The Music Machine
Duration: 23:00
Date of Composition: 1989
for full orchestra and 2 synthesizers
PROGRAM NOTES:
At the heart of The Music Machine, a fantasy for orchestra, is the assumption of a machine that produces music to order, in any style, for any occasion. Just click the switch, dial in the form, tempo, and mode – presto, out comes music. But since music is preeminently a human activity, the machine fails, albeit successfully, since we composers and performers are better at imitating a machine’s failure than a machine is at imitating human success. Still, The Music Machine runs smoothly: With its metronome occasionally clicking, we hear music for the full orchestra, an Oboe solo, a bit of chamber music. Then an internal pulley slips, levers clank, and an ominous boom is discharged from the battery. But after a stroke on the Tamtam, the engine generates a Scherzo, which builds to an extended orchestra climax with accompanying Timpani solo. The slower atmospheric section which follows is the machine’s attempt at combining two-parts impressionism with one-part expressionism. Then a varied, shortened recapitulation of the opening music leads to a “Hollywood Coda,” which is true enough in its melodramatic build-up, but at the critical moment, when the final tonic chord is imperative, the tonal axle twists, and dominant falls to subdominant. Never mind! The Music Machine heroically sprints along, drums pulsating, woodwinds and violins ripping, ending with the wrong sounds in the right spirit.
It may come as something of a surprise, that the above ‘program’ was written some six months after The Music Machine was completed in 1989. Indeed, the title itself was not selected until the music was half composed. Even so, the title alludes to several aspects of the work. Its music style could have evolved only from a ‘digital’ age. It is, for the most part, music of computer-like precision (and the computer is nothing but a machine in which electricity moves instead of parts). Also, our modern orchestra contains – if not true machines – springs and levers, pistons and gears. Historically, musical machines (as opposed to mechanical music) have long been part of Western music, from music boxes and chiming clocks to orchestrions and pianolas. Mozart, Haydn, and C.P.E. Bach wrote for various ‘automatophons;’ Stravinsky and Hindemith wrote for the pianola. Then there are the Futurists and Antheil’s infamous Ballet Méchanique. But it is hoped that The Music Machine not be thought of as music become mechanical, but as a ‘machine’ that has become musical. As with most music of mechanical quantities, this piece belongs to the classical side, but in consideration of the very un-mechanical romantic temper, there is a degree of late twentieth-century nostalgia in the work for those pre-postmodern times when Western society, rationalist to a fault, dreamed of machines that would make music, beautifully and perpetually.
Immediately before beginning composition of The Music Machine, I worked with David Hockney on a musical video project entitled Haplomatics. I had long been impressed with Hockney’ work. The way it deals with technical and aesthetic problems without sacrificing communicative immediacy and accessibility brings to mind the music of Ravel, Poulenc, and Stravinsky (all composers whose music has been of importance to Hockney’s work). It is in great appreciation of his accomplishment that The Music Machine is dedicated to Mr. Hockney.
-James Sellars