 Ray Kurzweil, Gil Rose, and Tod Machover |
Ray Kurzweil, Gil Rose, and Tod Machover
September 24, 2001
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Moderated and Videotaped by Frank J. Oteri
Transcribed by Amanda MacBlane
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, you can approach that at different levels. At a simple level, it’s a collection of human musicians using music controllers to create music. The 19th-century technology hadn’t necessarily linked between the physics of creative sound and the method of controlling, so you had to play a flute to create flute sounds. With 20th-century technology we’ve begun to break that nexus between the controllers and the sounds, so you can use different types of controllers, you can use a flute-like controller to create voice sounds and you can certainly use a keyboard to create virtually any sound. And it also allows the creation of controllers that are optimized for the human factors of creating sound that are not necessarily linked to 19th-century acoustic instruments. There is, however, a lot of musical tradition and musical knowledge in both the music-appreciating audience and musicians who create music in the orchestra using 19th-century instruments. So a lot of our musical understanding comes from that tradition because that tradition has been evolving. That’s one aspect of western music and culture in general — that it’s constantly shifting, but has its roots in tradition. So certainly we can take small steps and add electronic instruments alongside the traditional acoustic instruments and many orchestras have done that, it’s just simple augmentation. If you go away from classical symphony orchestras to more practical orchestras, such as the small orchestras associated with Broadway plays and so on, they take advantage of the ability of electronic synthesizers at a minimum to emulate lots of instruments so that they can put out a rich sound with a relatively small number of musicians. But in keeping with the ever-shifting and evolving nature of music in our society, it’s keeping its roots in the past while it’s birthing new forms, and the technology is allowing us to create music with an ever-growing palette of sound, sound modification tools, different types of controllers, non-real time forms of creating music, so that you can use sequencers and play music in non-real time; you can go back to cell modification and really massage your work in non-real-time and then combine some non-real-time programming with real-time performance. So we have many new options today but the concept of an orchestra has never been fixed. Consider, the orchestra underwent evolution until it reached its modern form earlier this century.
GIL ROSE: Well, the question you’re asking is about the word “orchestra” and how it resonates with the public at large. And my feeling is that in the year 2001, the word orchestra means many more things than it did even 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. I mean, the history of our musical culture in the last 100 years as far as ensembles go is breaking down into smaller and smaller and smaller subsets. At the beginning of the century, there was your standard symphony orchestra, your opera company, and various accepted chamber music forms, string quartet, blah, blah, blah, and the trio, and this and that, but partially as different instruments were involved and partially as technology and electronics were involved we started to break into an even wider group of sets. And even in this day, in 2001, there are a lot of different kinds of orchestras out there and this, I think, will ultimately be an interesting point when you start relating it to the relationship of technology into the orchestra world. What is the orchestra world? Is the orchestra world the large, established, well-endowed symphony orchestras? Yes, to a majority of the public. Is there a subculture of orchestras out there that are regional or have a different budgetary level which makes their constraints and relationship to the public different? Or are there specific groups like ACO or my orchestra in Boston that are specifically trying to drive an agenda to create a different kind of orchestra but still have the large orchestral body, and there’s the chamber orchestra and the new music group and the this and the that and there’s so many different little groups that have come into having their own kind of definition, you know, this kind of thing or that kind of thing. They have their own little clique and their own little way of operating and they’re seen by the public in a certain way. Almost each of those different groups has become so well-defined that they have different potentials for integration of technology and some have greater restrictions. And sometimes the most financially sound ones are the ones that have the biggest barriers to taking risks and engulfing technology and new ways of thinking. And sometimes the ones that are on the lower end of the feeding chain economically can’t do it for other reasons, because technology and integrating it brings its own set of circumstances. So I think that there is no one orchestra. But in the general public’s mind, there still is one orchestra. There’s the Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra and these major symphonic institutions. But there’s also a definite upsurge in the base of support and the audience for what we could call the alternative orchestra.
RAY KURZWEIL: It kind of sparked one thought. Just that the word “orchestra” does tend to imply a connotation of a more traditional kind of music because there’s a whole other world of commercial music, many different forms of popular music, which itself has been splintering into many different genres, which don’t have a lot of tradition behind them and have been very quick to experiment and become in fact very electronic. And a majority of commercial music is electronic and can experiment quite freely with different forms and different timbres. The concept of an “orchestra” does imply a tradition.
TO
D MACHOVER: Clearly there are all kinds of ensembles called orchestras that are all sizes and forms and contexts… I think the thing that’s interesting and maybe what has interested me in this particular project is that what we think of as the traditional symphony orchestra is the largest number of people and is maybe the most fixed structure. For all kinds of reasons, that’s the organization and the culture that has found it hardest to integrate technology in any way. But in almost every other form of music, there are lots of reasons both musically and conceptually why if you have five players or ten players, there are obvious ways that you’d want to use technology to augment and fill and it’s just clear. Just as if you are an independent composer at home and you want to try your pieces out, it’s obvious that you need these resources. If you’re a symphony orchestra, you have almost every practical consideration going against you to try anything really different.
TOD MACHOVER: It’s interesting to ask what technology could bring to a symphony orchestra.
GIL ROSE: It’s also interesting to ask what people who go to a symphony orchestra are looking for. Because sometimes you’re talking completely from an acoustical sense… The pressure that comes to bear on an orchestra, on the institution of the orchestra, comes from a constituency of both audience members and supporters. What is their relationship with technology? If they could be somehow more related to technology, then the whole process might happen a lot faster. We have to accept this, ’cause that’s where the bottom line decision is.
