Abstract: Last July, I visited an unusual exhibition of visual art at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, presented under the title of Art and Technology in the twentieth century. It sought to summarise and categorise the reactions, as expressed in drawings and paindngs, of artists to developments in technology in this century and also to look back to the way earlier manifestations of the Industrial Revolution had been depicted in the work of artists of the nineteenth century. Walking around that exhibition set me thinking about music and the technology of today and suggested, incidentally, that when we discuss the applications of late twentieth-century technology to music and musical research we must not omit to discuss the attitude of musicians and musical researchers to that technology; further, that we must use the process of discussion itself to amend or revise or enlarge our approach to the subject. Not least, we must occasionally remind ourselves of the history of art's relationship with technology in order to place our own attitudes in a larger context and to understand better where we find ourselves now and to what extent our proposals and reactions are conditioned by history, by historically based notions of the relation of art and technology, by irrationality and (no less) theories of what constitutes rationality, by instinctive fear and also by thespian confidence.
Publication Year: 1981
Publication Date: 1981-08-01
Language: en
Type: article
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