Our fine arts have developed, and their types and uses have been created, in times very different from ours, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the incredible development of our techniques, the adaptability and precision of what they achieve, the ideas and habits they create, make it certain that profound changes lie ahead for the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all arts there is a physical component which cannot be observed or treated as before, which cannot be influenced by our modern knowledge and power. In the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time have been what they have been from time immemorial. It is to be expected that innovations will transform the entire technique of art and thus affect artistic inventiveness itself and perhaps even bring about an incredible change in our very understanding of art. At first, the influence will undoubtedly be exerted only on the reproduction and transmission of works of art. It will be possible to send anywhere or anywhere to recreate a system of sensations, or rather a system of stimuli, caused by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of omnipresence. We will only have to summon them and there they are, either in their living reality or reconstructed from the past. They will not exist by themselves, but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus can be found. The work of art will cease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose utility will be available to us completely and completely, wherever we want. Just as water, gas and electricity will come to our homes from afar to satisfy our needs with a minimum of effort, so we will be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear with a simple movement of the hands, with little more than a movement. Just as we have become accustomed to, and enslaved to, various forms of energy flowing into our homes, it will be completely natural for us to receive the ultra-fast variations or oscillations that our sense organs collect and integrate to form everything we know. I don't know if any philosopher has ever dreamed of a company that deals with the home delivery of Sensory Reality.
Of all the arts, music comes closest to this transposition into the modem regime. Its very nature and the place it occupies in our world mark it as the first to be transformed in its methods of transmission, reproduction, and even production. It is of all the arts the most sought after, the most active in social existence, the closest to life, whose organic functioning it animates, accompanies, or imitates. Whether it is speech or walking, contemplation or action, the monotony or surprise in the temporal flow of our lives, music can take us over, combining and transforming the tempo and sensory values of all of them. It weaves for us an artificial span of time by lightly touching the keys of our real life. We get used to it, we surrender to it as voluptuously as we might to the “just, subtle, and powerful” substances it praises. Thomas De Quincey. Since it directly attacks the emotional mechanism, which is played with and maneuvered at will, it is essentially universal; it is a delight to the ear and makes people dance all over the world; like science it becomes an international necessity and commodity. This circumstance, in connection with recent advances in the means of transmission, suggests two technical problems:
1. Make a musical work available for listening at any point on earth, regardless of where it is performed.
2. Reproduce a musical work as desired, anywhere in the world and at any time.
These problems have been solved. Solutions are being refined every day. We are still far from controlling visual phenomena to the same degree. Color and relief are still quite resilient. In a sunset on the Pacific, in Titian in Madrid we still can't enjoy our living room with the same power of illusion as a symphony.
That will happen one day. Perhaps they will fare better and a way will be found to show us something of what is happening at the bottom of the sea. But as for the worlds of sounds, noises, voices, tonalities, they are already ours. We call them up when and where we want. Previously we could not enjoy music at our own time, according to our own mood. Our enjoyment was dependent on the occasion, the place, the date and the program. How much coincidence was needed!
Today we are freed from the slavery that is so contrary to pleasure and, by the same token, to the most subtle enjoyment of musical works. To be able to choose the moment of enjoyment, to enjoy the atmosphere when not only our mind desires it, but when our soul and whole being yearn for it and when they expect it, is to give the greatest scope to the composer's intention, for it allows his creatures to live again in a vivid environment not much different from that in which they were created. In recorded music the work of the composer or performer finds the conditions essential for the most perfect aesthetic responses.
Here I am reminded of a fairy tale play that I saw in a theater abroad as a child. Or maybe I just imagine that I saw it. In The Wizard's Palace the furniture spoke and sang, poetically and mischievously taking part in the action. The opening of a door produced a whistle or the solemn notes of a village band. If someone sat down on a cushion, it would exhale politely. Everything produced a melody at the touch. I sincerely hope that we do not go to such excesses in the magic of sound. Now one can no longer eat or drink in a café without being distracted by some music. But it will be wonderfully pleasant to be able to transform at will an empty moment, an endless evening, an endless week, into a spell, an expression of tenderness, a spiritual uplift. The days may be gloomy; there are men and women who are very lonely, and many whom age or infirmity confine to their own company which they know too well. These men and women, reduced to boredom and gloom, can now fill their sad and useless hours with beauty or passion.
Such are the first fruits of the new intimacy of music and physics, whose ancient alliance has already given us so much. And we will see much more.
(Glif editorial team; source: mtyka.github.io; translation: Danilo Lučić)
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