Remarks on Computer Music Culture

Years ago, in the founding days of ASCAP, Richard Rodgers, composer of countless wonderful showtunes, is reputed to have cast "serious" (ASCAP's term to indicate art as opposed to entertainment) composers in the collective role of the research-and-development department of the music industry. And it does seem to be true that in the industry of electronic music, the research-anddevelopment department has influenced the popular music division in different ways. Many pop-culture groups have acknowledged a background in the electronic music classics, many popular-music composers listen seriously to "high-art" electronic music, and many commercially successful ideas and technologies have grown out of the "serious" music world. Sampling is rooted in the tradition of musique concrate, for example, and frequency modulation as a soundgenerating technique was a product of computer music research. Lines of influence occasionally seem to point also in the other direction, from popular music to computer music. Some computer music composers have incorporated popular elements such as jazz standards and folk tunes in their music and, far more important, some composers have reinterpreted the dynamics of jazz improvisation into the framework of performance with interactive systems. In whatever direction influence flows, however, it is not surprising that composers of one type of music might take ideas from other types of music. But at this particular moment in the history of computer music, the flow of ideas between high art and popular art seems to have a particular significance. Indeed, the protective parapet that has long kept high art and popular art mutually exclusive seems to be showing signs of vulnerability. It seems that we are about to enter a new cultural architec-