NACTMUS - National Council of Tertiary Music Schools - Conference 2001

If no man is an island, then what am I floating in? The island mentality of music technology and what we can learn from it.

by Houston Dunleavy

Often the mundane or familiar is overlooked as a way of teaching us or bringing new insights. In this paper, I'd like to explore a fairly familiar subject -the mindset of composers who, for one reason or another, eschew involvement with other musicians, particularly performers, in order to pursue electro-acoustic music composition. It is not my purpose to go deeply into the characteristics and possibilities of the twentieth century's analogue and digital music. If I wanted to present such a history, I'd be better off writing a book! Rather, I shall quickly sum up the potential directions of the software in common usage and show how they continue a venerable tradition of thought among a certain type of composer. Then I'd like to examine a couple of other issues which, in the light of such potential, can be viewed in a new way, once the possibilities and implications of digital composition are examined and understood.

It only takes a cursory look at the available hardware and software occupying the home and commercial music studios around Australia to realize what the main point of it all is, apart from making the makers of the hardware and software extremely rich. The users of digital music products are often pursuing the same objectives as composers who pioneered the tape-dominated world of the last century. The razorblade-wielding women and men who made tape loops, explored tape recorder feedback and stuck patch pins into analogue synthesizers the size of small buses (which, like old buses, were started with a key and needed five to ten minutes to warm up) were attracted to the freedom that even such seemingly clumsy equipment was offering. This freedom didn't come merely from the ability to inhabit a new and exciting sonic world, but was also born from the opportunity to explore new and exhilarating compositional processes, and the ability to take the creation of a finished work of art from its original conception through to its final performance without having to involve any other musician.

Such freedom, such independence, was attractive to the kind of composer who wished for complete artistic control. There was no need for the interpretive prowess of the performer in the purely tape world, and even in the world of instrument or voice and tape, the input and flexibility of the performer was limited by the inflexible pre-recorded partner, the ever-present voice of the creator holding sway. When I sat in concert halls and sound studios in the 1980's and 1990's, listening to tape works by Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Steve Reich, Peter Tahourdin, and the lesser luminaries who were my peers, I was conscious of the fact that I was listening directly to the voices of the composers. Apart from any mishaps in the playback process, I was hearing an exact reproduction of what the composer had created in the studio; there was no input into the performance I was hearing in the air other than that of the composer. It was as if the composer were saying, "Yes, Houston, there is a God, and for the next few minutes, it is Me."

Now that tape and its associated paraphernalia are mostly museum pieces (with Wendy Carlos being both the best-known and most eccentric exception) the replacement technology of shiny discs and plastic boxes full of microchips seems to be busy carrying on the noble tradition of providing music creators, without regard to background or skill level, with the opportunity to make music that is entirely their own.

I made that cursory glance I mentioned before around one of our studios in Wollongong the morning I left to come here. I resisted the understandable urge to pat the Macintosh as I would an old and reliable horse, instead noting the massive increase in its power since I started on a Classic all those years ago. That old machine, probably now in the same museum as the razor blades, was to the current model as an old East German Trabant is to a modern German Mercedes Benz (although I think the current Mac retails for considerably less than either the Merc. or the Classic). What we have in the current model is the ability to run several memory-hungry programs simultaneously. Not only can we produce the recordings that a previous generation of composers would have been familiar with, but the Mac. can create real-time performances of extremely busy and complex sound pieces.

The software designed to run on this miraculous machine is as varied as what the manufacturers believe their customer base to be. In the little studio we set aside for undergraduate composers, there is the notation software Finale (an old friend from the 1980's when its icon was a hooded monk named Igor who held a scroll). Finale provides, among other things, access to professional standard notation and publication, instant audition of written music and a notated way into the MIDI world. Finale allows a number of skill levels to produce notated scores, as well as providing a useful tool for copyists and student composers who want to work as copyists. It provides a number of methods for entering data, and some need not even be particularly accurate in their final notation, if all the composer wishes is for Finale to re-create the same sounds that were input.

Finale allows files to be exported to other applications and edited therein. Applications such as Cubase, Sound Edit and Pro Tools are both editing and performing software which can provide real-time playback, like Finale, but can be edited without the need to resort to notation. They can also provide files which can be exported into other applications, such as Flash, a computer animation application, and thus soundtracks can be written, edited and synchronized on the same machine.

To this composer, who also spends a large amount of time performing both pre-written and improvised music, one of the most exciting elements of my little studio is the MAX program. MAX is real-time composing and performing software which allows for changes in real time as well as before the event. It is a very flexible and powerful program that uses very little memory. It can be linked with other applications to produce multimedia pieces as well as pure sound events, and can control any sound device. Any of the above-named applications can manipulate sampled sounds as well as general MIDI data, and are, with the possible exception of MAX, which is more likely to be a staple of the experimental or University sound studio, commonly found in sound studios around the world. All of these applications sit on my Mac., just a click away.

A very plausible way of looking at contemporary music technology, then, is that it can be used as a tool for complete independence of artistic thought and action. It appeals to the composer or sound performer who wishes to challenge the idea that wasput forward so many years ago; that no man, or woman, is an island - that we are all interconnected. A couple of hours in a digital music studio is often enough to completely throw that idea out of the window. A virtual sound world can be created without having to resort to the interpretive help of someone else. The sound studio occupant can live in complete isolation, the sounds of the mind emerging directly into the air. For the right personality type, it is a heady, intoxicating mixture of freedom and power - a virtual one-person world to inhabit and rule.

