[NewMusic] acoustic vs. electronic

[Chris Broderick]

--- Barry Threw <bthrew at gmail.com> wrote:

> No, things are good enough!  Don't make them better!
>  Don't change them, 
> its scary and uncomfortable!

And here, I believe, is the crux.  No one is saying
that technology can't improve things.  As I diabetic,
I am glad that medical science has evolved in its
approach to the disease.  If I was born in 1770 rather
than 1970, I'd have been dead before I was 30.  Hell,
if I was born in 1950, my health would probably be a
lot worse than it is.  I understand and respect that,
and am glad that I live in a day & age that respects
science and technology.  And I wish every day for some
Poindexter in a lab to concoct a cure.

What I disagree with is this idea that technology is a
panacea for everything.  It strikes me as the closest
thing that a post-Enlightenment rationalist is allowed
to get to a  religious attitude (see, for example,
astronomer/SF novelist Vernor Vinge's writings about
the Singularity).  And it is extremely unscientific. 
As Homer Simpson said, "Young Lady, in this house, we
obey the laws of thermodynamics!"  Our technologically
based society has a large amount of entropy already
built in.  And as the Second Law sez, entropy only
increases.  We don't have enough energy sources to
sustain our present course regardless of how many
geegaws we manage to gin up.

Phil Gelb can corroborate this, but most people I know
who are deeply interested in cooking still own a
mortar and pestle.  Why?  Because a) it's a lot easier
to pulverize a small amount of herbs, peppercorns,
etc. etc, using this most primitive of methods than it
is to throw it in a cuisinart.  And many cooks enjoy
the tactile part of the process.  Just because
technology improves some things does not necessarily
mean that it improves all.  Many older (some might say
primitive) technologies are still a major part of our
existence.  I didn't burn all of my books the minute I
got a computer, nor did I smash my horns when I got a
synth.  What I think happens is less a superimposition
of present technologies on past, but something more
like a palimpsest.  One of the virtues of living in
this modern world is that you can have access to less
than modern ideas without access to less than modern
diseases.  One of my greatest joys this past year was
learning (and then, despite my ignorance, teaching)
Kecak, AKA Balinese Monkey Chanting.  The past exists
in the present exists in the future.  Sorry for that
bit of hippy-dippyness, but I think (most particularly
when we are talking about the arts) that that sense of
anachronism will be with us for a long time,
regardless of our level of technological advancement.

-Chris

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com