RAY KURZWEIL: That’s true. There are two reasons why you might want to use synthesizers. One is cost savings. One synthesizer can create a whole string section or a horn section and can replace multiple instruments and musicians. That application is used commonly by small orchestras, especially in Broadway shows where you have four or five musicians who need to sound like the whole orchestra. At a traditional classical orchestra like the Boston Symphony, they don’t have that pressure. The other purpose of the synthesizer, and electronic music in general, is to create new types of sounds that you can’t make with violins and guitars and pianos. And to take advantage of the great palette of sounds on applications, sequencing techniques, and so forth. And for that you need a body of music and musical tradition. The symphony-going public wants a certain repertoire, most of which is classical and doesn’t call for these new sounds. There’s a tradition of modern music that can make use of it, but the repertoire of classical music incorporating new forms and new sounds that would require electronic music is limited although growing. Even more limited is the public appreciation of the symphony orchestra.
TOD MACHOVER: I think we’re at a crossroads where technology brings into focus this question of whether traditional orchestras are going to be vibrant living organizations of the 21st century that continue building the repertoire, or are they going to rest on past repertoire. Boulez has talked for years about orchestras little by little having various sub-ensembles: you’d have a full symphony concert, but you might have a chamber orchestra concert or mixed pieces on one concert. And I think not integrating technology in some ways, not providing the right forum for composers to be invited to create work… Right now there isn’t that much repertoire for full orchestra and technology because composers aren’t stupid. It’s hard enough to go out and get work done. I’m one of the dumber ones who keeps trying to do these things. But it’s hard. People don’t have rehearsal time. The conditions aren’t really right, so we have to change that.
RAY KURZWEIL: I would hope that that would happen because otherwise the traditional symphony orchestra is just going to become sort of a relic for preserving this old tradition and it’s not going to remain a vibrant new art form. It certainly made its way back in the Beatles‘ days into popular music that used traditional rock instruments. There were many pioneers, but the Beatles played a role in introducing to the public the idea of a wider palette of sounds that invariably get explored today. But classical music really needs to move in this direction as well and use all of the sound notation tools.
TOD MACHOVER: Just last night I was thinking about the Beatles. This week, I happened to be teaching the great period of Stockhausen and Boulez and Xenakis, the guys in the ’50s and ’60s who brought electronic music to the public. The Beatles are an interesting case because in those days, it’s all documented, Paul McCartney used to go all the time to see Stockhausen concerts and Berio concerts. And he knew that music, he and John Lennon knew that music pretty well. They were up on the latest electronic thing, so when they did Sgt. Pepper’s and moved away from live performance into studio things, they weren’t ripping off Stockhausen and Berio, but they got a lot of inspiration from them and really admired them. These days, it almost also happens the opposite way around. You’re absolutely right, in general, the people who’ve understood and capitalized on technology faster have been in the entertainment and pop industry and especially orchestras, of all institutions, are lagging way behind. Except for Gil’s, most of them!
RAY KURZWEIL: People who represent the market for symphony orchestras are sophisticated. They’re certainly familiar with popular music and synthesizers and they’d like to keep the tradition alive. I think you could hardly write really modern music without incorporating the more expressive technology that is now available.
GIL ROSE: I think you’re right. I think this is an interesting point, though, because I hear this point made often: that people attending orchestra concerts are ripe for the picking. They understand this, they come from a culture that understands this; they all fit a profile where that should make sense. So why doesn’t it happen? Where’s the missing link? One of the missing links, and I’m going to get a little negative here, is the leadership at some of the levels, in some of the more traditional, let’s say standard orchestras, where they feel they are unable to take certain risks because there’s a minority which would be unaccepting of this, but they’re a vocal minority. They’re the ones that slam the doors when they walk out of concerts, they’re the ones that call and threaten to pull their subscriptions and/or their contributions. They’re a very, very vocal minority but I think you’re absolutely right, the ground is well-laid. It applies to technology ’cause it’s the focus of our discussion, but it also applies to using the influences of indigenous music and from all sorts of musical melting pots that could enliven and grow the orchestra. But why doesn’t that happen? It’s a good question.
TOD MACHOVER: I think there are a lot of reasons, which are ones that are f
un to talk about. Besides the question of rehearsal time, there are two things that come to mind… One I don’t have a good answer to but I’d love to know what you think, the second, I’ll suggest… One is the standardization of technology. One of the reasons an orchestra does so well is that the instruments have evolved, but they’ve evolved at a reasonable speed and once the brass instruments got to a certain point, they stayed that way for awhile. Technology, every stage of it, whether it’s the synths or the cables or the mixing desks… First of all, they become obsolete quickly and just literally, it changes. Gil and I did a concert last May of pieces of mine that were all less than ten years old and we could hardly get them to work anymore mostly because of the computer software, because the Macs didn’t exist. So that’s one question, standardization, what you do with that, because you’re the big master of showing how fast technology actually is changing. Question number two is that there isn’t the same level of professional infrastructure of people in the orchestra or in the orchestra world for that matter, whereas in the pop industry or the movie/entertainment industry, people who create and rehearse know how to make a compromise. UC San Diego is starting a new doctoral program, it’s a program in computer performance, and it’s basically to train people who are kind of the equivalent in skill of a conductor; people who have to know music and they might help a composer realize a piece so that it would sound good, people who would be an interface with an orchestra… They’re actually recommending that orchestras have someone like this on staff at some point. But what about standardization?
