That’s Not Vintage, It’s Obsolete: Steve Reich’s early e-sketches as a case study of current issues with early historical music notation software and why it matters

lightning talk
Authorship
  1. 1. Twila Bakker

    Unaffiliated

Work text
This plain text was ingested for the purpose of full-text search, not to preserve original formatting or readability. For the most complete copy, refer to the original conference program.

Since the 1980s classical music composition has become increasingly digital. The working papers of the American composer Steve Reich, housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung (Basel, Switzerland), demonstrate one such changing trajectory. Reich began his professional career in the 1960s with pencil and paper, and moved into a digitally assisted compositional practice in the 1980s. After Reich’s adoption of the computer his working documents—in addition to handwritten sketchbooks and unbound sketches, audio tapes and assorted letters—become a blend of proprietary software files housed on 3.5” floppy disks and hand marked up computer print outs. While some of these digital documents still function due to backwards compatibility, not all of the software features are still supported and the surviving software disks run only on vintage hardware. This paper explores some of the challenges and additional information that these born-digital files offer the contemporary musicologist.

If this content appears in violation of your intellectual property rights, or you see errors or omissions, please reach out to Scott B. Weingart to discuss removing or amending the materials.

Conference Info

In review

ADHO - 2020
"carrefours / intersections"

Hosted at Carleton University, Université d'Ottawa (University of Ottawa)

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

July 20, 2020 - July 25, 2020

475 works by 1078 authors indexed

Conference cancelled due to coronavirus. Online conference held at https://hcommons.org/groups/dh2020/. Data for this conference were initially prepared and cleaned by May Ning.

Conference website: https://dh2020.adho.org/

References: https://dh2020.adho.org/abstracts/

Series: ADHO (15)

Organizers: ADHO