By Molly Sheridan
“Technology is anything invented before you were born.”
“Technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet.“
–Kelly jokes about how other people define technology
I admit that sometimes Kelly’s book made me nervous, like trapped on a speeding train nervous.
This was not the only pop culture parallel I drew. One of the points he grounds his argument on is the idea that certain ideas and developments have been and will continue to be inevitable, in that they have historically been simultaneously and independently invented or evolved as solutions to certain challenges. Our world will not be stopped. Shades of the two almost-identical versions of the world in the sci-fy tv show Fringe, anyone?
Perhaps I found this idea particularly beautiful, as well as musically related, because it gave me repeated flashbacks to one of the most lovely quotes I can recall from a NewMusicBox composer interview. Wendy Carlos was talking about the power of music and she noted:
And an essential part of music is to connect with our shared inner feelings, to recognize the connections and know that you’re not alone. We’re born alone; we die alone. In between we have music, and a great gift it is, too. It’s in there with our social structures: families and friends and loved ones, a shared humanity. I like to think of it as the old metaphor of two ships at sea. We flash our signal lights as we pass one another. It makes life less lonely. It’s wired into us. If music were taken away from us, I do believe we would invent it again. In a few generations, we would develop it all over again.