VLADIMIR USSACHEVSKY

Anthropological historians commonly assert that the first radical change in human behaviour came with the emergence of farming in a society that had subsisted thitherto on hunting and gathering. The importance of that change is undeniable. But in one respect it was a change of degree, not in kind; that is, in both conditions, physical survival, of the tribe and its individual members, depended on an intimate involvement of man and the forces of nature. The hunter trapped birds and mammals, using hand-made devices and knowing the ways of his prey. The farmer raised crops, using hand-made tools and studying the givens of soil and weather. For each of them, the environment and the human mind were locked together; and the key to survival was the human hand.

Over the centuries, techniques were steadily extended and refined. But nothing fundamentally changed until the fifteenth century of the modern era. That was when two things happened, in war and peace. In war, the introduction of gunpowder, in artillery and small arms, enabled soldiers to kill one another at a distance and dispassionately: previously, in hand-to-hand combat, the enemy had been a flesh-and-blood human-being, but now he was an abstract proposition; this completely devalued human life. In peace, the invention of printing made obsolete the hand-written book, produced one at a time slowly in the monastic scriptorium: from then on, books in large numbers became available to the general public, not just to the elite; and this was the true beginning of what is now called the Information Age. Later on, other aspects of living were affected by mechanical inventions, and the Industrial Revolution made possible the mass production of goods: this led to the death of craftsmanship and the enslavement of workers to machines. In important respects, some of these changes caused an overall dehumanization of life.

Commentators nowadays often refer to the present as a Post-Industrial Age. This catchy phrase rolls slickly off the tongue, but it really is quite meaningless. The modern world may be increasingly governed by international business, dominating politics and neutering the nation-state, but the economy is still largely dependent on trade in manufactured goods. Automation may have made a lot of jobs redundant, with unfortunate social results; but life in the twenty-first century is just as machine-oriented as it was in the twentieth — if not more so: in the developed world, almost every household has at least one computer, and the range of its use is enormous.

What bearing does all this have on the art of music? History can give a few tentative answers, not all of them welcome. Nothing has changed in the physiology of singing: some individuals are blessed with beautiful voices, and others are not; nothing will ever alter that fact. Developments have only occurred in the making and use of instruments. Seventeenth-century violin-makers like Stradivari have never been surpassed as craftsmen, and the technique of violin-playing, at the virtuoso level, is no different now from what it was in Paganini’s day. But the ability of modern factories and wholesalers and retailers to put instruments into millions of student hands has greatly improved the opportunity for talented youth to participate in musical life. Inevitably, some of the talent has been syphoned off into the dreary platitudes of pop music: nevertheless, the availability of good new instrumentalists has enriched the pool that serious orchestras can draw on, to the benefit of audiences and composers alike.

However, no sooner did this happy state of affairs come about than along came Robert Moog: his synthesizer and its clever successors have been able, tonally, to mimic the sounds of musical instruments, if not authentically, at least plausibly enough to fool the lay ear. To the expert ear, of course, there is a sad absence of the human touch, manifest in the lack of rhythmic or dynamic subtlety. But regret over that loss has been often overridden by accountancy: film-producers, for instance, willingly save the expense of a full orchestra by hiring a composer to serve as a one-man band, sitting at a synthesizer keyboard. The result may save the production company a pile of money, though the out-of-work musicians are unlikely to be cheerful about it. But what is the result like musically? Anyone who has suffered through the sound-track of “Chariots of Fire” knows the answer: it is distressingly shoddy; and the fact that it featured a quite catchy tune, well harmonized, only makes the listener wish that it could have been played by people, not a machine.

Economics apart, however, the synthesizer and the tape-recorder and the computer have not been all bad in their effect on musical life. Some avant-garde composers have seized on them as a means of extending their creative vocabulary. Early experiments were conducted in Paris, where Musique Concrète was created by taping, and in some cases transforming, the sounds of the natural world and the mechanical world, and by then combining those sounds melodically, harmonically, and contrapuntally as though they were conventional notes played on instruments. The results were sometimes quite interesting, though ultimately superficial: their novelty was intriguing, but they lacked depth, and they did not bear repeated hearing; Musique Concrète was a passing fad, and it did not survive. Its chief flaw was its arbitrarily exclusive use of non-musical sound: it refused to incorporate in its scores any sound that originated from a musical instrument; this put it on a par, artistically, with the kind of novel that has occasionally been written excluding, throughout, a particular letter of the alphabet — in other words, it is more a stunt than a real work of art.

Less inflexible, and therefore to be more seriously considered, is the electronic music that is willing to draw, impartially, on three sources of inspiration: traditional instruments, natural sound, and computer technology. The leading provenance of such music has been the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (New York), and its leading figure has been the American composer Vladimir Ussachevsky. Born in Manchuria in 1911, he was raised a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church; and as a composer he wrote choral music that belongs solidly in the liturgical traditions of that faith. By contrast, some time after emigrating to the United States in 1931, he played an important role, as a secular composer, in the development of richly varied electronic music. This did not signify an abandonment of his religious commitments: the two aspects of his musical career continued side by side; and even if some of the sacred works seem markedly different from the secular, nevertheless the latter do seem to have benefited from the former, at least from the fact that anyone steeped in the sound of Russian Orthodox choirs does acquire a fine sense of sonority.

Some of Ussachevsky’s electronic scores involved a combination of pre-taped material and live performance, the latter being given by one or more instrumentalists or vocalists. The pre-taped material in such scores, and in other scores not involving live performers, contained four species of sounds: there were the ordinary sounds produced by traditional instruments; there were those same sounds subjected to electronic alteration; there were the sounds of nature and of machines; and there were computer-generated sounds. These were his raw materials. From them, he composed works just as serious in their intentions and their skills as any more conventionally created works. They are entitled to be judged on their own merits, not segregated into review by special criteria just because they are electronic. In no way are they to be likened to the shallow effusions of techno-wizards (especially pop techno-wizards) who sit down at their computers and record electronically colourful pieces of rubbish that demonstrate at once their professionalism at the console and their amateurishness as composers. Ussachevsky was in a different league altogether.

What Ussachevsky achieved in the twentieth century was only possible because of the new technology. But it is interesting to speculate what might have been achieved by Bach if, through a magic time-machine, he had been transported from the Leipzig of 1750 to the New York of 1950. His final work, “The Art of Fugue”, is a profound and abstract meditation on the meaning and possibilities of fugal composition. It can be performed on any variety and combination of instruments. And it takes little imagination to picture that old genius sitting down in the Columbia-Princeton studio and committing to tape umpteen different versions of “The Art of Fugue”, employing not only the notes and timbres of traditional instruments, but also those of various other sources, with the sole proviso that they be of accurate pitch. Furthermore, he would have instantly cottoned on to the fact that the ideal way to listen to a four-part fugue is via a four-track tape played back through four separate, but equidistant speakers encircling the listener. That can still be contrived with “The Art of Fugue”, without needing a magic time-machine. What real machines can do is not to be sneered at, in any century. Bach had a superb machine at his disposal, in the pipe-organ. Ussachevsky had even more intricate machines at his disposal. In both cases, though, as both of them well knew, virtuosity in the use of those machines was not an end in itself, but simply a means to a much higher end: music absolutely valid regardless of its source.