or worse, Lost in Space.
Computer music composers have at their disposal an unparalleled wealth of resources, along with absolute authority.
If something goes wrong with the equipment, of course a technician can be blamed; but if the work turns out to be trivial, there is no hiding behind a performer's lack of sympathy.
Much of this music impresses as cloudy; you hear plenty of intriguing chains of ideas, sonorous sequences put alongside each other, but without many signs of cumulative development beyond all-too-predictable crescendos and an almost compulsory dying-out of sound to inaudibility.
Nothing I heard had the some overwhelming effect as that of Richard Moore's Antediluvian Groove at the 1981 conference.
On the other hand, while quite a few works over last weekend presented puzzles, it is hard to recall one that outlived its welcome.
If left bemused by the sometimes unadventurous nature of the music-making, you could certainly not complain about a lack of variety.
But, even with limited exposure, I was surprised to find that the same focus has been maintained over a 20-year period. To many practitioners and admirers of this school of music, clearly the creative process is still of more interest than the result.
© 2002 The Age
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