Music in an Electronic Age: Two Visions

Richard Povall

iEAR Studios, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Music is traditionally taught as if in a cultural vacuum, but now, more than ever, music is being molded a multiplicity of outside forces. Arguably the strongest of these forces is the electronic media and telecommunications environment in which we live. Music performance, music reproduction, music marketing, music composition, and musical content are being radically altered by sophisticated technologies and digital transmission systems. Two new degree programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute attempt to address these changes by teaching music in non-traditional contexts : a Master of Fine Arts in Integrated Electronic Arts, and a Bachelor of Arts in Electronic Media and Communications.

Some BackgrounD

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, based in Troy, New York, is one of the nation’s leading technological universities. The iEAR (Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer) Studios are a part of the Department of the Arts and have, since 1981, provided growing facilities and academic programs in computer music, video art, and computer imaging and animation. In September 1991 Rensselaer launched a unique Master of Fine Arts program in Electronic Arts, and is currently proposing a radical new Bachelor of Arts program in Electronic Media, Arts, and Communications (EMAC).

Before the establishment of the MFA program, academic programs in the iEAR Studios were limited to undergraduate non-majors: as a technological university, Rensselaer has not historically offered undergraduate art or music degrees. This unique set of circumstances has created a community in which music is taught to two different kind of non-musicians, or, to be more correct, to two distinct groups of individuals who have little or no formal training music. Undergraduates at Rensselaer are the cream of the engineering world, students who excel with numbers and quantification, but whose literary and artistic skills are, at best, underdeveloped. Many of these students have received no formal training in music or other arts whatsoever, and most have little or no exposure to any western classical music, let alone music of other cultures. MFA students, on the other hand, are all practicing artists, but from a variety of backgrounds, many of them from fine art traditions rather than musical traditions. Despite encountering a sometimes expansive gulf in language and critical frameworks, there is a shared creative knowledge base that allows these graduate students to work across boundaries with surprising ease.

New Curriculum, New Pedagogy

With a history of providing students with facilities and faculty that at least encouraged students to collaborate on new pieces, and with a number of experimental courses in multidisciplinary areas, Rensselaer’s decision to support the development of a new kind of MFA program was the result of a bold initiative by two iEAR faculty members: composer Neil Rolnick and video artist John Sturgeon. Their proposal: to develop an MFA program specifically oriented towards the teaching and practice of integrated electronic arts (namely, Computer Music, Video Art, and Computer Imaging and Animation). The primary goal of the program is to support artists in the development of their careers, to provide them with an informed insight into the nature of their work and its rôle in society, and to provide myriad performance and production opportunities both locally and regionally. The program, now in its third year, has over time developed a curriculum designed to meet those ends:

MFA Curriculum Summary

The only courses teaching traditional "disciplinary" art and music topics are the three basic studio skills courses. All the other courses share an integrated, electronic arts approach. This is not to say that the teaching of, let’s say, specific music compositional techniques, is totally abandoned. A course such as the Creative Seminar or Advanced Individual Projects has plenty of scope to deal with individual compositional issues, although the emphasis is generally on working within an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary environment without compromising individual craft and technique (or perhaps learning how to compromise within a collaborative venture).

The Role of Music I

So what is the rôle of music, and of traditional music pedagogy within such a framework? How can we claim to be teaching computer music, and music composition, at the graduate level, within a structure with such a widely varying group of students, backgrounds and expertise?

Answers to these questions are still emerging, but several things are clear. Students who come into the program as composers successfully continue to develop their professional skills as composers, as well as expanding into other areas within the electronic arts. More significantly, their compositional approach is often radically altered as they begin to build pieces within the new frameworks of additional media: the experience of, say, making a video-based installation, will forever alter the way in which a composer approaches her work, both through formal structure, and in content decisions. For music is radically altered when placed within foreign contexts, particularly when the composer has sensitivity to and experience with the environment in which his music is being placed. If a composer has spent some time working with a medium such as video (whether as single-channel video, or as some other construct), the creative process, the formal process, the decision making process, the approach to content, all must be reevaluated. Just as there is no "right" way to compose, there is no "right" way to make work using multiple media.

Our experience has been that students coming into the program with little or no experience with music, forced to deal with making pieces even within the first few weeks in the program, rise to the challenge with a freshness and vitality that challenges centuries of pedagogical approaches to music making. While students highly trained in the visual arts may have little specific knowledge of music theory or musical thought, they often possess an ability to make sound environments of extraordinary insight and richness. Once those same students gain insight into how time passes, they are able to begin building aural and visual time-based forms that are highly successful and sophisticated. For some, the experience rests there: for others, the urge to learn more and more, and to give their native creative wisdom a firmer grounding in theory, leads them to more indepth studies in traditional musical form. All students coming into the program are required to take one semester of theory in their non-specialty area.

Undergraduate programs

While there is neither a desire nor the capacity to launch a traditional undergraduate arts major at Rensselaer, the growing importance of high quality arts programming, and the realization that arts and technology are becoming ever more part of our everyday lives, led to a proposal to develop a new undergraduate curriculum dealing with these issues. The idea of a non-traditional degree program aimed at undergraduates is in many ways more difficult to approach, and more difficult to defend in concept. While it is conceivable (to some, at least) that a trained, professionally active artist can approach other artistic disciplines with relative ease, it is less conceivable that an undergraduate straight out of high school, without any formal art or music training, can be as adaptable and as free to roam. The knowledge base, after all, is significantly different, and it is not easy to ask undergraduate students to make sophisticated decisions without giving them a solid grounding in the traditional theory and literature of a chosen art form.

