75. "if the rest of my life slowed down a bit I'd finish this book" In response to In response to 73
>>THIS is what I'm talking about! And that's a link you can >>trace back to Stockhausen, Riley and Cage which carried its >>way through the likes of Moroder and Eno into a top tier >>position in the 21st century machine age of music.
Without going through the classical and pre classical eras (they are important cause you have like sacred eras and folk eras and through the expression of that you realize it's as much distinguished by time as it is by place, just look at chinese folk vs sacred vs classical periods which don't conform to the same euro timeline but i digress)
You have the composer era, the player era and the machine era. These eras are defined by the primary means by which music is understood to come forth. In the composer music comes from the composer. Player era the music comes from the person who is playing it (which is what gave way to the pop idol). Machine era the music comes forth from the machines. Now there's a slight inconsistency between them, but that is I think bridged by the names mentioned above.
You see if you eliminate the player era from the equation (just for now) you get a direct line from the composer era at the tail end as it gets more avant, more experimental, going outside of the rules, contradicting the form, and even introducing machines into the equation, but still with the ey on composition. Even Cage's 4'33" was a composition. Riley commissioned works for his mechanized reinterpretation. Stockhausen used the machines to express his compositional desires.
They were the ones breaking down the old guard around not merely what is 'music' but how music can be made. And it is that which was picked up on by Eno and Moroder, even if they were surrounding themselves with players for the era, they had the keen sense that music could be made in a different manner, and they explored that.
Those explorations kept the machines alive not just in practice but in the ears of listeners so that a few decades later when the technologies caught up with the ideas the transition from player to machine was acceptable (also thank hip-hop).