Composing in the information age - John Lifton - Interview

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1992 by Chris Meyer

The worlds of software and music have grown closer over the past few years. Not only is computer technology used extensively in the music-making and -recording processes, but creators in both fields share concerns about what happens to their work after it leaves their hands.

The following conversation on the impact of new technology and the "information age" on composers took place at the 1989 annual Composer to Composer symposium in Telluride, Colorado. John Lifton is a composer, futurist, and the codirector of the symposium. Chris Meyer is an instrument designer, multimedia standards activist, and writer for many music and electronics magazines. His email address is cybpunk[at]well.sf.ca.us. His log-in comes both from his car's vanity plates and his personal approach to life -- high tech on the street level.--Jonathan E.

THE OLD RULES DON'T APPLY ANY MORE. The explosion of the Information Age has erased many lines and bluffed several others. Take for example how far a composer shapes the final form of a piece of music: In the past, the composer wrote a score, and handed it to others to perform. He or she might actually have conducted or performed one of the parts. Particularly in the areas of classical and jazz, conductors and musicians were encouraged to "interpret" the score. Today, some composers not only write all of the parts, but -- with MIDI sequencers and multitrack recorders -- perform all the parts. They may have crafted some or all of the sounds from scratch, instead of relying on existing instruments.

Some composers are willing to provide just the seed material for a series of chance operations or algorithmic-composition software. They may create the software themselves, coding into it a set of personal compositional rules, and consider that to be their "song." On top of this, a larger number of people call themselves "composers": computers, algorithmic composition, factory patches, and home studios have really opened the doors as to who can play. A lot of people don't play an instrument, or don't necessarily want to invest the effort into learning to play an instrument well, but it's getting easy for them to make music.

The tools that have given composers so much power and control (along with the choice of how much control to exert) have taken away the ability to keep sole possession of their work. With software so easily and so rampantly copied, sounds so readily sampled, and Standard MIDI Files around to encourage the capture and modification of another's musical sequence, how does a composer hope to make any money once his or her work gets in the public's hands? These topics -- the new relationships between composer and composition, and between creator and consumer -- are discussed, if not necessarily resolved, herein.

Chris Meyer: How far does a composer's relationship with the composition go?

John Lifton: I don't think there's a real distinction any longer between the composition and the instrument and the means of dissemination and the means of reproduction. It's all one continuum of information.

CM: Two extremes seem to be represented by Laurie Spiegel and Paul DeMarinis: Laurie is willing to let some compositional rules be embodied in a piece of software, and let that live as a composition (namely, her program Music Mouse), whereas Paul defines every part of his compositions -- what pieces of speech he samples to play back, and how he processes them with software and hardware he created. Every single part of it has to be defined to be the finished composition he had in his mind. It's no longer a question of turning out a score; it seems to be a question of how much of the final product a composer wants to have control over. They're saving, "This much has to be hard-defined to convey my idea. And from there, whatever room's left, is up to you. But this is how much I wanted to define to get my idea across." Yet with things like MIDI and sampling, the composer may still not have control over what the listener ultimately hears.

JL: There are whole new areas of distinctions. And there are some new areas of concerns -- organizations such as BMI are just scratching the surface about sampling and so on. But sampling, to my mind, is nothing compared with the biggest scale of the problem. The fact is that with music today, as with most software, the original piece costs a fortune, and all the rest costs nothing. The cost of reproduction or dissemination is almost nothing, and once it's out, it's out -- effectively, there is no private domain.

The French theorists on postmodernism have described this vast expansion in the sense of "public space" and what constitutes public space within the culture. Effectively, once a piece has been put into that public arena it's gone, because it can be taken, it can be copied, it can be transformed, and there's not much you can do about it. In terms of the conventional view of getting royalties for performance of work, it's a lost battle immediately.

The underlying problem is more a problem of economics -- although economists don't seem to be prepared to address it. In the Industrial Society, when you produce a good -- say you're producing toasters; it doesn't matter what it is -- every one you produce takes the same amount of materials, and labor, and energy, and "stuff" as the one before, so you've got this certain, fixed cost. And up front, you've got R&D costs, etc. As you go on producing these things, the value of them is maintained, because each one costs that amount. At a certain point, you write off all of your up-front costs, but you've still got this unit cost you're dealing with.