Reconceptualizing “Music Making:” Music Technology and Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Recent initiatives by for-profit corporations and funding measures instituted by governments intend to support the preparation of students for careers in computer science and technology. Although such initiatives and measures can indeed increase opportunities for students' engagement with computer science and technology in K-12 schools, we question whose needs are being served, for what purposes, and at what cost. In particular , we ask whether music educators might be complicit in advancing technology that subordinates human needs-specifically students' interests in making music in their own creative ways-to modes of production that benefit certain dominant commercial interests in society. After discussing how current computer technology narrows students' choices, we counter this determinism by highlighting a music subculture that creates and appropriates music technologies for music-related purposes. Our example of the "chip-scene" illustrates how music educators might reconceptualize "music making" through modification of existing music technology and thereby restore students' freedom to "re-claim making" in the age of neoliberalism. Especially troubling under the rule of neoliberalism is not simply that ideas associated with freedom and agency are defined through the prevailing ideology and principles of the market, but that neoliberal ideology wraps itself in what appears to be an unassailable appeal to conventional wisdom. (Giroux 2004, 49) Man ceases to be one of his own kind when he can no longer shape his own needs by the more or less competent tools that his culture provides. Women or men, who have come to depend almost entirely on deliveries of standardized fragments produced by tools that are operated by anonymous others, cease to live human lives, and at best barely survive-even though they do so surrounded by glitter. (Illich 1977, 31-2)