by Greg D'Alessio
If I were to use the phrase “music and technology,” what would probably come to mind is a modern recording studio with banks of expensive looking electronics and of course the mammoth recording console—lots of lights and meters and computer screens. Indeed, we have a tendency to associate “technology” with whatever is the most sophisticated machinery of our own time and to think that all previous machines have somehow always been antiquated. If you don’t believe me rent a movie from the early nineties. The actors seem only marginally different from our current world—perhaps an unfortunate haircut or clothing choice—and then you see a computer or a cell phone: Oh my God, how did they (we) use those things??!!
These days, changes in technology have a way of making even the fashion world look stately and hide-bound. So it is understandable that we tend not consider technology’s impact on anything so securely in the past as classical music—after all that’s why it’s classical, isn’t it? They didn’t even have technology then … whenever “then” was exactly, did they?
Well, let’s consider. We typically divide up the long history of Western classical music into “style periods” – Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern – and we have a battery of characteristics to define how all these eras differed from one another and the socio-economic determinants that went into creating the eras, and it all works well enough that for the most part we don’t question it too much. I would like to propose, as a kind of a thought experiment, an alternate division—one made up of two different kinds of technological changes and the effects they had on music. Let’s start with the way in which music can be saved and propagated.
Most of the music ever created is gone—totally lost the moment it was made because there was no means of recording it. The sounds of all those solemn rituals, ecstatic country fairs, inspired jam sessions and solitary late-night noodlings have simply vanished as if they never existed. The only music that is known (and it must surely be a miniscule proportion of the whole, though it is indeed vast in itself) is recorded music. And by “recorded,” I don’t of course mean “recorded on magnetic tape or into digital form,” but simply stored in some medium so that it can be re-created. Prior to around1880 this meant notation.
After all, what is notation—the inscribing of paper (itself originally a pretty sophisticated technology) with a set of standardized symbols for the storage of a piece of otherwise ephemeral and abstract successions of sounds—other than a complex and hugely valuable technology? Notation created at a stroke (or series of strokes; it took a while to establish a standard method) the first “permanent” music; that is, music that was not reliant on human memory for its existence. This in turn led directly to the art and craft of composition. Without the ability to write down one’s music or to copy, study and learn from the music of others, the art of composition would be as hobbled as the art of painting without durable paints and a long-lasting surface on which to paint.
The first era of notated music, which we might call the hand-written era, encompasses all the works of Europe that were considered important enough to justify the time, expense and effort to write down from the Dark Ages to some time in the mid 1700’s. This, of course, means music for the Church, where it was part of the unifying liturgical glue that held together the disparate and polyglot nations of Christianity, and music of the courts, whose rulers could afford to pay specialists to compose music for them as they did could pay for food-tasters and master falconers. This era stretches from the Dark Ages all the way through to Bach’s day; even though music printing had existed for some time, he was still obliged to copy Vivaldi’s works by hand for further study.
The notated, or literate era was kicked into overdrive along with all other forms of written communication with the advent of the printing press. Engraving and the establishment of commercial publishing houses, in full swing by the end of the 18th century, led directly to the great flowering of musical development in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Scores became almost immediately available on publication from one end of Europe (and later the Americas) to the other. This immediacy of access was responsible for the intense cross-fertilization of the music that we see in the early Romantics, with Schumann eagerly reviewing each new work of Chopin’s as it was published, and Liszt transcribing and performing un-staged operas by Berlioz and Wagner, and so forth.
This musical era, which lasted until the practice of recording allowed for the propagation of non-literate music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, basically corresponds to what we still consider the “standard repertoire” of classical music. The advent of recording was in many ways as epochal an event as the invention of notation itself. Indeed it is a kind of “unwritten notation” in that it allowed for musically illiterate composers and performers to create fixed, and therefore transmittable, knowable artistic statements. Thus, at the simple stroke of a stylus, “music” went from that which could be written down, to that which could be played—an increase in quantity of many thousand-fold.
Further technological refinements—the long-playing disc, recording tape, multi-tracking, digitization—have, over the last century, allowed “illiterate” music to develop a scale, level of sophistication and degree of refinement that previously required the individual genius of a master composer and the extensive training of a professional orchestra to achieve.
When looked at through the lens of the technology of reproduction, the many various “styles periods’ and “genres” into which music history is usually separated, becomes a much simpler and more coherent matter. It also removes from our conception the role of technology as a trivial add-on to the autonomous art of music. Music, in this sense is whatever technology allows it to be.
