Mankind – Music – Technology. Technology in the Musical Thinking of the 20th and Early 21st Centuries

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Mankind – Music – Technology. Technology in the Musical Thinking of the 20th and Early 21st Centuries

Martin Flašar

This book examines the modalities of human relationships and technology as reflected in the musical thinking of the authors of art music of the 20th and early 21st centuries. The discursive and reference frame of the treatise consists mainly of individual artistic poetics and more general musical-aesthetic reflections embedded in the basic theoretical concepts of technology and its functions in culture and society. The departure point for the work is Heidegger’s lecture "Die Frage nach Technik", in which he suggests humanising technology through art. The following chapters examine the relationships between man, music, and technology from three points of view. Chapter 3 deals with music from a technical point of view, chapter 4 analyses the transformation of the musical artefact in the developmental arch of the 20th century from numerical abstraction through digitisation to materialisation in musical as well as non-musical art forms. Chapter 5 is a representation of man and his thinking in relation to technology in music. Here we distinguish between four basic types of attitudes in musical thinking on technology, categorised by the degree of influence attributed to technology: techno-utopian/techno-optimistic, techno-realistic, techno-sceptic, and post-technological. In the latter, we define four basic artistic strategies forming separate types: critical attitude, adaptation of technological models, recycling, and inspiration. These strategies are ranked from generally negative attitudes through specifically positive to generally positive.