「music technology」というと電子楽器や電子機器を思い浮かべる読者が多いでしょうか。しかし生楽器も技術の産物なのであり、例えばピアノの音を鳴らすアクション機構には50以上の精巧な部品が使われています。テクノロジーを音楽とは無関係とする見方はテクノロジーが音楽に対し影響を及ぼすものとの認識を前提にしていますが、そうではなく音楽にとって不可欠な要素なのです。時代やジャンルを問わず音楽の制作、保存、複製、そしてリスナーへ届ける技術を俯瞰して論じます。
 

     
Mark Katz surveys the age-old interrelationship between music and technology, from prehistoric musical instruments to today's digital playback devices.
   
This Very Short Introduction takes an expansive and inclusive approach meant to broaden and challenge traditional views of music and technology. In its most common use, “music technology” tends to evoke images of twentieth and twenty-first century electronic devices: synthesizers, recording equipment, music notation software, and the like. This volume, however, treats all tools used to create, store, reproduce, and transmit music—new or old, electronic or not—as technologies worthy of investigation. All musical instruments can be considered technologies. The modern piano, for example, is a marvel of keys, hammers, strings, pedals, dampers, and jacks; just the sound-producing mechanism, or action, on a piano has more than 50 different parts.
    
In this broad view, technology in music encompasses instruments, whether acoustic, electric or electronic; engraving and printing; sound recording and playback; broadcasting; software; and much more. Mark Katz challenges the view that technology is unnatural, something external to music. It was sometimes said in the early twentieth century that so-called mechanical music (especially player pianos and phonographs) was a menace to “real” music; alternatively, technology can be freighted with utopian hopes and desires, as happens today with music streaming platforms like Spotify. Positive or negative, these views assume that technology is something that acts upon music; by contrast, this volume characterizes technology as an integral part of all musical activity and portrays traditional instruments and electronic machines as equally technological.