Taking a mechanical turn

Bernard Stiegler in a 2010 article ('The Age of De-proletarianisation') refers to Bartók's 1937 lecture on mechanical music: "At the beginning of the 20th century, perception took a mechanical turn – making it possible, for example, to repeatedly listen to music without knowing how to make music. Bartók drew attention to this in relation to the radio, when he recommended only listening to music while following along visually with the musical score."

Stephen Hough has released a wonderful iPad app where you can do just that: the score is presented as well as three different camera angles filming the performance, and all of these play in sync and of course you can move freely around in the piece with the swipe if a finger. There is also an intriguing piano roll view which shows the notes of the left hand and right hand as little scrolling streaks in different colours.

Bartók was concerned with the body's role in the production of music, and to some extent echoed an aritcle in a special issue of Musikblätter des Anbruch on Music and Machines (October/November 1926) contributed by Hans Heinsheimer, who worked as a music publisher for Universal Edition (where he supported Kurt Weill, Leoš Janáček, and Alban Berg).

Stiegler asserts that "the socialisation of digital technologies, as with every new technology, is initially perceived as a kind of poison (as Plato said about writing, even though it was the basis of law and rational thought)." Perhaps we are too far steeped in the consumerist disenfranchisement from our lives to feel the poison at work: as Stiegler writes elsewhere in the same article ..."a good consumer is both utterly passive and irresponsible" He concludes with an injunction to grasp the digital nettle: "Like writing, and according to Plato’s word, the digital is a pharmakon, that is, at once a poison, a remedy and a scapegoat. Only the digital itself, insofar as it can be a remedy, enables an effective struggle against the poison which it also is"