Digital harmony —a personal history of music vision

Abstract

Color and tonality have more potential for fusion than imaginative composers, poets and artists ever dared to believe in their dreams. Visionaries from Aristotle to Scriabin repeatedly invoked the mind's image of gracefully intertwining painting with music, spawning a collective archetype which may become associated with a remarkable digital technology. Whatever the dream a true vision or a strained fusion of dissimilar ideas the interweaving of color with tone has acquired a dramatic prospective reality only in this decade. A few television producers advocate fusion and are dedicated to raising music from subordinance to prominence within the realm of video and videodisc broadcast. Yet it's hard to expect music to succeed, even as well as seasonal football, on today's television. Despite MTV-type programs, composers haven't begun to study some of the vast structural and compositional unknowns surrounding the challenge to unite sight with sound. Nevertheless, information technology and a variety of new techniques derived from science stimulate rapid transformations in both art and contemporary music. At this moment in history, powerful forces for change in all arts encourage more technical than true artistic innovation. In fact, important developments in computer music and graphics with liquid colors, promise to draw together the roles of artist and composer. A kind of artist/ composer is redirecting creative attention to computers where one can structure color in motion with skills that were formerly applied to complex tonal architecture by itself. Compose/rs may needlessly envy the independence of a painter or sculptor whose product is immune to performance and secondary interpretation. Few composers perceive that digital musical creations can be substantial as marble. Digital technologies permit a composer to create 'realized music' in finished form as if it possessed the permanence and finality of an art object rendered in paint or stone. Sooner or later, a few such digital art objects, combining music with color, will acquire the integrity and lasting qualities of a classic. A few will be offered among the limited-edition multiples sold at the galleries of the major art dealers of the world. Popular publishable videodisc formats are bound to proliferate. Sooner or later, that forementioned collective archetypal dream or vision will begin to seem very real. Despite limited experience with these evolving forms, there is substance in the concept of a structural interface between music and art. This assertion is deduced from my own study and practice within the aesthetics of audio-video 'complementarity ' , (my term for the specific potentials for aural/visual harmonic relationships that reside within computer instrumentation). An outline of the course of my study runs somewhat as follows: Long ago, I was able to reconcile an attraction to music composition with my earliest work as a filmmaker. While studying in Paris in the 1930's, I began composing a unique form of music, working with an optical printer and with the comparatively new sound-film's optical music track. This was many years before the invention of magnetic recording, computer technology and digital media had kindled today's interests in electronics among growing numbers of composers. My work, essentially music composed measure-for-measure with abstract design on film, soon won international attention because of an excitement about new technoartistic creativity that arose out of the post-war flux. However, the awards bestowed upon this early work came from a select underground avantgarde, whose members shared with me misguided assumptions about an artist's creative potential in art or music within cinema technology. In truth, what ideas I did share with these cineasts were less important to me than those concepts I shared with my brother and a few contemporaries who, like Wassily Kandinsky, years earlier, envisioned music-like potentialities in the spiritual abstract constructivist formalisms of painting. Those filmmaking contemporar-