"I have problems with machines which aren't gestural"
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Ferrari’s complaint lands like a shrug that’s also a manifesto: the problem isn’t machines, it’s machines that refuse to meet the body halfway. “Gestural” is doing heavy lifting here. In music, gesture is the readable trace of intention - the arc of a bow arm, the breath before a phrase, the physicality that lets listeners sense cause and effort even when they can’t name it. Ferrari, working in the postwar world of tape, electronics, and studio composition, is poking at a central anxiety of technologically mediated sound: when the interface gets too abstract, the human disappears behind the system.
The line is also a quiet swipe at a certain modernist fetish for immaculate control. Non-gestural machines promise precision, repeatability, an almost bureaucratic kind of perfection. Ferrari’s work often leaned the other way: toward the documentary, the anecdotal, the messy richness of real environments and lived perception. He’s not romanticizing “authenticity” so much as insisting on legibility. If a tool doesn’t let you shape sound through action that feels continuous, you start composing by managing parameters, not making moves. The music can still be brilliant, but its intelligence risks becoming disembodied.
Contextually, it reads as an early warning that now feels obvious in the era of laptops and menus: the interface is an aesthetic choice. A gestural machine doesn’t just make sound; it makes intention audible, and it keeps the composer’s body - not just their ideas - inside the work.
The line is also a quiet swipe at a certain modernist fetish for immaculate control. Non-gestural machines promise precision, repeatability, an almost bureaucratic kind of perfection. Ferrari’s work often leaned the other way: toward the documentary, the anecdotal, the messy richness of real environments and lived perception. He’s not romanticizing “authenticity” so much as insisting on legibility. If a tool doesn’t let you shape sound through action that feels continuous, you start composing by managing parameters, not making moves. The music can still be brilliant, but its intelligence risks becoming disembodied.
Contextually, it reads as an early warning that now feels obvious in the era of laptops and menus: the interface is an aesthetic choice. A gestural machine doesn’t just make sound; it makes intention audible, and it keeps the composer’s body - not just their ideas - inside the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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