Improvisation

Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

“…In the words of the Atari pioneer Nolan Bushnell, the computer serves simultaneously as "an arbiter, an umpire, a scorekeeper, and a dungeon master." 207 Its binary protocols transcode sensible representations of language, number, sound, image, gesture, and affect by way of audiovisual modulations and input devices that operate both as formal mechanisms and as digital interfaces. In this regard, the device that most conspicuously brings the historical, cultural, technological, and epistemological properties of music and digital gameplay into direct contact is the keyboard.…”

“…16.4 monochords of Keck, Conrad, and Gallicus demonstrate that the keyboard can facilitate analog computation that, like a slide rule, models the very phenomena it seeks to measure. 207 The fi e detail of such analogical mappings can be directly indexed by the topographical features of the keyboard itself. Th s tendency was most evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when instruments such as the archicembalo of Nicola Vicentino, the cembalo triarmonico of Giovanni Battista Doni, and the clavemusicum omnitonum of Vito Trasuntino rendered the keyboard's interface more temperamentally granular in the service of transposition, modulation, historical speculation, and neoclassical experimentation.…”

“…Although Landgraf deftly exposes the contingency of the premises and distinctions on which this dilemma was founded, Ord-Hume's twentieth-century framing of the componium as either an unparalleled marvel or an unspeakable hoax reveals the strength and longevity of its binaristic logic. 207 The bewilderment that greeted the componium's mysterious mechanisms can be considered in light of Czerny's puzzlement at how the quintessentially human attributes of "refl ction and attention" failed to account for improvisation at the keyboard: instead, as we saw above, "we must leave nearly everything to the fi gers and to chance. " 208 On the one hand, Czerny's reference to the fi gers acknowledges the mechanistic digital principles that underpinned eighteenthcentury improvisatory techniques, driven into the subconscious by the type of repetitive practice recommended by Niedt and demanded by his own works.…”

“…So the famous opening chord now becomes a chord of the added 5th. " 207 In other words, the pitch of E flat-the tonic itselfbecomes a foreign element at the very moment of its anticipated return.…”