Jon Appleton

My friend max

Among the characteristics of great individuals are humility, generosity, loyalty, conviction, enterprise, and curiosity. These are all traits I have observed in the nearly forty years I have known Max Mathews (see Figure 1). I met him in 1970 on the island of Lidingo in Sweden where we both attended a UNESCO-sponsored meeting on music and technology. I was an enthusiastic “young Turk” and thrilled to be at the same conference with Xenakis, Schaeffer, Koenig, and others. It was also the time that I formed life-long friendships with Jean-Claude Risset and Lars-Gunnar Bodin. It was at that conference that Max Mathews said, “The future will add the digital computer to the equipment of today’s electronic studio. In the near future it will control analog sound synthesizers. Together, the digital and analog form a hybrid sound synthesizer. In the far future, analog devices may be swept away by more reliable and accurate digital synthesizers constructed from integrated circuits. The result will be real-time digital synthesizers which can be played with all the nuances of presentday performance and all the precision and range of sound quality achieved by present-day digital synthesis. The future grows from the past, and the past is now long enough to reveal at least the next step forward” (Mathews 1971). Max Mathews was the only distinguished figure at that conference who listened to my ideas. This is something he has done for many, many young composers and scientists who were interested in advancing the cause of computer music. In countless ways he encouraged me throughout my professional and personal life. The one exception was the time I ran for the Vermont Senate in 1990. He thought it was a waste of my time, and he was right. I lost. The day after my loss I flew to Stanford and began composing again. I have little math and science background except that which I learned from my Synclavier colleague Sydney Alonso. This ignorance never deterred Max Mathews from helping me work from what I knew.

Machine Songs III: Music in the Service of Science-Science in the Service of Music

come from? Let me suggest that it is a by-product of self-conscious, rational thought, which we call science-the idea that everything can and should be explained. As our civilization develops and evolves, an increasing tension can be observed between disciplines that lend themselves to scientific inquiry (such as acoustics) and those, like music, that seem to constantly evade satisfactory explanation. Who among us today, aware of the recent advances in the study of cognitive processes, would attempt to account for the power of music? Leonard B. Meyer (1967) has written that,