ABSTRACT

The rise of digital technologies in music since the 1980s has obviously impacted listening, archiving and sharing in many ways, but how transformational has it been in the realm of composition? Once fierce, analogue resistance to the digital has almost vanished among musicians (or mutated into technostalgia), seemingly paving the way for an all-digital musical era; yet is far from being clear how comprehensively the hegemony of computer (or computer-like) devices affected compositional practices. Some composers would fiercely denounce the copy/paste temptation which comes with the use of music software, whereas others would argue that critical-mindedness is not more strongly needed when it comes to technologies than it used to be towards any other matter or ideology (Rea 2008). Some musical subcultures straightforwardly stem from the digital (such as live coding music performance), whereas others – such as contemporary concert music – enduringly position themselves as being essentially unbound by the intense technological drive of our times: composers should be free to define software applications as mere tools determined by their musical thinking, or merely not use them.