RAY KURZWEIL: That’s actually a very important issue, not just in music but in general: the whole issue of the perishability of digital information. We have this idea that once we have something in digital form it could potentially last forever and certainly software does outlive the hardware it lives on. If you replace your personal computer, you don’t trash all of your files, you copy them over, so your files have a longevity that goes beyond the hardware they live on and this is segued into the discussion that if we can actually capture the files in our own brains, our “mindfile” can live beyond the hardware that we’ve lived on, but that’s a different discussion, but it had brought up the issue that information doesn’t necessarily live forever, in fact it doesn’t last very long at all. And if you ever try to reconstruct some file from ten to fifteen years ago of Wordstar or some other word processing document, or a piece of music, sequence files or something, which would be even more obscure because you probably were using some low distribution piece of software and the company doesn’t even exist anymore and you’ve got many layers of software and hardware to get, you’re going to get this old computer and this old operating system and the application and the application files and get the media to work. And you can try reconstructing information on some old 8″ disc platters and that’s a really difficult problem. In my work now, we’re looking at some databases. We want to actually exist 20 years from now. We’re thinking, what the heck system can we possibly use that we can be sure will exist 20 years from now. The conclusion we came to is there isn’t one. The only way to have that information last is if in fact people care about it for the next 20 years and therefore, continue to maintain it, pour it into the next operating system, the next database version and so the basics or the moral of this is that if this information lasts, if someone cares about it, ’cause otherwise it will quickly grow obsolete. The point you made about music software, equipment, getting up old instruments which involve software, different layers, is one example of this fairly pervasive problem. The other issue is that you have this pretty well-established, very finely tuned tradition with the role of conductors and all the musicians know what they’re doing and there’s a whole body of music and there needs to be some musical bridge to incorporate these new forms but there isn’t. But I would hope it would come from the world of modern music, which has been experimental. We could say they do breakdown these traditions. Certainly, they have forms that are very different or we use different sets of instruments, so why not incorporate electronic instruments, not simply to create acoustic sounds which acoustic instruments can still do somewhat better, but to actually incorporate the very rich sounds that are impossible with acoustic instruments. You can create sounds that have the complexity and richness and enharmonicity of the piano, but it’s not a piano, it could only come from a synthesizer. Maybe it started with a piano, but it’s been modified in various ways so it maintains that complexity and richness and musical relevance and is now something new. And then the artist has to come in and make some artistic statement that is relevant, but it is a great expansion of the palette and possibilities.
TOD MACHOVER: Gil, I was going to ask you, relating to this question of a new kind of training. You’re a good example of someone who’s trained in traditional music and then traditional contemporary music, but has done more and more technology. I was just wondering, what about technology do you feel you’ve started to understand and what do you still need to understand?
GIL ROSE: Yeah, that’s a good question I think, because if there’s a barrier to realizing more the technological use in the orchestra world, it’s probably conductors who are the barrier and administrators who are at the decision-making level and function the same way as artistic administrators. If they don’t have experience and/or an interest, it can be a little bit frightening. I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of years, but I’m really basically still a novice in so many ways. But the one thing I learned early on in the process was, if you’re going to do that kind of stuff, to get people around you who know what they’re doing. This thing at UC San Diego is perfect. If there was the will, maybe it was a special series done by orchestras for futuristic music or whatever, and there was the will to do it, having that support mechanism, that support person, is critical. At the little concert we did in May, I learned a lot but still the people who are in the decision-making process with orchestras, at the decision-making pivot points with orchestras, they’re not too experienced in it and it’s a deceivingly complicated question but it’s also a little bit frightening and it looks like it’s going to be a really hard nut to crack for them. Not only handing them music, but all this extra stuff. You know, in May I did two pieces with click tracks and one with an electric thing up the back of my jacket, the back of my shirt, which I get to do again in two to three weeks, and you know, pieces with multiple pianos and computer programs. Again, I’m too stupid for my own good on that front, but I think that if there could be some kind of support mechanism or some technological advisors… In a sense, that’s the role we will play with the ACO in this thing and you’re coming to give a broad overview in your capacity as a composer with them. You know, it can shake the dust off things a little bit. It has to be ultimately brought not only to the decision makers, but also to t
he public. And somebody has to do missionary work. People have to get out there and say, “This is good, interesting, you know, the future and you have to be part of it.” We look for the future and the new thing in the dance world. We look for the future and the new thing in visual arts world. But our musical culture is working in retrograde.
RAY KURZWEIL: You’re addressing some valid political and organizational issues, and you alluded to the composers, but I would say the composer is really the front-line of this. Because the musical knowledge has to come and if you think about how synthesizers are used, they’re very often one-person shows. It’s typical to have people immersed in synthesizers in their bedrooms, which are personal music studios. They’re doing a lot of stuff in non-real-time and they’re creating a whole work and maybe if it’s a popular piece, they may have a guitar or a drum part and they’re arranging it on their home music work station, but the concept of an orchestra implies more than one person, in fact, more than two or three people, it implies a fairly large ensemble. Tod, you’ve done more pioneering in this area, but there needs to be a cadre of composers who can lead the way and provide the compositions for multiple musician ensembles that would deserve the name orchestra, that would make use out of this great power of possibilities.
GIL ROSE: If the composers are writing for the large symphony orchestra, it’s for a broad-based public, even if they’re a small percentage of the general music-listening public. The music has to be of the highest quality and also somehow reach the audience. I would be interested to hear what Mario Davidovsky has to say about this because the history of technology’s use in music was really sheltered in academia for a long time. I mean, it came out of Columbia-Princeton in a way…
TOD MACHOVER: It was a little different in Europe…
GIL ROSE: Yeah, it actually was, but still… Ticket sales were not a big issue for Otto Luening. It was not something that probably crossed his mind a lot. But it’s a big issue for the manager of the Cleveland Orchestra and reaching out to the public and integrating technology and musical language, which is one of the things that Tod does so well. He uses a technological argument and the music that supports it is both interesting to the most hard-crusted new music person as well as somebody who is walking into the hall and getting an auditory experience for the first time. So, those uses, you may not get a whole lot of, you may not get a lot of “at-bats” is what I’m saying, and we need to be careful… It has to be the highest quality.
