But where a guitar has a flat back, an oud has a domelike form that presses backward against the belly or chest. This makes playing one a tender experience. You must find just the right way to hold it, constraining your shoulders, moving mainly the smaller muscles below the elbows. Holding an oud is a little like holding a baby.
Moving this way, I become aware of the world beyond the small instrument I’m swaddling; I start to play more for others than for myself. The cello also makes me feel this way. You have to use your shoulders—your whole back—to play a cello. But cellos summon a different set of feelings. Playing one, you’re still bound up in a slightly awkward way, bent around a vibrating entity—not a baby, not a lover, but maybe a large dog.
If playing the khaen turns me into an extroverted athlete, then the xiao—which is held vertically, like a clarinet or an oboe—invites me to explore internal dramas
Eventually, I cajoled the caterpillar and found a tone I love, solid yet translucent. When that happens, the challenge is remembering how to make those fascinating, false notes. One mustn’t lose one’s childhood.
I met many Japanese musicians who found Mozart as appealing as the Beatles, and who played violin and piano along with rock and roll. In Western countries, the social institutions that kept classical music alive—conservatories, instrument builders, teachers, contests—were being sustained by an influx of stunning musicians from Asia. A kind of cultural trade was taking place.
Most of the world’s compositions were never notated, and what was written down is often minimal; although scores do exist for very old Chinese music—some of the oldest are for the noble guqin, a kind of zither—they amount to mnemonic devices, lists of strokes and playing positions. The earliest European scores are similar, with lists of notes. What we now call “early music” is largely a modern stylistic invention. I tend to learn the rudiments of my instruments and then develop my own style; I’m an eternal amateur.
The forms of music which could be synthesized by powerful AI may hearken to styles of music that have been lost to time — which people would otherwise not endeavor to master because there is little demand. Reconstructing these is reconstructing heritage.In the case of the xiao, much was lost through the centuries, and then again in the Cultural Revolution—but xiaos are small and easy to hide. Some musicians are said to have buried them in secret locations, in hopes of escaping Mao Zedong’s attempts to engineer culture from scratch. This complex history means that, today, there are contrasting contemporary approaches to playing the xiao.
There is an irony in the surveillance state: the same apparatus that enables models to be trained on privacy-violating data could produce systems powerful enough to reconstruct the cultural history that the regime sought to erase. The tool of control becomes, inadvertently, a tool of recovery.But physical instruments channel the unrepeatable process of interaction, a quality lost with modern production technology.
Today, tech companies promise to create algorithms that can analyze old music to create new music. But music is ambiguous: is it mostly a product to be produced and enjoyed, or is the creation of it the most important thing
The ambiguity of music as product vs. process raises questions about where economic value sits. A score is produced to be reproduced, but orally preserved music — carried through mnemonic devices that expired with their practitioners — held a different kind of value, one that resists commodification precisely because it cannot be separated from the act of transmission.I often work with students who want to build algorithms that make music. I ask them, Do you mean you want to design algorithms that are like instruments, and which people can use to make new music, or do you just want an A.I. to make music for you? For those students who want to have optimal music made for them, I have to ask, Would you want robots to have sex for you so you don’t have to? I mean, what is life for?
Because of my work with computers, I had early access to looping tools, and I was able to play around with loops earlier than most musicians. At first, the techniques didn’t speak to me; music is about change, I thought, while loops are about artificially preventing change. When so-called minimalist composers—Philip Glass, Terry Riley—ask musicians to play the same phrases repeatedly, what emerges from this technique isn’t repetition but an exquisite awareness of change: using a traditional, physical instrument, each repetition reflects your breath, your pulse, the weather, the audience, the light, bringing subtlety into consciousness. My understanding of loops shifted when hip-hop appeared. Here was a genre that was often angry, often a protest—the use of loops could evoke the strictures a rapper raged against
Hip-hop’s use of loops as constraint maps onto broader questions about institutional resistance: what are the structures to rage against now? The consolidation of power among tool-makers, the erosion of privacy, the architectures that constrain creative agency while claiming to enable it.Over the years, I’ve toyed with one possible definition of reality: it’s the thing that can’t be perfectly simulated, because it can’t be measured to completion. Digital information can be perfectly measured, because that is its very definition. This makes it unreal. But reality is irrepressible.
This connects to Martin Heidegger’s concept of “standing reserve” — reality cannot be fully reduced to resource, and what resists measurement resists domination. Art-making, then, is an act of insisting on connection to what is unmeasurable, regardless of how digital the medium becomes. The digital tool does not negate the spirit of the work; it only changes the surface through which that spirit moves. ecological framework for technology and churchThat’s also how much information a key press communicates in an electronic keyboard. And yet the experience of playing an acoustic piano, and of listening to one, is that more is being conveyed. When pianists trade off on the same instrument, they perform with individual touches and sounds. Pianos are somewhat abstract devices that have transcended abstraction.
There have been many studies comparing old and new violins, for instance, or flutes made of different metals, in which a player is hidden behind a screen and listeners are asked to identify which instrument is being played. The problem with this approach is that the difference between a good instrument and a great one could inhere in the player’s experience, rather than in the external sound. If an instrument inspires a musician, then the music will be more meaningful, even if listeners can’t distinguish the sound of one instrument from another. Music is an interior art before it becomes exterior.
The musician’s perception of the instrument may matter more than the listener’s ability to distinguish its sound. A great instrument inspires the player, and that inspiration shapes the music — even if the audience cannot hear the difference. The same dynamic applies to digital vs. analog photography: the tool’s effect on the maker’s process is where the real distinction lives.How can you be competitive about raw skill, or get into some other macho trap, when the task at hand is so esoteric? Who is to judge the winner in a contest that must invent itself over and over
