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His work on the subject reads a lot like Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, only for the computer age. Gaddis — who wrote ad copy for IBM among other major corporations — saw the instrument as symbolic of a shift towards a binary mode of thought (“the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no”), the triumph of entertainment over art, the move from creation to consumption. It’s a rich metaphor, especially now that the digitization of music allows its infinite replication, causing expensive fights between multinational corporations over the legal status of the artist in relation to his or her work.
Nancarrow was a communist and exiled himself to Mexico City in 1940 to avoid harassment. He began composing for, and tinkering with, player pianos in part to avoid having to work with real musicians on his rhythmically difficult compositions.
