I DONT WANT IT to look like I only ...
Steve Holtzman died of cancer in 1999. He was only 43. His was a genuine loss at many levels?as a thinker, a synthesizer of ideas, a writer, a decent human being. Less so, maybe, as a composer.
I read Digital Mantras when it came out in 1994. His ideas about music intrigued me, so I shot him an email (or maybe even a letter), and he sent back his CD of the same name as a gift. He was that kind of guy, you could even see it in the book jacket photo?somebody you'd like to know.
The book is both broad and deep, but also clear and accessible, the work of a friendly, incisive mind driven by fascination, not hubris. Starting with Sanskrit grammar and Gregorian chant, he talks about language, structure, systems and art through the ages, leading up to how computer technology has become a new kind of artistic tool that, in a sense, has shifted the structure of structure.
He got me to understand things like music theory that had never before made the least damned sense to me. There's little overt sense of humor, but you can feel it lingering in the background, scratching itself. This is an interesting and engrossing book, but beyond that, I think it's an important book.
Potentially (though not currently), Holtzman says, computers can give everyone the means of composition by helping identify, organize and apply explicit rules of structure to create a language for any type of art. And, unlike any past artistic tool, the computer can become a partner in the creative process?or even become the creator (in which case the artist, who supplies the abstract organizing structure, becomes the "metaartist").
Holtzman's views of the future of art and music are a little like William Gibson's. But they're perhaps even more like those of J.G. Ballard in his 1960s Vermilion Sands stories.
Holtzman developed his own, I guess you'd call it "metamusical," language, GGDL, "designed to permit the definition of a very broad set of different kinds of rules for music composition." His recorded musical works are as much exercises as compositions?most of them labeled "studies"?neither memorable nor exciting.
The electronic "After Artaud" maps the structure of an Antonin Artaud poem into music sounds through a process I can't pretend to understand. "After Schoenberg" is a series of trios "for piano and for digital noises?generated [through GGDL] using rules that would also generate Schoenberg's Trio from his Suite for Piano, Opus 25." Sorta fun, but...
The centerpiece on the Digital Mantras CD is "Machine Music," 25 minutes and three seconds of a computer processor performing its operations, translated into sound. It comes across, to this non-individual-cricket-discerning ear, as white noise with ever-so-subtle bips. But just because it supplies so little variation, anything at all unusual almost makes you hold your breath (tiny snatches of melody in Terry Riley's In C have the same effect). Sudden gaps of silence followed by stuttering restarts are like the machine shaking itself and saying, "What the hell was I just doing?"
Holtzman argues that beauty can reside as much in a composition's abstract structure as in its realization?though he notes, "Music is an expressive, deeply moving communicative system. It cannot be reduced to mere abstract formal structures."
I find not the slightest trace of artistic fatheadedness in Holtzman (unlike many of the artists he quotes). Alas, being something of a fathead may be one of those uncatalogued prerequisites to being a true artist.
What's Out There: His books, Digital Mantras and the later Digital Mosaics, are still in print. The Digital Mantras recording is available at [CDbaby.com].