Word Jazz: Werde, Jack © Paul Martin Zonn, 1997
Jack kept on
track with the
pack of analog-dudes from the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Facility
and with great ability (and just as he pleases)
put together his computer orchestra of farts and wheezes,
strings and brasses and cackling winds to compose music
that will still make my mother cringe
when I play it.
Loudly, of course, so that the
power, force and great beauty sing through the air,
Lingering only long enough to rattle
windows and walls on the way to who knows where!
But that was the old days.
Jack carefully has made forays
into new ways
of raising sound from silence as no one else can.
Old Analog-Jack and his computer-band
has turned his back on the old technology
with no new or old apology he reappears as Digital Man... and
Acoustic-only music is the newest game-plan.
Wait a minuet --
Sidebar, sidebar!
(and a sidecar or Gentleman Jack
for gentleman Jack!)
Is this the guy who poo-pooed the PDP5 and wouldn¹t acknowledge
that composition could thrive in another domain
other
than that East-coast plane?
All those concerti that used a solo instrument simply amplified.
He never tried
any effects to equalize and
combat those Columbia-Princeton timbres and
earball bam-bam bammers.
Tape: complexity
Performer: nervous-wreck-city!
More¹s the pity:
no sequenced MIDI
Wait another minuet --
no sidebar or sidecar, just a Cardhu (and never Cardew)
This is the guy who knows all the words to "Mountain Dew"!
And he will sing a chorus or two
for me and you if we¹re not careful.
He knows Handel, Elgar, Gershwin and Porter, too.
He knows "Black and Tan Fantasy", "Bye-Bye Blues"
"All Blues" and "Blue Suede Shoes".
Hey! wait a minute Illinois‹--
Do you know what you¹re losing?
Judd G. Danby
John Melby's contributions to the field of music via the electronic medium are a documented part of musical history. What is probably not well known, at least to those not personally acquainted with him, is his fascinating blend of attitudes toward the technology behind that medium for producing music.
Not since Gilbert and Sullivan has the world witnessed another paradox such as that posed by John's relationship to and with the computer. There's a delectable duality about a man who, on the one hand, continued to use-and to teach his students to use-punch cards after they were no longer a programming necessity, and yet who, on the other hand, pursues and tests the latest soon-to-expire beta-release software on his own personal computer with such vim and vigor that a widely-read industry weekly writes a feature article about him as a beta-tester. And about a man who has multiple personal computers placed in multiple rooms (linked by intercom), linked by multiple hardware connectivity platforms to multiple internet service providers via multiple phone lines, and yet does not own an answering machine-a device which he despises.
Far more than mere charming anachronism or inconsistency on the part of a quirky personality (though John does indeed possess considerable charm, and even a quirk or two!), his attitude belies an important ambivalence which has informed all of his activities in computer music. The recent fervor over Kasparov's chess defeat at the "hands" of Big Blue's Deep Blue has reinvigorated the age-old battle of man versus machine (a debate I find lacking in real significance, since man created both that machine and the game it plays). It's a battle John (and others) never accepted as real, while recognizing that many around him did and do believe it to be real-to the detriment of music-making (and, ultimately, of humanity more generally). For, to believe in technology as something separable from man is to open the door to granting technology significance in its own right.
Too often, the computer-the technological platform-is mistaken for the significant link in the music-making process. But a piece cannot be good just because its sounds were created using, say, granular synthesis techniques, any more than another piece can be good just because it is written for the piano. I surmise that John's predilection for "outdated" programming and synthesis techniques (a condemnation uttered by all too many who think that "technologically incorrect" is, in fact, a meaningful statement) is not so much anachronism as it is a deliberate counter-move to the advancing pawns of the technologically chic, who grant significance merely on the basis of the choice of tools and techniques used in achieving some musical result, rather than on the results themselves. (And of course, the academic system itself is largely to blame here, for promoting the simple earning of grant money-necessarily via use of the latest and greatest machines-over significant activity.) I further surmise that his ambivalent feelings toward and interactions with technology belie an inner war between the desire to apply technology in expressing his musical thoughts and the fear that merely by employing the technology to the human, oh so human end of making music, he will be perceived as condoning the very attitude he abhors. (Our delectable duality; his dolorous dilemma!)
The computer-in its most generic and all-encompassing sense-is a wonderful tool for making music. Rhythm, texture, dynamics, and timbre can all be employed in new ways and to new degrees of specificity in shaping a work, and John has done so in his computer music throughout his career. Since the early days of computer sound synthesis, he has joyfully worked to realize some of the vast musical potential of the medium. It is interesting that the vast majority of his pieces involving computer-generated sound are concerti for live instrument(s) and tape, pitting them against one another in battle by musical definition- contradicting on a certain level what I stated above. But of course in the bigger sense there is no contradiction, for any significant piece of music, whether it involves the computer or not, is ultimately of, by, and for humankind. It is his recognition of this deep truth underlying music rendered in the electronic medium that has informed John's multifarious musical activity over the past thirty-some years, and rendered it so valuable and enjoyable.
And thus, as both his student and his colleague at the University of Illinois, I will miss his valuable perspective on computer music making as a teacher in and member of our division even as I salute his achievements and eagerly await what is yet to come from his musical imagination.