A composer in his twenties tells me he doesn’t use “technology” in his music — no samples, no interactive computer applications. To me, it’s concerning.
At a recent Music with a View concert at the Flea Theater, there was new music by three composers using varying amounts and means of interaction between electronics and live performance. In the Q & A after the concert, Morton Subotnick mentioned that he had dreamed of this new world — a world where technology becomes easy and accessible enough so that many and various artistic voices can be heard through it. Subotnick had thought it would take only 200 hundred years to achieve!
Evolving instrumental technology affected Beethoven. When he got a new Erard piano with added high pitches he used them right away in the “Waldstein” sonata. (The new notes seem to sneak in, ascending step by step, several pages into the first movement — so as not to dissuade potential 
buyers of the printed music who might only take a glance before their purchase? Very few pianos in Vienna included these notes when they were written.) Later, a new piano with a low-bass E provoked Beethoven’s Opus 101, with its climactic use of the new “contra E” as a dominant pedal tone. The new note motivated the entire sonata’s multi-movement harmonic plan, it seems to me.
Schubert’s music stays much more in the middle. Did he have less exposure to expensive new mechanical inventions, or was he less interested in “limits”? Was Schubert less temperamentally extreme, more attached to the piano as a vocal analogue, less an artistic mannerist?
Always there are some early adopters. Technology shapes the specific details of their work. But they have to encounter or even seek it out.
Thank God there are composers who compose using
inspiration, not techncal availability.
I’m curious why you find it concerning for a young composer not to use “tecnhology.” I am a young composer myself, and I do use modern tools (Sibelius notation software, Ableton Live sampling and processing), but I also know that there is plenty left to say by me and by my colleagues that requires no more than a pen, manuscript paper and acoustic instruments. I see the obsession with newness – ideas pushed by a few generations of mid-century academic composers – finally subsiding, and us young composers are realizing that nobody is looking over our shoulders to make sure our statements are unprecedented and complicated. So we are free to compose rock music, turn off our computers, whatever we want. I just think of how Bach was writing outmoded music while his colleagues, and even his sons, were moving on to “modern” techniques, and I remember that unearthing something authentic and personal in my music is the only requirement for this craft.
I think the two of you are missing Bruce’s point: even the modern pencil and paper you are using is a result of technological advancement, so frowning on people who use ‘technology’ is hypocritical.
The blank page is bigger than ever!