Electroacoustic music is to instrumental composition as photography is to painting.
The charm of painting (and of all art) lies in the artifical representation of nature. That a piece of canvas dabbed with droplets of coloured oil can be made to look like, for example, a magnificent view of the sea is a stunning thing.
This of course ignores the anti-representational practices of Modernism, such as Pollack's sort of Abstract Expressionism, in which the paint itself is the thing "represented." But Modernism is inherently destructive, and here I want to speak of creation, not destruction. Shiva has his place and his duty, but now I speak of Brahma.
The technical reproduction of such an image in a photograph is likewise rather thrilling, arising as it does out of the study of image in projection that arose during the development of Renaissance painting, but it does not thrill in the same way or to same degree as the piainting. I believe this is because the artist is less personally involved in the detailed creation of the work. Beautiful as a photograph might be, it always seems a lesser achievement than a great painting.
Electroacoustic music seems to me to stand in a similar relationship to instrumental composition as photography does to painting. In electroacoustic music, especially as practiced by those in the musique concrete tradition, e.g. the "Montreal school", the artwork consists by and large of recordings which have been manipulated and combined in a multitude of ways. It's not so different from what can be done to a photograph, likewise a "recording" of a moment in time, using modern tools such as Photoshop. There can be great artistry in the manipulation, but...
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