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 *  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.

 */