TOD MACHOVER: I do want to say that this question of “at-bats” is actually what’s important because there are so many simple things that make it difficult, besides the actual music you’re writing, just to make this new blend really click. One thing that always bothers me, one of the reasons why I got into this work and what’s still elusive is that when you talk about an orchestra, it involves a lot of individuals shaping their own world and fitting it in with others. A synthesizer is really more like an organ, it’s out of size, it makes more sound and more texture than one person. When you’ve got acoustic sounds and then amplified sounds on stage, first of all they don’t mix very well, they just don’t sound that good together. If you’re used to putting on a rock concert, there’s a developed sense that the people on stage have monitors, they have a partial idea of what the whole sounds like and then you’ve got people mixing in the back of the room. You’ve got a symphony orchestra, with a highly trained person like Gil conducting people on stage who have spent their whole lives judging on stage what they are playing, how it relates, how it all sounds, how it projects out. And it’s the craziest thing, I can go into a context like that and put in two loudspeakers, nothing more than that, and all of a sudden, Gil has to rely on somebody else to shape part of the texture, the musicians feel like something’s been taken away from their autonomy, which in fact it has. The people on stage don’t hear exactly what the audience hears. That’s a dumb silly little thing, but we really haven’t solved it. We haven’t solved how we make amplified sounds that blend well and can be measured by the performers on stage so they can adjust to each other. Those are things that you just can’t do without having the “at-bats,” and I’m a smart guy, but you can’t imagine that without having some rehearsal time, without trying things out and making mistakes.
GIL ROSE: If Mario was here, he would’ve almost given that same answer about his Synchronisms No. 10 for Orchestra and Tape because he’s told me that. I tried to get him to let us do it in May and he said, he had pulled the piece because it didn’t work…
TOD MACHOVER: What about it didn’t work?
GIL ROSE: It was too hard for the orchestra to adjust and too hard for the orchestra to hear the tape and too hard to make an interaction. I don’t want to put words in his mouth.
TOD MACHOVER: That’s something that Ray can solve, it’s a tough one.
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, you can go all the way and have everybody creating electronic sounds including traditional musicians who understand, let’s say, flute technique and they use flute controllers…
GIL ROSE: Who gets to talk to the union president?
FRANK J. OTERI: In the very beginning of this history of the orchestra and technology, there were these almost novelty instruments like the theremin and the Ondes-Martinot that would be played with an orchestra for some weird effect. Later, there was a repertoire of orchestra and tape pieces where a lot of the time the two parts had nothing to do with each other. The orchestra would play for five minutes and then the tape would play for five minutes…
RAY KURZWEIL: Yeah, in the ’50s there was a lot of that…
FRANK J. OTERI: Then they started coming together and only with the third generation of people writing this stuff did people actually think of this idea of modifying the actual orchestral instruments and having more integrated interfaces…
TOD MACHOVER: That’s not very satisfactory either because until now and even now it’s very hard to modify acoustic instruments without knowing anything about their signal or about what’s being played. It’s like sending everything into a blender, and you have the blender set to some speed and everything gets processed the same way, unless you know what all the notes are, unless you have as much information as your ear does basically, and that’s just hard to do. So that’s not usually very satisfactory.
RAY KURZWEIL: Are there examples that you could point to in the traditional great symphony orchestras or maybe in some other type of orchestra that have done this well, that might be an example to follow?
GIL ROSE: I think that Turangalîla wo
rks pretty well actually. Having conducted it, it actually works pretty well. It acoustically balances in really well because the lone speaker usually goes behind the orchestra.
TOD MACHOVER: I think the examples that work are probably concerto type examples or where you have a solo instrument. One thing I was going to say when you talked about this model of maybe everybody playing a new kind of instrument… At some point that might be possible. Symphony orchestras, even though they might be dinosaurs, have got some good things going for them. One of the things is the sound blends; acoustic sounds fill a room in such a complex way. As I said before it’s not just one signal it is all these, although if you’re not a trained musician, you probably can’t pick out what some violinist in the middle of a section is doing, it makes a difference that there are that many people who are trying to play together and we’re also used to what they do on their instruments…
RAY KURZWEIL: There’s no reason why you can’t have lots of point sources of sound, each musician could have his own speaker.
TOD MACHOVER: That hasn’t worked so well yet… It’s another thing your company could do. There really haven’t been any fundamental, radical breakthroughs in speaker technology in a long time and most speakers, actually all speakers that I’ve ever heard, don’t have that complexity of sound emanation. Also, the fact that it’s coming from you and not somebody else. It all becomes a little gray even with very good speakers. So it hasn’t worked so well to have just a lot of them. That’s what we do in Resurrection, we have a lot of small speakers in the pit and it works better, but still…
RAY KURZWEIL: That’s a good step. People haven’t done it, I think, because it’s expensive and they haven’t bothered and they assume you only need two speakers.
TOD MACHOVER: Cables are always a weak link.
GIL ROSE: Even this kind of technological support is an obstacle. We did this concert in May at Symphony Hall and we found out that the beautiful speakers at Symphony Hall were mono; they had to rewire them. I mean, if Symphony Hall doesn’t have a good playback, how can you expect the Charleston Symphony or the Indiana this or the Kentucky that…
FRANK J. OTERI: Which begs the question, what is the ideal venue for this kind of interaction? More than likely, it’s not the 19th century conception for a concert hall.
