Music Is Duty-Free: Sending Sounds across Borders

Abstract

The object of Telemann's complaint, above-a 3-month delay in the delivery of a musical score-was only one of the many problems an eighteenth-century composer suffered from, when he or she wanted to use the communication paths available at that time. (The costs were another. Telemann explains in a letter toJ. R. Hollander [1] that he had to send the score by ship in order to avoid the prohibitory costs for postal transport by mail coach.) Cheaper, faster and closer to contemporary musicians' needs are electronic mailing facilities offered by various computer networks for the academic and the home computing community. Composers, musicians and sound researchers can exchange sounds as easily as they can musical scores. A cooperative process of musical creation could liberate the composer from the restrictions of isolated work. Composition could in fact become an interactive process among individuals with quite different cultural, political and aesthetic backgrounds. The old romantic cliche of composergenius would have to be dismissed in favor of the concept of composer-teams. Four different ways of musical networking are score collage, sampled sound exchange, musical structure exchange and live interaction.