NEW MUSIC AND NEUROBIOLOGIC RESEARCH Can They Meet
Richard Toop · 1982
In the popular imagination there is probably no kind of music that seems more compatible with the 'sciences', loosely understood, than radical new music. No doubt the visible impact of technology on some branches of new music (most obviously, electronic music) has helped to foster prejudices. It should be clear though that the mere use of synthesizers, computers or other electronic equipment in the production or performance of music does not necessarily make the music so produced of interest to scientific research, any more than does the use of a contact microphone in the performance of a 19th century guitar concerto (though this latter case does have obvious sociological implications). It would be an understatement to say that examples from recent art music do not figure largely in current scientific discussion of music. In fact, dialogue between composers of 'new music' and serious researchers engaged in the study of music as a communications system, an anthropological phenomenon, or whatever, has rarely taken place to any great effect. There were some exceptions in the early 1950's particularly in relation to the early development of European tape music. The German information theory researcher Dr. Werner Meyer-Eppler* was one of the founding fathers of German electronic music (its first major exponent, Karlheinz Stockhausen, subsequently attended Meyer-Eppler's classes at Bonn University). Stock hausen (1963, 1964) makes intermittent, and often adulatory, references to Meyer-Eppler. (Stockhausen's lecture notes for the Bonn University courses have survived, and shed light on the influence of information/communi cations theory on Stockhausen's compositions in the mid-1950's.) Similarly, Meyer-Eppler's French counterpart Abraham Moles was much in evidence at * For a brief summary of Meyer-Eppler's role in the beginnings of European electronic music, see Eimert et al., 1973. 387