It is a commonplace to say that we live in a scientific age. Moreover, musicians have always been aware that music and mathematics have more than a superficial relationship. After all, musical sounds can be translated into the language of numbers, and tones which we instinctively feel to be related turn out, on examination, to possess a numerical relationship. Thus, a tone is no longer merely a tone, to be accepted as a fact of nature; it can be taken apart like a mechanism and measured in frequencies, in decibels, in duration, and in kinds of attack. But that is only the beginning. The whole subject of sound waves and how they behave is under intensive investigation. Even outside the field of music, the idea of sonic exploration is familiar to the man in the street. He knows what it means to travel faster than sound, to “break the sound barrier,” to use sound to detect the inner failings of machines, to study the eating habits of bats with sounds too high for the human ear to hear. In a time when the very word “sonic” is familiar to everyone, it would be strange indeed if the art of music were not profoundly affected by recent investigations.

In such circumstances, it is too much to hope that music will remain music, just as in the past. Isn’t it astonishing how quickly all of us have become used to the thought that we can have a new kind of music—music without performers, without instruments, and even without composers?

These developments naturally affect the aesthetic climate within which the composer of today functions. He asks himself whether he ought not, perhaps, go back to school to study physics, acoustics, and higher mathematics, if only to save music from being taken over by the engineers and technicians. Gradually our professional musical journals begin to be filled with analyses and theories understandable only to those with adequate scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, these do not include the large majority of practicing musicians, baffled as they are by technicalities from disciplines outside their frame of reference. It is comparatively rare nowadays to read an article of musical criticism in our professional journals that concerns itself with the human significance of the composition under consideration. Instead, we are typically given a laboriously detailed analysis, a note-by-note and measure-by-measure dissection of considerable ingenuity, which would, in most cases, surprise the composer who wrote the piece in the first place.

What I am saying is that composers are in danger of being put out of their own house. The writing of music has begun to attract a new type of individual, half engineer and half composer. He does not approach music out of the same need as did the composer of the past; he sees it from a new perspective. To him it is an open subject with endless possibilities for experimentation, none of which need necessarily engage the subjective side of his nature. Such an investigator shares no traditional inhibitions. He has no hesitation in disposing of conventional notation if the use of other means serves his purpose better. Nor does he hesitate to apply mechanistic principles to compositional problems, the end result of which he himself cannot foretell, nor to write pieces whose virtuoso demands go far beyond the capabilities of human vocal cords and fingers.

Please do not misunderstand me. It is not my purpose to frighten the reader with ogrelike figures taken from science fiction who are about to invade the art of music. I am merely describing an important aspect of the world of creative music as it is today. Scientism has a dynamic of its own—once propelled forward, there is no way to stop it. Just as the world at large has the problem of how to absorb and incorporate the phenomenal advances of the scientific age without loss of our humanity, so the musical world must face a similar situation. Some few composers do have the training and talent needed to judge the competence of scientific minds directed to music, and these few composers can be of help at present. We must keep in mind always that musical judgement in the end belongs to the musically gifted, without whose sensitivity and perceptivity the whole art of music becomes an amusing game—and sometimes a not-so-amusing game.

Aaron Copland