Science & Tech Quote by Marian McPartland

McPartland’s “at the risk of being a fuddy-duddy” is a sly preemptive defense, the kind artists learn to deploy when they know the culture will label restraint as quaintness. She names the insult before anyone else can, then calmly refuses the premise that not adopting a device requires an apology. The line isn’t technophobia so much as time politics: a musician protecting her most finite resource from a machine designed to consume it.

The specificity matters. Not “technology,” but “a computer,” “e-mail,” “something in my house” that would keep her “sitting in front of” it. She frames the digital world as furniture, an intrusive object that rearranges domestic space and habits. The subtext is bodily and musical: jazz is a craft of listening, reacting, being in the room. A screen invites a different posture and a different attention economy - solitary, sedentary, endlessly interruptible. For a performer whose life is built around rehearsal, gigs, and conversation in sound, that trade can look like a downgrade.

Context sharpens the intent. McPartland came of age in an era when musicians learned by ear, by mentorship, by late-night sessions, not by inbox. Her refusal reads less like nostalgia than boundary-setting: a reminder that “progress” often arrives as a default setting, not a considered choice. She’s not rejecting connection; she’s rejecting the version of connection that arrives with a chair, a glow, and the expectation that your hours are up for grabs.