TOD MACHOVER: It’s a good question. I would say that electronics tend to work best in modest size dry halls.
RAY KURZWEIL: Places that use electronic and acoustic instruments routinely together are the Broadway theatres and they do that all the time and it sounds good for what it is. Is there something we can learn from that? Are they providing some kind of example…
TOD MACHOVER: I haven’t been to a show in a while. Does it really sound good? I mean, I’m sure it sounds good, but…
RAY KURZWEIL: It’s sounds appropriate…
GIL ROSE: They have speakers to enhance the sound.
TOD MACHOVER: Broadway shows have smaller orchestras…
GIL ROSE: It’s a financial matter also. I mean, they use it as a supplement, they have 14 people there instead of 22.
TOD MACHOVER: I can’t think of a single example of a full orchestra which is amplified or integrated with electronics, probably in the Hollywood Bowl you could find something that, where you’ve got a large orchestra for a film score being played that has synths and electronics and…
RAY KURZWEIL: All concert halls are amplified; singers have microphones. There’s very little, if any, real projection in their voices, it’s all picked up by microphones and even acoustic instruments are miked. And what you hear in the audience is from a speaker system.
TOD MACHOVER: I can think of two pieces that worked really great, but neither is for full orchestra. One is Boulez‘s Répons, which is for chamber orchestra. It’s pretty cool actually. I saw it at Symphony Hall where they took out all the seats. The orchestra of about thirty players is in the middle, the audience sits around that and then six solo instruments with speakers all over are behind you. And that works well because it’s not meant to blend but the orchestra in the middle has enough presence, especially if you play in Symphony Hall, it resonates nicely. Then you have this other layer behind you; it’s terrific! And then I heard Golijov‘s St. Mark’s Passion. Again, not a large ensemble, maybe 20 players and singers, but all amplified at Symphony Hall and all amplified and it sounded great! Beautifully done amplification… But I can’t think of a single case where an orchestra is actually fully amplified, even delicately, with extra sounds added in a symphonic context. It’s just almost never done. Who’s got the microphones? Who’s got the technique to do that for an orchestra? And that’s what we want to do now, but it’s not that easy to do.
GIL ROSE: I think the standardization issue is an expensive proposition for a hall or an institution like an orchestra to equip for this and then it’s really disappointing to equip one way and find out composer X from down the street did it, you know, it was VHS versus Beta, and you know, you don’t want to get involved in that and I think that that has caused a certain amount of reticence. But, you know, as these technologies have developed, and people like yourself who are working here, who are working in Paris, and people who are working in San Diego, is there enough integration at that level to unify? Probably not and even if you did, the nature of what you do kind of drives you to do things different and to explore technologies in a different way, so standardization is almost not part of the process and that’s a big obstacle to getting the orchestra world involved because you’re right about what you said: The orchestra is standardized. The basses play, they all have the same number of strings, they sound this way and…
TOD MACHOVER: And we can build on that.
FRANK J. OTERI: And of course, you equip yourself for this new piece of music that Tod or Mario or someone else writes and then you don’t use that technology for the Brahms‘ symphony that’s on the second half of the program. Tod made a comment earlier on about brass instruments and how they evolved during the 19th century. To the nay-sayers who say that the meat and potatoes of the symphony o
rchestra concert are the Beethoven and Brahms symphonies, the standard 19th-century central European repertoire, you can say, ok, wait a minute…you play Mozart with this orchestra, and a lot of orchestras still will play Bach on an orchestra that is in fact a late-19th-century ensemble using 19th-century technologies such as valved brass instruments, Boehm-keyed woodwind instruments, etc. What else could technology for the orchestra go? If we have contact microphones on every instrument in the orchestra of the mid-21st century, why not also enhance, maybe enhance isn’t the right word, “contemporarify” the so-called standard repertoire of the past?
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, my father used to play the Brandenburg concertos on piano rather than harpsichord and he got a lot of flack for that but felt that it really was much more expressive and that Bach would’ve used the piano had he had the opportunity.
TOD MACHOVER: He would have really gotten flack now because it’s gone so far in the other direction, but I understand.
RAY KURZWEIL: And at least to my ear, I might be biased, I can really hear Bach’s vision much more readily with the piano than harpsichord, which seems to blend all the sounds together. But I would think that the greatest potential for blending though for electronic music and the symphony orchestra tradition would be new forms of music that really take advantage of what these instruments can do, because these instruments can create all kinds of complex, rich sounds that you just can’t do with an acoustic instrument. They can provide playing techniques that aren’t otherwise feasible. They can have virtual instruments such as Tod has pioneered where the musician is doing something with the controller and there is some intelligence in the instrument that can then augment, and add additional sounds; figure out walking bass lines and other types of odd rhythmic transformations of what the musician is able to do, thereby creating sounds and sequences and note sequences, that a human couldn’t do because we don’t have the dexterity or the training, etc., etc. It has just widened the palette. So just kind of miking traditional instruments or replacing a flute with a flute controller that goes through a synthesizer to create flute sounds, is not really the potential of this.
TOD MACHOVER: We’ve been talking about how things might change on stage, how things might change for a composer, but what about for audiences in terms of the experience actually in the hall? Arguably, our whole idea of what it means to go to a concert is in itself a 19th-century idea: the fact that you sit in the audience, that the performers are up on stage and you have one perspective. I think that even if you’ve grown up listening to CDs or radios, and Symphony Hall is a particular case, but even the sound is kind of up there on stage, so I’m wondering how technology might actually increase the impact of actually being in a hall with other people, what that might be, and whether you might hear differently.
