Yet jazz struggled to gain parity, particularly in the U.S., its country of origin, due in large part to systemic racism. Improvisation ceased almost entirely to be a part of classical music, but flourished in a new art form: jazz. The ultra-complex compositions of high modernism required machinelike accuracy from performers, but many postmodern minimalist scores also demanded robotic precision.Ī performance of the excerpt from ‘Lemma-Icon-Epigram.’ Modernists became increasingly enthralled with procedures, algorithms and mathematical models, mirroring contemporary technological developments. Classical musicians had to consistently deliver technically flawless live performances to match, sometimes reducing music to a sort of Olympics.Ĭlassical pianist Glenn Gould was both a source and product of this state of affairs – he despised the rigidity and competitiveness of live performance and retired from the stage at the age of 31, but retreated to the studio to painstakingly assemble visionary Bach interpretations that were impossible to perform in one take.Ĭomposers mostly abandoned the serious pursuit of improvisation or performance. Performers faced the rise of recording techniques that flooded consumers with fixed, homogeneous and objectively correct versions of compositions. Johann Sebastian Bach was mostly known as an organist, with his first biographer describing his organ improvisations as “more devout, solemn, dignified and sublime” than his compositions.īut the 20th century saw the splintering of the performer-composer-improviser tradition into specialized realms. Machines are replacing human improvisation at a time when classical music has abandoned it.īefore the 20th century, nearly all of the major figures of Western art music excelled at composition, performance and improvisation. Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images Music becomes more machinelike Yet humans eventually became no match for machine: In 2019, former world go champion Lee Sedol retired from professional play, citing AI’s ascendancy as the reason.Ĭhess enthusiasts watch world chess champion Garry Kasparov at the start of the sixth and final match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997. That’s because go has a far greater number of possible move choices at any given time, and virtually no specific rules – it requires more improvisation. IBM’s computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but it took 20 more years for AI to defeat top players of the board game go. (“Hey Siri, email Amanda and congratulate her on her promotion.”) Predictive email text will continue to evolve, bringing an increasingly transactional quality to our relationships. Much live social interaction has been replaced by the sterile activity of carefully composing emails or social media posts. Autonomous vehicles currently stumble where greater mastery of improvisation is required, such as dealing with pedestrians. Self-driving technology may soon replace human drivers, automating our fluid decision-making processes. These trading pits have mostly been replaced by algorithms. The trading pits of Wall Street, Tokyo and London were once filled with the vibrant chaos of traders shouting and signaling orders, reacting in real time to fluidly changing conditions. AI has been making significant strides in this area. More improvised activities are less rule-based, more fluid, chaotic or reactive, and are more process-oriented. Machines have long excelled at activities involving consistent reproduction of a fixed object – think identical Toyotas being mass-produced in a factory.
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