Networking Chopin: Grids, Filters, and Aliases
This paper approaches the technological networks and interfaces via which Chopin’s nocturnes and études have been distributed and filtered over the course of the last two centuries. From his day to ours, musical images of Chopin at the keyboard have consistently mediated Romantic fantasies that at once reveal and disavow the mechanisms that bring them to spiritual life. In particular, the digital transmission of Chopinian signals via the keyboard’s grid has been liable to introduce technical artifacts that can be elucidated via phenomena and techniques associated with contemporary attempts to mitigate aliasing (the jagged presentation of smooth contours). Moving across time as well as the discursive registers of pedagogy, performance, recording, media theory, and cultural techniques, the paper pursues the notion that rather than constituting a transparent means by which Chopin and those who followed in his fingerprints could impose their musical will, the keyboard’s pliability could engender mindless automatism. Conversely, the creative spirit could be spurred rather than hindered by mechanical resistance, the concomitant inevitability of communicative distortion, and the impulse to transcend such artifacts via the fine-grained technical manipulation of the very digital elements that gave rise to them.