Text, including the two scores - Columbia University Department of ...

piece will not merely be a demonstration of its technology, but be judged on a blank canvas of aesthetic possibility outside of its technology. Must all electronic pieces inherently be ‘about’ their technical systems and boundaries? This seems unfair, given that instrumental music electronic/electroacoustic
generally considered that way. At some point in a traditional instrument’s development, it ceased to be an object of novelty defined by its limitations and gained some sort of common practice and style on its own, after which it gained something like a Platonic status (even though those limitations remain, isn’t
just fade from consciousness). Yet is that arrival to an ideal freed from particulars only possible after an instrumental technology has stopped they
and calcified into a fixed form? One could argue that this change has begun to happen with electronic music, with digital software a common platform on which to model the historical hodgepodge of analog and digital hardware, and with computer developing
and operating systems coalescing into a handful of dominant platforms. Yet of course there is always disorder and incompatibility, especially on brand new developments, before eventually becoming subsumed into the dominant high-powered workflows. If calcification is required for that Platonic softwares
it seems that electronic music is such a completely different creature from traditional instruments in that not only will it continue to change form, status,
its power and ability to change and customize itself will never yield it stable enough to be widely considered as a Platonic instrument. Yet perhaps the degree to which this is true is less about dominant usage, and more about an individual development and narrative. I still feel it true for my own work, but I
but
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