Wait, did you say 'Programmed Music'?
We taught a machine to play music before we learned how to reproduce it ourselves.
I find it fascinating that recorded sound is so new to the arts. Sculptures, paintings, literature, and even motion pictures proceed it. Analogue, then its more successful, electric, and digital recording techniques for audio expression are last in this list. Recorded sound comes in with a flurry of changes to how we live and express ourselves artistically. As Scott DeVeaux opens his discussion about the AFM recording ban of 1942, “The jazz tradition as we know it could not exist without recording technology. The special nuances of jazz-the details of rhythm, timbre, pitch variation, and dynamics, to say nothing of the art of improvisation-simply cannot be accurately represented with conventional notation. For better or for worse, the history of jazz is a history of recording.”
Before that, three Persian brothers were translating Greek works in Bagdad during the 9th century. The encyclopedia of People, Science, and Technology’s biography of Banu-Musa brothers describes the siblings—Muhammad, Aḥmad, and al-Ḥasan —always known under the one name, which means “sons of Mūsā”, worked in the House of Wisdom—the first scientific institution in the Abbasid Empire. The middle brother, Aḥmad, was known for his publication of the Kitāb al-Ḥiyal (The Tricks Book), which was filled with one hundred mechanical devices. This included the “automatic flute player”, which is regarded as the first programmable machine.
A flute, played by the first program, lead us down the road to the computer, and recorded sound. And hence, the Facebook Livestream. If ever there was a more fascinating story about the “Pied Piper”, I’ll never know, for in the original story, written on the wall of Pied Piper House in Bungelosenstrasse (drumless street) - the street where the children were last seen and where, to this day, no music can be played out of respect for the lost children (On the trail of the real Pied Piper, By Lizz Pearson), they might still be listening to a livestream with their headphones on.
With that, I give you John Corigliano's Pied Piper Fantasy from February 4, 1982, which I admittedly may have chosen because the composer’s name sounds like “Corgi”, despite the silent ‘g’.