Here's an example of what can be done with all of this independence - whether for good or evil. Early this year, I finished work on the incidental music to a CD of the poetry of Alan Wearne. On this CD, the poems are read by the poet from his new poetic novel, The Lovemakers, and are then linked by my music. The entire project was recorded, edited, composed, produced and mastered using only three machines and two or three applications on the computer. There was no need to involve anyone else in the creation of the CD as all of the editing of both text and music could be done by those who had conceived it in the first place, in a tiny room in the bowels of the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong. When the master CD left for reproduction, no-one outside of the creative team who appear on the CD liner notes had any input into the final sound product. It was a paragon of digital potential. Perhaps this is a good time to play you a little of both the poetry and the music.

With all of this potential, it is tempting to leave our imaginary composer in his or her imaginary world. It is easy to have a taste of this glorious solitude and leave for other, more gregarious pastures. However, the point of this paper is to hold up this state of affairs, caused by both the wishes of composers and the power of the available technology, against two other phenomena.

The first is the current dominant philosophy of research funding. The dominant paradigm in current research funding can be summed up by a number of synonyms - cross-disciplinarity, collaboration, cross faculty and a host of other terms that force the individual researcher to stand in line with the equivalent of a dustpan and brush to look for the crumbs and dust left over after the big groups have picked up their grants. It is a philosophy born just as easily out of economic rationalism as from finding the unique perspectives provided by individual specialists from a number of different fields. Research funding tends not to benefit the researchers financially either, of course - although the arguments behind this are more complex. Yet it does seem odd that funding is more easily gained to pay for printing costs than for the time spent by the researcher on the project. An example close to my heart is the little CD you heard earlier. All of the funding won for this project went to pay for the production of the CD, the design and printing of the label and jacket and for its marketing and promotion. I can tell you that neither of the creators involved, saw any of it.

The paradox I see in this is that funding for research and creativity into music technology is no different from other forms of research funding. Despite the potential afforded by the technology for individual development and achievement, which seems not only to carry on an old tradition but even to be forging new paths in this direction, the dominant form of funding is co-operative and group orientated. I'm neither crying sour grapes, nor decrying the potential of such multi-disciplinary research (and I am quite willing to have anyone who is heavily involved in the granting of research dollars demonstrate to me that I have got hold of the wrong, even pointy, end of the stick). What I am trying to point out is the seeming dichotomy between the potential of new technology and its ability to allow thinking, creative individuals to beat paths of breathtaking originality and independence, and the direction that the economic rationalists seem to want to take research in order to maximise the value of the spent dollar. The struggle between the two worries me: that research, creativity and new technology are heading in different, seemingly irreconcilable directions seems to point to the fact that we really aren't getting efficient returns on invested research dollars, as one of the most important potentials of the developing technologies is being overlooked, or completely ignored, for short-sighted economic gain.

A second point I want to make is a little more speculative, but it was prompted by that fact that I have been involved recently with the development of a new music course at the University of Wollongong which is to replace, or perhaps it is better to say "expand upon", the current music composition stream. Without going into too much detail, as we still have a little bit of thrashing out to do when I get back later this month, we are going through a process of sorting out aspects of the old course worth keeping, but primarily we're concentrating on areas of expansion and on new ways of teaching old principles.

The way music technology has developed over the past 80 years or so seemed to me to provide an ideal metaphor for the job at hand in our Faculty. To wit, the freedom and independence that new technology espouses provides a clear path for education in music (particularly education in the creation of music) to emulate. What is needed in the pedagogy of music creation (please note that I am using a wider term than the loaded "music composition") is a group of individual pathways, either within one institution or shared between several, which can respond and provide safe havens for the widest possible variety of creative temperaments and musical backgrounds. Such a group of pathways would not only provide a larger cohort of creative students with the opportunity of pursuing a rigorous programme of study at a high level, but continue to expand the stylistic possibilities which would be open for young musicians to explore and inform the future.

Examples for inclusion in such programmes would be improvisation and musical happenings, web-based sound design, music happenings designed especially for young children, the creation of critical listening environments to train ears to listen in new ways and sound installations. Programmes should be designed with the backgrounds of students taken into consideration, as opposed to attempting to make students conform to a narrow, possibly outdated, model of what music creation is. Some exciting examples of such new paths are being taken right now, but much more is needed to create a panorama of choices and directions. If such new paths are not taken, we in the University system, will miss out on interacting and training a large section of dynamic young musicians who are from non-traditional, but still exciting backgrounds. They will be the poorer for it - and so will we.

Biographical Note

Ulster-born Houston Dunleavy is Lecturer in and Co-ordinator of Composition at the Faculty of Creative Arts, the University of Wollongong, where he has taught since 1995. He also teaches analysis, computer music and vocal and improvisation ensembles. Since 1985, he has pursued a national and international career as a composer and conductor, leading American contemporary-music authorities to refer to him as "one of the best of distinguished group of young composers to emerge recently" and "one of the leading interpreters of 20th-century music in his generation". One even commented that "he will one day, no doubt be a composer of national, maybe even international reputation". Since completing his Ph.D. at Buffalo in 1994, he has taught at The American University in Washington D.C., James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, U.S.A., The National Music Camp, Interlochen, Michigan, USA, the Bethesda academy of the Performing Arts. He has conducted, and had performances of his music, at "June in Buffalo", the North American New Music Festival and The National Music Camp, USA. He made his European debut as both a composer and conductor in Scotland in 1995 at the Hoy Composersâ Course, where he was invited by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to write for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra String Quartet. In 1997, his score for Merlinda Bobisâ play Ms Serenaâs Serenata played to critical and audience acclaim in its season as part of the Sydney Asian Festival. In 1999 he was Visiting Composer at the Cleveland Institute of Music (twice) and Ball State University and was a Participating Composer at the June in Buffalo Festival. In 2000 he was appointed Musical Director of the Illawarra Choral Society. 2001 sees the commercial release of two CDs featuring Dunleavy's music.

2001 NACTMUS Conference