The crisis in British theatre in the 1980s, precipitated by a withdrawal of state funding for and a lack of investment in the arts, a failure of the political Left, and a loss of confidence in theatre as a political arena, resulted not in conspicuous critical resistance to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's market economy by British playwrights but a nervous retreat from mainstream politics and the 'State of the Nation' play. The tradition of epic dramas which dissected the condition of Britain, so prevalent in the 1970s, was subdued in a theatre either too timid or too financially insecure to challenge the prevailing climate. At the same time, the political shift to the Right and the enterprise economy produced a theatre audience less interested in 'committed dramas' than in theatrical spectacle. As Michael Billington commented, 'What I missed in 1986 were plays that addressed themselves to the particular spirit of our times: most especially, the privatising greed . . . It is almost as if the present is too vile or daunting to be properly encompassed.'

Let us begin at the end: contemporary poetry ceased to be 'twentieth-century' in December 1999. Throughout the world, the Millennium was a moment for reflection on the expiring century, but in Scotland, especially, it also meant rebirth. In the previous July, the Scottish Parliament had opened in Edinburgh after a recess lasting two hundred and ninety-two years, and its re-establishment confirmed the confidence in Scotland's culture and independent identity that had been growing, albeit fitfully, since the 1960s. The time was right for a new anthology of Scottish poetry, which could present the country 'hale and whole' and provide a literary context for poets working in Scotland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse, edited by Robert Crawford and Mick Imlah, opens with St Columba's 'Altus Prosatur' ('The Maker on High'). The sixth-century Latin may seem startlingly remote from the experience of modern readers, but on the facing page is the English translation by Edwin Morgan, through whose powerful rhythms the traditional faith in eternal creative energy comes pouring through, breaking down linguistic barriers and opening poetic channels through the centuries. As Morgan has observed in a recent sonnet on Scottish literary tradition,

With the proliferation of transport infrastructure in sixteenth-century England, the term network appeared. From then on, its use spread to the most varied fields, so that today it occupies various significant nodes in our thinking – it has become a way to understand the world. Network music can be situated somewhere between such a conceptual and the more technical meaning of the term. It covers a broad range from collaborative composition environments to sound installations and improvised music ensembles. Within today's computer music, networks play an important role. Be it laptop ensembles that use the local ethernet to exchange hidden musical messages, composition tools for searching online sound databases, or shared environments for musical improvisation on the internet – the communicative and social aspects of music-making are reflected in the computer instrument. The history of the computer is closely linked with the history of telecommunication, so that it is not surprising that network music has been evolving together with computer music. Nevertheless, as we will see, network music goes beyond the technical needs of communication – it investigates the implications of networking in a much broader sense.

This chapter gives an introduction to basic aspects of this field, providing a background for understanding network pieces and giving inspiration for new developments. As far as possible, we try to include the cultural context that forms the background of contemporary network music pieces. The first two sections will cover the aspect of transmission, and the role of material and symbolic mediation within sound-based art. In the next section, we will first follow a brief history of the network paradigm in computer languages.

Although Algorithmic composition became popular with the rise of computers, algorithmic thinking is far older – it can be traced back to the ancient times of Pythagoras and the Jewish Kabbalah. It is a method of perceiving an abstract model behind the sensual surface, or in turn, of constructing such a model in order to create aesthetic works. Behind the various approaches there is one common denominator: a longing to create something infinite that exceeds the limited horizon of our individual knowledge. Seen in this light, algorithmic thinking and its application in the arts can become a way to gain experience and to overcome barriers that are either implicit in ourselves, or erected by our social environment.

In this article, I am focusing exclusively on the use of algorithms in the compositional process, leaving aside other approaches like the algorithmic simulation of musical styles, the computational modelling of music cognition and the application of artificial intelligence techniques (Cope 1996; Ebcioglu 1990). My primary aim is to demonstrate how the algorithmic spirit has evolved through the centuries – from medieval music theory to the interactive realtime-generated computer music of today.

