Try telling young folk...
(sent to me by our correspondent in Bussels)
"…But perhaps the best instance of discovery in the book is also the most understated. Artist and engineer Buchla had hooked up with Subotnick and Sender in 1963; collaborating on their concept for an “electronic music easel” and, oddly enough, using Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau sans maître,” 1953–55, as a case study for the design, Buchla invented the modular voltage-controlled synthesizer in late 1964. When asked how he came up with the idea for this revolutionary device, which made everything from Kraftwerk to Timbaland possible, he simply states: “I don’t know. I just did it.”
When I was eleven, my grandmother took me to a Grateful Dead concert at the eighty-thousand-seat football stadium in Buffalo. I remember watching the half-hour guitar and light solo that happened after sundown. Being a technology and music nerd even back then, I quickly deduced that the guitar solo was produced by playing modal scales through a tape delay. My own eureka moment while reading The San Francisco Tape Music Center came when I realized this was the same technique that led Riley to “In C.” After all, the Dead had played the Trips Festival, and their bassist, Phil Lesh, had studied composition with Berio along with Reich. The VW vans in the Buffalo parking lot and the post-Cagean avant-garde all seemed the same—having converged in ’60s San Francisco. Next time you use Apple GarageBand software, pay your respects to Boulez. Next time you hear “In C,” consider Miles Davis and the Dead. And the next time you are in a loft in Brooklyn/Vienna/Tokyo watching a band improvise with electronics, thank your lucky stars that Pauline Oliveros took accordion lessons."
Cory Arcangel is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
...
