From Dance! to Dance: Distance and Digits

13 Computer Music Journal, 25:1, pp. 13–20, Spring 2001 © 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The relationship between “art” musics and vernacular (or “popular”) musics in Western society is complex and has a long history. From engagement and synthesis to incomprehension and antagonism, this relationship has reflected larger social trends—themselves the product of economic and technological change. Within this continuity, there are periods of intensified exchange. In the 1920s, for example, it centered on jazz, but in the 1990s the picture was not so clear. There is a cautious consensus that in the 1990s, there was a profound difference: art music itself appeared to be increasingly isolated as a minority interest (an old argument to be sure, but increasingly highlighted). Another major contribution to this polemic has been the ever-increasing access to sophisticated tools for music production that computer technology has enabled.