Algorithm

The term algorithm was phonetically derived from the name of the Arab mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (ninth century) who introduced Hindu–Arabic numerals and the concepts of algebra into European mathematics. An algorithm can be defined as a predetermined set of instructions for solving a specific problem in a limited number of steps. Algorithms can range from a mere succession of simple arithmetical operations to more complex combinations of procedures, utilising more involved constructions from computer science such as rule-based grammars, recursion and probabilistic inference.

It is now more than twenty years since the appearance of The New Monteverdi Companion, edited by Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune, to whom this book is dedicated. During those years the re-evaluation of Monteverdi and his work by performers and historians alike has proceeded apace and shows no sign of abating. New generations of performers now work comfortably with the instruments of Monteverdi's day and continue to explore the types of vocal production with which he might have been familiar; and listeners can now experience a wide range of live and recorded interpretations of Monteverdi's music. More is known now about the context in which Monteverdi worked, and fresh questions have been asked about his musical output, not least those arising from the so-called "New Musicology". On his operas alone three new books have appeared within the last five years.

The foundation years

The history of the International Gustav Mahler Society in Vienna (henceforth IGMG) is of general interest because the organization both exemplifies, and was exemplary in, the struggles surrounding Mahler's work. It was founded on 11 November 1955, ten years after the end of the holocaust. Today Mahler has reached Olympian heights of recognition, even adoration, but at that time his work was as controversial as it had been during his lifetime. The catastrophic Nazi reign, with its ideological antecedents stretching back to the nineteenth century, contributed its share to this in Germany and Austria. However, to blame the neglect of Mahler's music on this alone would not represent the whole truth. There were only a few musicians throughout the world who believed in Mahler at that time and who occasionally performed a small number of his works in England, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union and the USA. The collection of concert programmes in the IGMG archive offers convincing proof that the much-discussed, surprisingly rapid ‘Mahler boom’ did not come into full effect until the 1970s.

The initiative for the founding of the IGMG came from the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Its stance towards Mahler had always been ambivalent: affection and disapproval had played equal parts in their work with him during his appointment as Director of the Vienna Opera. Although the orchestra had dishonoured itself because of the way it treated Jewish members during the time of the Third Reich, it did perform Mahler's First Symphony again on 3 June 1945, a few weeks after the end of the war, and it took over the costs of maintaining Mahler's grave in the cemetery at Grinzing.

The Lamento della ninfa, included by Monteverdi in his Eighth Book of Madrigals, the Madrigali guerrieri, et amorosi (1638), has been a focus of hot debate over aesthetic and expressive issues in the composer's Venetian secular music. It was identified by Ellen Rosand in 1979 as a prototypical example of a ground-bass pattern moving from tonic to dominant through a descending minor tetrachord – the so-called ‘emblem of lament’ that then, in diatonic or chromatic form, and with or without a cadential extension, permeated Baroquemusic, via Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (Dido's concluding ‘When I am laid in earth’) to the Crucifixus of Bach's B minor Mass, even extending into the Classical period and beyond (the opening of Mozart's D minor string quartet, K. 421). In 1987, Gary Tomlinson sought to reconcile his disparaging view of Monteverdi's apparent decline from Renaissance subtlety into Baroque sterility with his undoubted sense of the power of this ‘through-composed dramatic scena’: the Lamento della ninfa is ‘a brilliant anomaly’ – ‘In it, from the foundation of Marinism, with materials touched bymemories of lighter styles, Monteverdi erected an enduring monument to the Petrarchism of his youth.’ In 1991, Susan McClary picked up on Tomlinson's notion of it being a ‘dramatic scena’ and explored the piece as a prototypical (again) mad-scene, worthy of comparison with Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Richard Strauss's Salome, and Schoenberg's Erwartung.

Writing about two of David Hare's epic plays from 1978 and 1982, I encounter history in syncopated time. Plenty, overtly historical, moves from 1943 to 1962 while A Map of the World, not marked by year in the text, was produced in 1982 and 1983, when preparations were already underway for an observation of 1985 as the 'Year of the United Nations'. A Map of the World can be linked productively to debates about the role of the United Nations at that time, while Plenty will benefit from attention both to the history of the years represented within the play, and also to concerns and events at the time of its first production. Then there is the third dimension of time, the time of this writing - when this chapter is intended to speak to contemporary readers who may not even have been born until after both of these other periods. David Hare and I were born in the same year, and the second time stratum examined here, the decade from 1975 to 1985, found both of us living and working as thirty-something contemporaries. 'Contemporary History' can seem like an oxymoron, but the important question of when experience is past enough to be viewed as history - perceived, analysed and treated as historical - is a valid and perplexing one for those of us engaged in the pursuit of a glimpse of the newly historical past.

