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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2016
The rise of information science and its effect on contemporary arts is a topic raised in Stravinsky and Craft's Memories and Commentaries in 1959. It makes sense to inquire how the fundamental priorities and exact discriminations of communications science might have altered the ground rules of musical invention and contemporary listening habits. Answers lie thin on the ground, the few composers most deeply implicated in the information revolution – Babbitt, Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage in particular – having chosen to remain silent on issues relating to the hidden side of the avant-garde. ‘No gossip!’ said Stockhausen to me, in a blunt email in 1998.
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6 Dmitri Tiomkin's score for the 1951 sci-fi movie The Thing (from another world) is typical. Alexander Courage's theme music for the Star Trek television series substituted a wordless soprano voice for the ondes martenot, at producer Gene Roddenberry's insistence, in order to avoid frightening younger viewers. Steiner, Fred, ‘Music for Star Trek: Scoring a Television Show in the Sixties’, in Wonderful Inventions: Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress, ed. Newsom, Iris (Washington: Library of Congress, 1985), pp. 287–309 Google Scholar.
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