Realizing that this kind of formal training would never be available at Rensselaer, and yet wishing to address the need for a new kind of training for an art whose context is changing fundamentally, we have set out to build a proposed undergraduate program that treats art and technology as equal partners, exposing students to some of the new ways in which music and visual image will function in the electronic age, and dealing specifically with experimental and futurist technology paths. The Bachelor of Arts in Electronic Media, Arts and Communications (EMAC), is, in some ways, a considerably more revolutionary approach to arts education than the MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts.

EMAC - teaching the 21st Century

The focus of the EMAC program is on preparing students to understand and participate actively in creating and applying the new and evolving electronic culture, especially in the arts, literature, communication, and information delivery. Students graduating with a BA in EMAC at Rensselaer could work in any number of fields, all of which are growing rapidly in the marketplace as the result of new communications and media technologies:

The emphasis is on straddling the two cultures of art/text and technology. EMAC prepares students uniquely by familiarizing them with the necessary combination of technical skills and knowledge, on the one hand, and design, communication, production and creative skills on the other.

This marriage between arts/communication and technology is the result of the newest communications and computer technologies. Not since the advent of the printing press has technological innovation promoted cultural change to the extent that the computer and other new technologies have since the 1960s —— a revolution that continues to gather force and effects every niche of our social fabric and in every marketplace.

The EMAC program at Rensselaer prepares our students for this future through the study of arts, media and communication theory and practice, and the technologies – many of them still in the laboratory – that will shape cultural expression of tomorrow. There are few, if any, programs in the nation that are explicitly and exclusively dedicated to studying this phenomenon and preparing students to take leadership roles in the marketplace it is creating. Only a handful of institutions around the world are as suited or as equipped to deal with this new field of study as Rensselaer —— and Rensselaer is the first to approach technological expression as a gestalt at the undergraduate level, just as it has been the first to do so at the graduate level. EMAC’s mission is to provide students with a broad education in the diverse traditions and varieties of cultural expression that provide the contextual basis for these postmodern developments.

The Curriculum

Core Requirements

Science, Math & Engineering (15 credits)

Humanities & Social Sciences (24 credits)

Design (3 credits)

1st Year Studies (3 credits)

The Major

The Role of Music II

In EMAC, traditional music training has a place. Courses such as Basic Tonal Materials, Music Analysis, and Western and non-Western Traditions in the 20th Century provide a historical and theoretical context, and a good grounding in traditional music theory. They are, however, the fodder of the non-major. More traditional daily ear-training, rigorous 2-year or 3-year theory sequences, and detailed music history classes have no part in this program. Instead, students are studying how music functions within cyberspace, how a composer can control and mold three dimensional space to create an aural image, how music communicates, how music functions within visual and narrative space, how music functions within experimental performance frameworks, how music functions within the digital network, how music is sold and distributed, how music is built in multiple media environments, how sound functions within multimedia training and art products. Always, we are talking about music created or mediated through electronic means. The composer is working almost exclusively at the computer, and there is no longer any need to be able to hear music in one’s head, or even how to read music. Many of my currently undergraduate student composers cannot read music —— but they know how to sample, how to mold sound for specific effects, how to structure using a computer-based sequencer, and how to "paint" with sound. They could no more become professional composers in any traditional sense of that word than fly, but they will play a creative rôle in the musical world that makes up the cyberworld we will live with in some form or another.

EMAC has two paths beyond the core, the arts track and the communications track. It is unlikely that students who take the art track will have come into the program with no prior classical training, but it is possible. Music and Art Theory comes early on in the program, and is taught to all students in the program as part of the core requirement. But EMAC diverges quickly from traditional models. Students are also working within technological frameworks from the beginning, and that in itself is bound to challenge the traditional music models. The new technology is almost never linear —— more and more the branching structures and free association structures of the cyberworld are non-linear. Even simple interactive environments such as CD-ROM are almost entirely non-linear, almost by definition. The software used to create these environments is itself no longer linear, but is so-called "object-oriented" software, built by joining pre-existing modules, or objects. Music written for a non-linear, interactive environment such as CD-ROM is also "object-oriented" —— a shockingly new approach to musical form and musical composition. Composing within totally electronic environments is also an entirely different experience than traditional "head and paper" composing. No longer do students have to hear melodies, harmonies, and orchestrations in their head, but are able to design sound at the keyboard. Of courses there are still golden rules of form, shape, and voicing that need to be learned, but they can be learned 100 time faster than with traditional methods. Further than that, however, composing with a mouse is simply, well, different. The composer makes shapes differently, draws melodies differently, defines small and large forms differently, all working in an extremely direct and free environment. Our students are growing learning to compose in these environments, and many of them will never write music in any other way. That may be considered a loss by some, but I contend, as an electronic composer myself, that is represent a growth —— in freedom, in creativity, in speed.

Conclusion

If music is to find a place within the cyberworld, and as yet it has not, we must be training individuals who understand the nature of both worlds. A composer working within electronic space, visual space, narrative space, must understand how compositional and musical form interact with three dimensional space, with narrative form and content, and, of course, with the actual technological environment. Traditional music played by traditional instruments in traditional groupings will never go away, but it is being challenged as it has never been. If we are not educating our students to operate within the technological environment, educated and informed music making will lose out, and will be removed even further from the mainstream. We need not let this happen.