![]() Musicians everywhere are breaking their synthesizers and audiences are turning off their televisions and going to live performances again. By the time the guild has had Baque imprisoned (they frame him for murder), it is too late. He modifies the machine further and begins playing music in underground concerts that awaken strong emotions, even sexuality, in listeners. Forced to play a honky-tonk multichord in a dive bar, he discovers that its broken, out-of-tune filters allow for much more personal expression. The protagonist, Baque (a none-too-subtle reference), is a composer who is too committed to the quality of his tunes and thus is fired for returning assignments late. The guilds, in fact, have all but banned acoustic instruments, because they cannot control the emotional effect they have on listeners. ![]() Human composers make this music, but settings on their synthesizers (the “multichord”) and the operations of musical guilds strictly constrain their creative choices. ![]() “The Tunesmith” is a grounded satire of these attitudes, set in a authoritarian near-future where the only music still consumed by the public is commercial jingles. Laudadio investigates these attitudes by looking to science fiction stories from the 1950s, Charles Harness’ novella “The Rose” (1953) and Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s short story “The Tunesmith” (1957), that imagined scenarios in which electronic music threatened human culture. Many feared being replaced, either as performers or as composers, by computer processes. It’s no surprise, then, that the biggest skeptics of electronic music were musicians themselves. Many musicians feared being replaced, either as performers or as composers, by computer processes.
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