The myth of early opera

Early opera is often regarded as a completely new genre, created ex nihilo by a small circle of theorists and musicians in Florence and Rome as a conscious attempt to reinvent Ancient Greek tragedy which, some believed in the later sixteenth century, was sung throughout. Although this view has been justifiably criticised on a number of occasions, it still tends to be the prevalent model for the rise of opera even in recent encyclopaedias and textbooks.

However, none of the dramatic pieces which were, or may have been, performed musically in their entirety between 1590 and 1608 in Florence, Rome and Mantua, can be regarded as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense because of their choice of subject, place and characters. Instead of depicting the tragic entanglements of kings and their like, situated in palaces or other appropriately courtly surroundings, early operas are generally set outdoors in country settings and are concerned with the loves of gods, semi-gods, shepherds and nymphs. In this respect they belong instead to the contemporary tradition of the pastoral play, a dramatic genre that evolved only in early modern times, even though it referred to the long-standing, but non-dramatic bucolic tradition of Greek and Roman classical authors. The most influential contemporary examples of this new type of pastoral play in Italy were Torquato Tasso's Aminta and Giovanni Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido.

The possibilities for sound manipulation, spatialisation and performance have given rise to a multidimensional approach to electroacoustic composition. Yet from whichever background we find ourselves, a number of trends following historical, sociological and technical developments can be uncovered. This chapter identifies these trends and their compositional and aesthetic circumstances, forming a springboard for a new composer to the genre. Although it is unrealistic to delve extensively into all that is relevant, I hope to encourage the reader to more deeply explore the issues raised through the references and discography. Without dwelling on the problems of terminology, let us accept for now the term ‘electroacoustic music’ as including all that is not purely acoustic music, based on instrumental models nor commercially orientated.

Where are we today?

The novelty of the early decades – of listening to strange sound emanating from loudspeakers – has passed. Trial and error has resulted in as many new approaches to materials and structure as has conceptualisation and intellectualisation. Yet if as composers we are to ‘progress’, and not ‘recycle’, we need to refine our art form and learn from those few works which have survived the past sixty years, as well as discover masterpieces from our current year. After all, music technology changes dramatically in less than a decade while musical aesthetics require reflection and development benefiting from longer historical periods. Too often do we hear new compositions from all environments where refinement and development in both technical approach and musical expression is stark – and would have benefited from a deeper insight into the repertoire.

In 1886 William Butler Yeats was introduced to Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dublin. Both were to play a significant part in the history of English verse, yet they constitute an ill-matched pair. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest but also an English patriot who felt painfully out of place in Catholic Ireland, whereas the young Yeats was far from orthodox in his religious beliefs, although descended from a Church of Ireland clergyman. When confronted with Hopkins he seems to have experienced a reaction which was predictably Irish and recognisably Protestant: his impression was the usual Irish one that Hopkins was 'a detested aesthete' and that he had brought a 'faint theatrical Catholicism to Ireland'; the Irish, Yeats told Humphry House, apropos of Hopkins, had 'no sympathy with English Aesthetic Catholicism'. Many years later, Yeats wrote about Hopkins as someone 'whom I knew', vacillated about which poems should be included in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse and mis-remembered, or misrepresented, the occasion: 'a boy of seventeen, with Walt Whitman in his pocket, had little interest in a querulous, sensitive scholar.'

Yeats may have had a copy of Whitman in his pocket, a detail intended to suggest a wide gulf of taste, but the example of the American poet seems to have left little trace on his own verse. On the other hand, Hopkins once said that, even if he had only read 'half a dozen pieces at most', 'I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living.' This suggests an undeclared and significant affinity with the poet recognised by D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) as 'greatest of the Americans'.