In The Face of New Technology

Music has always been in the forefront of technology. The extension of the human voice to reeds, tubes, strings, and membranes has involved advancing the range of our creative expression. Lewis Mumford in his insightful book Art and Technics (he chose to modernize the spelling of our antiquated techniques), notes the ascendancy of practices in art as our skills brought about more control over existing rubrics and the creation of new devices that require and support new and advancing "technics."

Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media anticipated the impact of digital technology on culture and provided a means for analyzing media, creating a new field of research: media ecology. The first seven chapters are freely available on-line. However, the medium is the message (a phrase that McLuhan invented), and Understanding Media was published to be read as a conventional book that electrifies its audience as it breaks through the format of print to help us understand hot and cool media. Through McLuhan's cataclysmic vision, our awareness of the world includes the transforming power of media evolving new realities.

These artists and poets of culture help us understand the world around us through a new lens and with new ears. Mumford was a visual artist who emerged as the poet philosopher of the city, which he described as humanity's greatest artistic achievement. McLuhan was the poet scholar of media who anticipated where we were headed at least 60 years before we arrived.

Poetics of Tech Musicing

Stravinsky published Poetics of Music in 1956, presented at Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures "in the form of six lessons." The spirit of his discussion was the thought that poetics came from the Greek word poiein meaning "to do or to make."

The poetics of the classical philosophers did not consist of lyrical dissertations about natural talent and about the essence of beauty. For the the single word techné embraced both the fine arts and the useful arts and was applied to the knowledge and study of the certain and inevitable rules of the craft. That is why Aristotle's Poetics constantly suggest ideas regarding personal work, arrangements of materials, and structure. The poetics of music is exactly what I am going to talk to you about; that is to say, I shall talk about making in the field of music. (Igor Stravinsky. Poetics of Music. p4)

Musicing is a word that was used in the distant past and recently revived by NYU's David J. Elliott, retrieving our field description from an inanimate noun condition and restoring music to the verb status like dancing, acting, painting... hence musicing.

So I will explore musicing through the lens of technology (techné) as an extension of the ways we music, our making or doing of music. I am inspired to work on this by a class of composers, musicers, and educators, all engaged in exploring techné as an extension of musicing.