Editor's Notes.(Brief Article)

The character of technology, both within and without academia, is such that it almost necessarily calls attention to itself. "Look, I'm new, I'm different. Bigger, better, faster, more lifelike, more otherworldly." And yet ultimately the arts that utilize technology most strongly must address issues different from the technology itself. They must address, as all arts must to remain viable, issues of value and meaning--that is, if they wish to remain art and not sink into cultural commodity. That they use technology, or what technology they use, is not so important as how they use technology--to what human, cultural, and aesthetic ends it is directed. The essays gathered here do not speak with one voice about the role of technology in music, nor do they even reflect any common repertoire--they each draw on works from very different camps. And yet, with one exception, each essay presents, as one of its primary themes, the human impact of that technology. The exception points up the difference; the essay by Martin Supper arises from a less humanist, more positive branch of modern aesthetics. Its concerns are more with the objective characteristics of a work than with its cultural or personal impact. It takes as its starting point the contentious assertion that computer music is music that requires a computer for its composition. It then proceeds to an ostensive definition of this ontology by enumerating several representative computer music works.

This broader theme, the relation of a human artist or listener to the musical process, while most clearly presented as such in my own article and that of Horacio Vaggione, can be discerned in the article by Stan Link in such statements as: "Namely, the illusion of human performance that Tables Clear allows us at its beginning is, indeed, incontrovertibly broken by the work's technical accomplishment, and yet ...