Letters to Memory

Abstract

There is no doubt that computer music would have happened independently of Max, but that it happened as early as it did and in the form that it took was altogether dependent upon Max’s unique, forward-looking way of thinking. In his famous 1963 article in Science (Mathews 1963), where he first made public his work begun six years before, he describes a music program that was elegant in its conceptual simplicity yet extensible to constructive complexity. The article showed that music, for Max, embraced the numbers behind the notes on paper, the science that explains sounds in the air and its mysterious processing in the brain. His implementation was accessible to musicians because his program was in a musical frame—note, score, orchestra—and the non-musical concepts, signal flow, control, and so on, were translatable or learnable and became part of the lexicon. Max invited, indeed encouraged, musicians to become involved, for he knew that from among them he could find those who possessed essential attributes for the field that he had launched—the capacity to compose, to create sound from the inside out, and the capacity to apply refined performance skills to his magical controllers. Max gave voice to these and many other ideas and pursued them with passion through his lifetime—we listen and we hear, still.