Technology, Commodity, Power
Roger N. Johnson · Computer Music Journal · 1994
The October 1952 performance of the tape music of Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at New York City's Museum of Modern Art has come to represent the beginning of a major shift in the relationship between music and technology-and not just within vanguard electroacoustic music, but for all aspects of music production and distribution. The fact is that the vast majority of the music made and heard now is actually electroacoustic music. This condition is obviously part of a much larger social and cultural shift from print-based and, in music, notationand live performance-based information and communication systems toward those increasingly determined by electronic media. During the last 40 years, we have seen enormous changes in the practice of music, in its tools and technologies, and in its social and cultural conditions. In 1952, modernism was still the dominant ideology of the arts. Formalism, avant-gardism, experimentalism, internationalism, the liberation of sound, the idea of progress, and the search for artistic freedom and individualism were all still