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, I think the genre is about having multiple musicians interact in real-time, perhaps with some pre-programmed elements, perhaps some sequences or software that’s been prepared ahead of time, but that you have real time musical intelligence in multiple musicians and probably that’s going to come most easily not by starting with the traditional 19th-century orchestra and or at least as we know it in the 20th century, and trying to modify it, to add these new elements. Generally if you have a concert that involves synthesizers it’s just one synthesizer, maybe two, and very often it’s in the context of sort of contemporary music, but out of the tradition of classical music or any tradition, to have the key concept of an orchestra, which is a substantial number of people, you know, ten, twenty people interacting with electronic technology, you know, forget being limited by the tradition of the classical orchestra but have that concept of many people interacting, but using electronic instruments.
GIL ROSE: It seems that technological uses have kind of broken into two camps, too. There seems to be the enhancement camp and the more pure form of making something new. There’s always this idea, and we’ve been talking mostly about acoustic realizations and technology, but video realizations will kind of get to your question. There’s a certain school of thought, which says you know, all of a sudden we want a screen behind and we live in a world and our future audiences are people that are impacted by audio-visual information all the time. I was fascinated to see on CNN, Headline News has all of a sudden gone to a format where there are four screens. There’s a ticker on the bottom and then the stock quotes here and this thing here and that thing there and they evidently made this. They summarized that people are able to obtain more information and it can actually keep them from clicking channels so much if, instead of one talking head, you’re giving them four pieces of information. That same logic has been applied to get people into the audience. You put a screen in the back and you’ve got this interpretive art thing while the music’s playing and that’s the technological thing. I always wonder how we’re going to keep them down on the farm once they’ve seen Berlioz. If you go too far in trying to hold their hand and coddle them, though, you’re going to take away the primary acoustic relationship of listening to an orchestra. If you give them so many bells and whistles to get them in the door, how are they ever going to focus on Brahms?
RAY KURZWEIL: One thing along those lines that has emerged in some of the dance clubs has been having multiple motion capture devices. And there are different types of motion capture. There can be quite a few degrees of freedom, in terms of moving the different limbs, connected either to different synthesizer parameters or triggers, to trigger whole sequences or interacting with algorithmic elements. But you see these people moving and they are triggering and controlling the music and after a while you actually understand what it is. OK, this is a synthesizer parameter and when he goes like this it’s triggering a sequence and some other movement is the amplitude of the pitch. So you quickly learn how it is they’re interacting with music, but it’s actually an exciting blend of dance and musical expression.
GIL ROSE: You can really attract people for the long hall with that kind of thing if it’s part of an original composition, but I think that when you start sprucing up Night on Bald Mountain in this way, you’re really belittling the experience. And also you’re setting up an expectation level which you’re just never going to satisfy… It’s like Disney, one of those theme park
rides where things are poking you from the seat and there’s steam coming out. We’re trying to make this whole 3-D technological realization while what we should be concentrating on is getting people involved in listening to music and using technology to do it. It’s just that there’s a whole set of barriers. But I think that just about every barrier there is could be circumnavigated simply by creating a public will to make exploring new ideas the norm as it used to be as opposed to what it is now. It is very strange heretical talk that anybody would suggest that a symphony orchestra should play 90 percent new music and 10 percent old music like they did in Beethoven‘s day. You know, it was a pretty good time for music. You know, we developed a lot of good stuff with that recipe. Why is that such a hard argument to make? And if we can’t finally make that argument, what hope is there for any of these ideas? We’re just going to be at the whim of things other than the public force. The funding starts to dictate all of the issues. If we can take it into the public arena in a way which puts real momentum behind what we do, it will all come out fine.
FRANK J. OTERI: I want to say something potentially even more heretical. I want to take it even further along. Older concert halls are not ideal for new music. Maybe the whole notion of concerts, which is a very 19th century idea is outmoded. Very early on in the discussion, Ray used the term “real time input” for performance. Now you can listen to music on a home stereo system or on the radio or on the Web, and other technologies will develop in the future. Maybe what we’re looking for in this new orchestral music, this new orchestra tech music is not necessarily a live concert hall experience. Maybe the ideal realm where this will work acoustically is either in a recorded format or some other non-concert hall type format.
RAY KURZWEIL: People are creating many new forms of music. A lot of the musical creativity is in experimental music, popular music, and many different genres. I imagine in Beethoven’s day you had folk music and classical music and his contemporaries were the cutting edge of the popular music. A least, that kind of folk music at that time. But the tradition that has come up from those classical traditions is not the only place where music is being created. As you say, a lot is being created, in terms of finished pieces of music, in non-real-time and it’s in a recorded form. But that’s not an audience experience. There’s something about a real-time expression of musicians making sounds to communicate in real time with an audience: an emotional, artistic, inspirational message.
TOD MACHOVER: If what you say will happen, and it is happening and will expand, we don’t need an orchestra for that. You could make everything by yourself in a studio. The BBC is a really interesting organization to watch right now. Sometime before next summer, they’re going to launch two new digital TV stations. One is going to be for education; one’s going to be for culture. They’re going to be completely connected with the Web. They’re pushing their own line and they’re really looking at it as a chance to think about how live performance fits into broadcast, fits into enhanced experiences, fits into being there watching something, having something that doesn’t always have to be live, a live kernel that branches out into other forms. And they’re a very interesting organization because they have orchestras and they have a real belief in performance and they also know what studio production is. I personally really believe in live performance. I love studio work, but I love live performance. I love the fact that you have this text that can be changed in different contexts and changed over time and changed for different audiences. I think that it’s a very important part of music, as much as I love studio work.
