THE OMEGA INSTRUMENT

A conductor stands to an orchestra as a proton equivalent to a collection of bound-electron equivalents, the combination thereby formed constituting an atomicity appropriate to an atomic age or society. With the emergence of a post-atomic age or society, however, such an atomicity will cease to be viable ... as orchestras and conductors are regarded as obsolescent and consigned, in consequence, to the rubbish heap of bourgeois, democratic history. You can't have a baton-wielding proton equivalent dominating a collection of instrument-bearing electron equivalents, reminiscent of a tyrant lording it over his subjects, in a radically theocratic society. All such relativities would be morally taboo, quite apart from the inapplicability of acoustic instruments to a supernatural age, or the no-less inapplicable reference to music-scores, which, through intellectual appearances, maintain a relativity with the music being played - the music not solely essential, or stemming from internal memory/improvisational sources, but derived, as notes, from a source extraneous to the self.

When music is essential, and thus stemming from the musician's spiritual self, there is need neither for scores nor conductors, since free-electron absolutism is then, as in the best Modern Jazz, the norm, and the music will reflect this internal freedom largely through improvisation. But better, of course, is the use of synthetic or electric instruments to reflect such a freedom than ... acoustic ones, which, being naturalistic, are more applicable to an atomic, and hence bourgeois, context. Modern music is best served by electric instruments, though we can distinguish, I believe, between the antinatural and the supernatural even here, so that while some types of guitar and keyboard will be better-suited to antinatural Rock, other types, being differently constituted, will prove more appropriate to a supernatural context like Modern Jazz, which depends much more on pitch than on rhythm.

Where electric guitars are concerned, one can distinguish between the flat, solid type of instrument, suited to Rock, and the guitar synthesizer which, with its piano-like keyboard, is more appropriate to the supernaturalism of Rock-Jazz. On the other hand, there may well be a Marxist-Leninist equivalent about synthesized guitars, or synth-axes, which would make them specifically appropriate to Jazz-Rock as opposed to either Rock-Jazz or Modern Jazz, the latter of which, by contrast, would profit, as it so often does, from the use of semi-electric guitars (not to be confused with the raised, hollow type of guitar that is more relevant to Pop and was, in some sense, a forerunner of the solid electric guitar) and even from the use of modern folksy kinds of acoustic guitars ... appropriate, in their partly plastic construction, to the supernatural, in contrast to the natural, wooden/catgut acoustics used in bourgeois classical music - the classical guitar properly so-considered. Certainly the supernatural seems, as a rule, to have more in common with the natural than with, say, the antinatural, even if the anti-supernatural, Marxist-Leninist equivalent appears a little closer to it when all the ingredients have been taken into account.

And what holds true for guitars must also apply to other types of instrument, keyboards included, where one can note a natural/antinatural distinction between acoustic (specifically upright) pianos and flat, horizontal electric ones, the latter applicable to Rock. No doubt, the incorporation of a synthesizer or synthesizing capacity into the electric piano brings it closer to the supernatural ... with regard to synthesizers-proper, and may be said to constitute an anti-supernatural (Marxist-Leninist) equivalent ... to the extent that a supernatural element, viz. the synthesizer, has been brought to bear on a basically antinatural instrument, as applicable to Jazz-Rock.

However, for a truly supernatural integrity, applicable to Modern Jazz, nothing short of a genuine, unadulterated synthesizer will do, its appearance reminiscent, to a degree, of a harpsichord, its sound transcendental. If Modern Jazz is to evolve into Superjazz, a pitchful absolutism, it can only do so, one suspects, via a synthesizer, that most supernatural, and hence theocratic, of all musical instruments. Guitars, keyboards, strings, wind, brass, and percussion instruments are all, in varying degrees, either democratic or autocratic, whether on a positive or a negative basis. Not even the use of transparent plastics - perspex, vinyl, etc. - turns electric guitars and violins into truly supernatural instruments, though it marks a distinct radicalization of the antinatural.

Only the synthesizer can transcend all historical instruments and their antinatural successors by combining them within its own uniquely synthetic integrity, and thus rendering them superfluous. For if you can play a guitar-like or a flute-like sound on the synthesizer in addition to its own specific sound, of what use are guitars or flutes? Why have the Many when you can settle for the One which, in its multifaceted capacity, subsumes the Many into itself while simultaneously transcending them all through its own uniquely synthesized sound? And which, as well as being manually playable, can be programmed to play any sound or combination of sounds in whichever way one specifies, thereby doing away with the relativity between different performers and elevating the musician to an absolutist status vis-à-vis his compositions.

Ah, so quintessentially theocratic! And no need for a conductor to ensure that the music is performed correctly or, more usually, according to his personal preferences. No individualism where an autonomously-generated performance is concerned. Nor even any performer. Does not the machine rid man of the burden of manual work? Or, in the case of musicians, of repeating the same work over and over again, no matter how pleasurable it may once have been? Yes, of course!