8.3 The Future of Musical Performances

So how could a project such as the Conductor’s Jacket influence the future of a performance tradition such as Western classical music? It seems to me that projects such as this one provide the only promising avenue for a strong future for the art form. With audiences aging and declining and the overwhelming pressure of television and the Internet, classical music forms seem doomed to serve a shrinking niche where the standard repertoire is one dependable box-office draw. While there should always be a place and a reverence for the standard repertoire, I don’t think that the reliance on symphonic music of more than 100 years ago indicates a healthy state in this art form. I think that it is now crucial to find ways to gently interface and extend the forms of classical music while respecting its complexity and subtlety. I think that incorporating graphics and amplification and synthesized sounds would help to extend the vocabulary and appeal of classical music to younger audiences, making it more exciting and current.

8.3.1 The Need for New Live Concerts

"We will always go to concerts to see the people perform; if we wanted to hear music and not see any interaction, we could listen to the CD." Live performances have inherent value because they reflect the states of the artists, the instruments, the audience, and the venue. All of these factors interact in complex ways and sometimes produce surprising and exciting results that may be absolutely unique to that moment. Live performances are inherently richer than recordings because "the performer’s attitude and energy on stage is more important than the sound coming from the speakers. And, of course, in the recorded media, this aspect is eliminated." I think that Glenn Gould was incorrect in his infamous projection that "the public concert as we know it today would no longer exist a century hence, that its function would have been entirely taken over by electronic media." It might be true that live performances generate too many mistakes to be useable in judging the performer’s interpretation, but I think that the unintentional mistakes are outweighed by moments of insight and improvisation. That is, the freshness and uniqueness of the moment outweighs the out-of-time perfection that can be gained in a studio. Also, since music is ideally a medium of communication, the inspiration and spontaneity in a live performance is more valuable than the perfection of a studio recording. This idea was supported by John Cage: "[Recording] merely destroys one's need for real music. It substitutes artificial music for real music, and it makes people think that they're engaging in a musical activity when they're actually not. And it has completely disturbed and turned upside-down the function of music in anyone's experience." 8.3.2 Possibilities for Great Art with Sensors

Ultimately, I’d love to make great performance art with sensors – an art which "exceeds culture" Many media artists share this vision; such a form could be as expressive as a violin, on which one’s own depth of feeling could be communicated. Such an art form would be able to convey magical feeling, the essence of the human artistic experience. Performers in the future will be using gesture in seamless ways as they interact with computers; I also think that conductors and musicians in the future will be using their gestures to control (triggering and modulating pre-composed material more than generating or creating on the fly) interactive graphics, text, video, music, and fireworks displays while they also perform on their instruments with their normal techniques. We as a society are in the midst of defining the new forms. No one knows what will come of the traditional institutions that have served the classical performance traditions for the past century, and yet on the other hand there is a new energy in the area of experimental and electronic music. But one thing is sure – we must use new technology to move, uplift, inspire, and elevate.

One of the unfortunate associations that traditional musicians have with computer music is that MIDI put them out of business; this is because many producers have seen it as a way of saving money by saving on musicians’ fees. They assume that a sequenced version of a score played on synthesizers is as good as the live thing, which is not true. And by jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of thousands of working musicians, it has had exactly the wrong kind of effect. My hope is to put them back in business by improving audiences’ appetites for new music.

Will these instruments ever take root? Denis Smalley says no:

"The integration of a new instrument into a culture is not a purely musical question, but depends on the socio-economic climate and a lengthy period of time for full assimilation. The possibility that a new electroacoustic ‘instrument’ could become established is extremely remote due to the dual factors of rapid technological redundancy and commercial competition. Indeed, in our current socio-economic climate the prospect for such an occurrence seems fanciful." Perhaps this is because most inventors create an instrument, write one composition for it, and go on to the next one. Performers, Ensembles and new situations for this art form. It is crucial for any instrument to have active proponents in the performance world; it can’t be just the builder or inventor who finds the voice of the instrument. In fact, it often is precisely not the builder who is able to find the optimal style and sound for the instrument. Les Paul and Lev Termin knew how to play their instruments but weren’t masters of the craft; it took Clara Rockmore and a generation of great guitarists to make them capable of musical art. Perhaps one of the problems with computer music is that there is often no distinction between builder and performer. So, by induction, I think that it would make a lot of sense if other performers would get a chance to work with this instrument – in the short term, to take their comments and improve upon it, and for the long term, to let them develop it and work with it to develop their own ideas.

Finally, the vision of Immersion Music described at the beginning of this thesis represents a possible future for musical performance. The scenario is that Immersion Music will be a more mainstream realization of electronic music, transcending the stereotypes of it as an experimental form of "music we don’t like yet." It will ideally involve creating new forms of art for the stage that combine the best of classical performance traditions with the best of the new technologies. The Conductor’s Jacket may have a future role as an instrument in the new form of Immersion Music, not as a solo instrument but rather as one that allows a human performer to communicate with others on stage, combining the specificity and expression of gesture with musical feeling.

  Chapter 8.4