RAY KURZWEIL: There’s real communication going on in a live performance. An excitement and a chemistry and a magnetism that doesn’t exist in a recording, and so very often then, when you’re trying to capture by recording the live performance, it has certain imperfections. It’s hard to capture that immediacy of the emotional response of a real live audience. But there’s something magical about live performance. I’ve experienced that difference. You’ve got something much more polished, but a recording is a static object.
FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, well the amazing paradox at this point is that the majority of people have heard the Brahms symphonies through recordings rather than through live performance and ironically, most people have heard the Orchestra Tech-type works through a live performance because most of these works never even get recorded.
TOD MACHOVER: Yeah, that’s funny. Yeah, and actually one of the interesting things about the BBC model is how these different worlds can complement each other better.
GIL ROSE: And maybe this answers this question about how to go forward. It’s not un-historic. The radio orchestras in Europe were much more on the forefront of new music than the Vienna Philharmonic or the Berlin… There was always the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and that’s why there was a certain segment of musicians who really circulated through the radio orchestra networks. And even conductors like Hermann Scherchen, who were ahead of there time as far as integrating technology, really navigated through the radio symphony circles because there was a certain leeway they got there on projects. So maybe that’s the answer; we just have to get the BBC here.
TOD MACHOVER: Yeah, well I was thinking in this country, that kind of thing is so hard; to get media integrated, but you know, BMOP and WGBH. I think WGBH is clearly thinking about online media broadcasts.
GIL ROSE: In the end, it gets back to a certain level of support that the BBC has and again which a good organization used to do things like that. WGBH at one point did a broadcast of Britten‘s last opera Owen Wingrave, which was a television opera. WGBH mounted a production of it and broadcast it on television. Now that was in a different culture thirty years ago than what we have now. It gets back to that cultural question. If we could answer the cultural question we could probably drive the money to the right places, but we live in a country which is all descendents of people who came here for economic independence and low taxes and all of these things that make us Americans and that’s a hard thing to navigate.
GIL ROSE: It’s no mistake that a lot of early electronic music grew up in fiscally sound, academic environments, and/or in Europe. Even Koussevitzsky at the Boston Symphony, who was at the forefront of commissioning new music and new works, had no experience with that kind of technology stuff. In his defense, it was a little bit before his time.
FRANK J. OTERI: Bu
t it’s interesting that Stokowski, who was of the same generation, used a theremin to double bass lines with the Philadelphia Orchestra in standard repertoire pieces, which was along the same lines as playing a Bach piece on the piano, playing a work for an earlier version of an instrument on a later version.
GIL ROSE: But it shows you what leadership can do. Stokowski is a great example, much better than Koussevizsky. It shows you leadership, not just leadership on the technological front, but leadership in youth concerts and in experimental music. One stubborn person can make a big difference.
FRANK J. OTERI: I’d like to play Luddite for a minute…
GIL ROSE: What?
TOD MACHOVER: Luddite, anti-technology…
FRANK J. OTERI: And I’m saying this as a fan of technology, as a fan of this music, but I want to turn it around to give voice to the dissenting opinion and talk about music in the future. Is there a place in the future for musical works that do not involve technology on any level?
GIL ROSE: There’s space in the future for every kind of music because Pandora’s box has been opened up. That’s one of the truisms of our musical culture. There are a lot of sources for inspiration. Sometimes you’ll have somebody playing an indigenous instrument who’s electrified it. And there’s other places where people will go in a whole different direction. I can tell you that after having basically conducted and produced a very technologically heavy concert, I really wanted to do something with rocks and sticks.
RAY KURZWEIL: There was a beautiful concert with bamboo flute by an Indian master just last night at MIT… But to respond, there are two connotations of the Luddite challenge: one is employment, which is how the Luddite movement started and the other is technology as an assault on pure, traditional forms, and certainly we see that in music. And sometimes people resent technology as not being consistent with the purity of certain traditions. The Luddite movement started around 1800 in the textile industry in England with these weavers whose families of many generations had enjoyed these livelihoods from a certain guild and craft of weaving which had been turned over on its head by these new automated machines. And it seemed clear to the Luddites that soon employment would be enjoyed by just a small elite because one person could do the work of ten or twenty and the machines were getting more sophisticated, so pretty soon there would be almost no employment. And ironically, employment actually increased and wages went up and there was actually a period of prosperity, which is the main reason why the Luddite movement died along with some violent oppression. A reason for the increase in employment was that new industries were created to create the machines and also it’s human nature. We didn’t create the same number of shirts with a smaller number of workers. Now that the common man and woman could have a well-made shirt, people didn’t want just one shirt, they wanted a whole wardrobe, etc., etc. And if you look at the whole sweep of automation in the last couple hundred years we have actually ten times as many jobs today as we did a hundred and twenty years ago, both on a per capita basis and on an absolute basis. And what we tend to do is automate jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder and create new jobs on the top of the skill ladder, so the whole skill ladder moves up. And we’ve seen that in music. There was a lot of controversy, which I was a part of too, with synthesizers and the union and others. With synthesizers, one person could do the work of ten or twenty, particularly in commercial music where people were used to blowing a trumpet and getting gigs for television commercials, and now they were using synthesizers. This was back in the 1980s. And it’s true. Certain types of gigs, certain kinds of performances were being automated. However, the advent of this technology made music more exciting, particularly in the popular world. A group of three or four musicians could make a much richer, a more complex sound. One musician with a synthesizer could create an interesting soundtrack for movies, so they would actually hire a live musician with a synthesizer rather than using recorded music, which had been the practice up to that time in industrial films and government films and so on. And there actually are more musical opportunities and you can actually measure that economically in terms of financial statistics. Musicians are better off. There’s a lot more excitement in the world of music and there’s more economic activity as a result. As for the cultural challenge, that’s a challenge that exists not just in the world of technology but anytime you have change and there are guardians of the old values and sometimes that gets tense. Sometimes you see that in the world of politics in terms of reactionary forces that resist modernity, change. Sometimes violently, usually not in the world of music but there are guardians of the old traditions and sometimes there’s a resistance to new forms and that’s another aspect of the Luddite issue. Overall, I think, I agree with what you said, that there’ll be room for continued traditions and that the new doesn’t extinguish the old it just provides new options and new alternatives, new ways to express ourselves. Music’s always using the most advanced technology in at least some of the forms. That was true in Beethoven’s day. In the 18th century they used the wood-making crafts and in the 19th century the metal working industries. Then we used analog electronics and now we have the full gamut of digital signal processing to expand, not to replace, the old modalities.
