/*
* PROGRAM NOTE
*
* Writing in the fourth century BC, Aristoxenus proposes that there
* is a limit of musical production and perception: a smallest interval
* that the voice can sing, and that the ear can hear. His argument is
* not simply an appeal to musical practicality, but also an assault on
* the numerical representation of sounds. Numbers, which are digital
* and therefore arbitrarily precise, are too subtle to represent meaningful
* musical information. Better to listen to the voice, which has a limit
* to its fine-tuning.
*
* Aristoxenus is music theory's first schismatic, the first to devise a
* voice-oriented, "common sense" alternative to the Pythagoreans'
* monochord-based, mathematical philosophy of music. More than two
* millennia later, the tables have turned in Aristoxenus' favor.
* The conservatory compels its students to sing, not to calculate;
* music scholarship promotes the embodied intuitions of the vocalist,
* rather than the instrumentalist's reflection at a distance. The general
* celebration of musical liveness, closeness, or expressivity is,
* fundamentally, a celebration of the human voice, and an attempt to keep
* the power of instruments in check; for instruments, whether musical or
* mathematical, are in essence dead, distant, and indifferent.
*
* But there are those among us---modern schismatics, no doubt---who love
* _both_ the warm vagueness of humanity's "inner voice" and the cold
* precision of musical-mathematical instruments, whether monochord,
* piano, or computer, and are savvy enough not to expect from one
* what we expect from the other. I will claim on my side several
* friends (whether they like it or not)---Yoni Niv, Sam Pluta,
* Jim Altieri, Jeff Snyder---as well as a couple established figures
* who doubtless have no idea who I am---Ryoji Ikeda, La Monte Young.
* To varying degrees and in different ways, we are all trying to come
* to terms with the gap between musicians and their instruments.
*
* My PLOrk piece, for silent typers and sounding digital artifacts,
* is an exploration of this gap. The typers play their instruments
* without having to become them. They make music in spite of
* Aristoxenus' vocal-aural schizophrenia, and the limits it imposes.
*/