TOD MACHOVER: For the last several years in particular, and I think partly because of being here at the media lab at MIT, I’ve gotten increasingly concerned that, as much as I am interested in technology and love technology, I think technology for the past five years or so, maybe a little longer, has had such a momentum and a tendency to capture the public imagination and grow so fast that in many ways, certain times technology has a tendency to outstrip what we know how to do with it and what we want to do with it and I think it’s had a certain momentum just to come up with advancements for the sake of not just for the markets but for the kind of imaginative sense effective of just doing better. And so I’ve been sort of screaming that especially in the technological context, since we’re in the middle of it here, one of the most important things to remember is what it is you want to get done, what it is you want to express, what it is you want to do and then you feel that you’re looking and that’s obvious. But I think technology has had such a momentum of its own, it’s sometimes hard to remember that. And I think that in the last couple of weeks, about the only positive thing that’s happened so far is that it has shaken so many of us to just simply think back on what we’re here for and what the important things are and I find myself looking for any kind of wisdom that I can find anywhere, how to view what’s going on or how to just go day by day in such a confusing situation. People will need a certain kind of escapism just to get through things, but art for entertainment’s sake is not going to mean much to people for
a while now. And I think technology for it’s own sake, because it’s cool, is not going to mean anything to people right now. On the other hand, sharing with each other what each of us considers important and worth doing and what art is really for is really important and I think that’s got to be healthy for the field. It’s hard for me to imagine it, and frankly, so many things are in question now that what technology is going to have to do with our lives period is probably a bit more of a question than it was six months ago or four months ago or three weeks ago. Ray often makes the point about technology changing exponentially. Things aren’t just changing, change is changing and it’s hard to imagine. And we’re involved in a really major struggle right now about the future versus the past in our culture and, obviously, in the world. So these are big issues that are going to get played out and we’ve unleashed big forces that none of us can predict. I would imagine that Ray’s description of the future is probably going to happen. I’ll put words in his mouth, Ray’s contention is that once you start putting intelligence in machines that you’re enabled to do things that you couldn’t do before and that the sophistication of these machines grows very, very fast and it builds… So I think that to imagine that the core parts of our culture are not going to involve more and more sophisticated technology is naïve. I think it will. And I think probably we’re going to want to find ways to incorporate those ideas into our forms of expression because that reflects our experience most. So I think orchestras probably really should be thinking of ways of embracing the technological world and leading in the technology world and helping to create new art forms in their midst rather than outside it. And obviously you can always make great art and great thoughts, all you need is a mind and a heart, you know what I mean. It’s not the tools that do it, but I think these tools are here to stay.
RAY KURZWEIL: Well, I think the threshold we’re on now are not cybernetic geniuses but we are creating machines that have narrow intelligence. We have a program on our Web site called Aaron, which is a cybernetic artist that actually creates good quality art and every painting is different. The creator of it, Hal Cohen, who has worked on this for thirty years, has joked that he’s going to be the first artist that’ll able to have a posthumous exhibition of original work, because the system keeps creating original paintings and they have a particular style but every painting is different ’cause human artists have a recognizable style as well. So he has embodied this program with his understanding of visual art. Clearly, we can do similar things in music and there have been experiments like EMI, David Cope‘s experiments in musical intelligence, which are beginning to do some similar things, in my mind, not for broad works, it’s very actually convincing for brief snippets of music, but not the sort of full musical expression of music that makes sense over a period of time. But I do think we can create sophisticated systems today that have narrow intelligence that can work collaboratively and interactively with human musicians and I know, Tod, you’ve experimented with this concept. And I think that’s really exciting, to have a system that has narrow A.I., that understands something about music, that can anticipate what the musician is doing and then can kind of fill in. Once it’s programmed it can actually think faster than humans, so it could very quickly finish a walking bass line or fill in a rhythmic pattern, do things more quickly than a human performer could do and interact with a human performer. And that’s a threshold we’re on. I mean, thirty years from now we’ll have non-biological intelligence, in my mind, operating on human levels, and they’ll be creating music and everything else, but right now I think it’s a tool that can really amplify human intelligence and I think what we really need more of are people who really understand something about technology and understand music and have the artistic insight to use these tools. Because to some extent there are two different worlds and we need more of a bridge between the whole idea of artistic expression, which is communicating emotion from a performer to the audience and understanding what the technology can do, which I think is a lot. We need the people who can form that bridge.
