N the 1950's and 60's, the recording studio became an instrument. From its humble origins documenting live performances, the studio turned into a music-maker itself, retooling raw material the work of musicians into a finished product. Once mere "records" of musical events, recordings were now something much more exotic and autonomous, painstakingly layered confections. But even after multitrack recording had severed music making from real time, somebody still had to play that guitar.
Not any more. The music business has finally figured out how to do without musicians, those pesky varmints. Today, more and more pop is created not by conventional musicianship but by using samplers, digital editing software and other computerized tools to stitch together prerecorded sounds. From magnates like Sean (Puffy) Combs to innovators like the D.J. and producer Roni Size, pop belongs increasingly to people who don't play instruments and have little or no grasp of even basic harmonic and rhythmic theory. Even music that doesn't wear its computerized origins on its sleeve the mainstream pop of Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears or, for that matter, of Madonna relies far more on sampling and looping (programming a sampled phrase to repeat indefinitely) than on the rock 'n' roll staples of guitar playing and drumming. The punchy rhythms on Ms. Spears's best-selling albums are the work not of a real-live drummer but of programmers pecking away at computers and electronic keyboards.
The issue isn't a mere lack of formal training pop musicians have always been self-taught; neither Elvis nor the Beatles nor Jimi Hendrix could read music but a more profound lack of conventional musical skills. As more and more nonmusicians become hit makers, is the skilled pop instrumentalist an endangered species?
At 29, Zach Danziger is one of the most gifted drummers to have emerged in the last 15 years, a former prodigy whose blistering chops and acute ear made him a rising jazz-rock instrumental star before he was out of his teens. A few years ago, a friend introduced him to the sample-heavy pop genre drum-and-bass. Fascinated, Mr. Danziger started buying samplers and other computerware; today, his living room is the sort of soup-to-nuts, all-digital home recording studio that is becoming de rigeur for today's working pop musician. Mr. Danziger's drums are in a practice room 60 blocks away, gathering dust.
Before his programming skills were up to snuff, Mr. Danziger impersonated John Henry, the mythical steel- driving man who out-hammered the railroads' newfangled steam drill. That is, having absorbed the lightning- fast, computerized beats of drum-and-bass, Mr. Danziger simply sat down at his drumkit and played them. But John Henry died from racing that steam drill. These days, Mr. Danziger hardly plays at all. He programs.
Boomish, the drum-and-bass group Mr. Danziger helped found several years ago, is about to release its second album. "I'd be exaggerating if I told you there were 16 bars of real drumming on it," he said. "Basically, it's me playing two measures, cutting them up in the sampler" digitally processing them in various imaginative ways "and making a tune out of them." In the future, he said, he may not play drums at all, a melancholy thought for the listeners who enjoy his supple sound.
A line you'll often hear from today's embattled real-time musician is "Sooner or later there's going to be a backlash." In fact, there's one right now, maybe even several backlashes. The most publicized is led by R- and-B and hip-hop artists and groups like D'Angelo, the Roots and Lucy Pearl, who more or less explicitly see themselves as fighting the trend toward automation. So did the Luddites, who made a big noise in their day.
The point is, music is an industry as well as an art, and once an industry finds a more efficient way to make its product, the clock doesn't turn back. It's as true of pop music as it is of the car business. And if something as fragile as taste is implicated, if the onrush of capital pushes performers, styles, genres into the margins well, that's just too bad.
As the musicologist Paul Thιberge pointed out in his 1997 book "Any Sound You Can Imagine" (Wesleyan University Press), the musician is both creator and consumer. This duality turned problematic in the 60's, when the musical instrument industry boomed. Earlier, a musician typically owned a few trusty axes for his or her lifetime. Musicians made sounds, they didn't buy them as they do today, literally, whether in a kit of pre-recorded samples or out of a distinctive-sounding synthesizer.
"A new piece of gear comes out and bam! it's on every record," said the producer and guitarist Nile Rodgers, whose work with Chic and Madonna made him famous. "If you don't have it, your music isn't happening. You are compelled to buy it. I'll bet I have a million dollars' worth of gear I'll never use again." To make music today is to invest in technology; if you want to get a sense of how deeply marketing is penetrating every realm of human activity, talk to a musician.
Every generation, of course, recoils from its successor's new sounds. Jazz was barbaric, Elvis the low point of humanity, Dylan sold out when he plugged in that Fender. But we're talking here about more than a generational taste change. Digital music making represents an epochal rift in music- making styles, a final break with the once common-sense notion of music as something created, in real time, by a skilled practitioner, whose contribution presupposes a long, intimate and tactile relationship with an instrument.
In 20 years, when most mainstream pop is made solely by sampling and sound editing, what will we have lost? "Soul," said Ahmir Thompson, the drummer for the Roots. "Feeling. There's a beauty in flaw." It's a beauty you certainly won't find in today's pop concerts, where the music is often as programmed and lip-synced as it is live.
"Concerts today are a joke," Mr. Rodgers said. "They're personal appearances, period. At least in the literary world you get what you pay for. You go to a book signing, the author tells you a few stories about how he wrote his book, he signs it for you and you're happy. You don't tell him, `O.K., write!' He's there for you to touch. It'd be much more honest if at pop concerts the star just got up there and told stories: `Well, I got to the studio and I was like way off-key, but the producer had this machine that fixed everything so it sounded perfect, and that's how I got my platinum record and why you all love me so much . . . ' "
Techno advocates wave off fears of a loss of feeling, assuring skeptics that machines are getting better and better at making warm, vulnerable, human-sounding music. But that's not the point. First-class working musicians do something special: using their minds and bodies, they arrive at, and physically execute, near-perfect solutions to problems that get tossed in their laps at the speed of sound. To say, "It's O.K., we'll still be able to fake the results of that ability" is pure cynicism. A piece of our soul is at stake.
One day in 1975, the drummer Steve Gadd walked into a studio and played the whisperingly, viciously funky 14-second intro to Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover." He played it off the top of his head after having honed his craft for decades. Given a day or so, a good programmer might come up with 14 seconds as subtly delicious, but he would never know Mr. Gadd's pleasure in the moment-to-moment triumph over collapse and chaos.
Music making is sociable. Not only is the digital musician physically isolated, peering into a computer screen in his home studio, but worse, he's also spiritually isolated. Even practicing in a room alone, the real- time musician is in conversation. The sociologist and pianist David Sudnow, in his 1978 book "The Ways of the Hand" (Harvard University Press), described his breakthrough from rote playing to improvising. Alone, as usual, at his piano, Mr. Sudnow wrote, he found himself "counting off the time with a care I had never taken before . . . a care for the others with whom I would have been coordinating my moves, for that bass player and drummer who were never around."
The great guitarist Ry Cooder once put it this way: "Music gives you radar sensitivity to people because you closely associate with others as you play your music." Programmers never develop this sociability, this magical fluency in a nonverbal language they don't need it; they've never been challenged by the requirements of real time music making.
Musicians don't like to admit it, but computer music makes you lazy. Invited recently to play drums for a remixed single by the rock band U2, a jet-lagged Mr. Danziger gave what he called a sub-par performance. Not a problem. "I'm sure they found two good measures and looped them," he said. "Nowadays it's, like, `Don't worry, there's two good bars in there somewhere.' That's all you have to play anymore."
Unlike classical music, with its academies and pedagogical tradition, pop relies on mass-cultural exposure to generate new players. (The Beatles, of course, sent guitar sales through the roof.) The bassist and guitarist Raphael Saddiq of Lucy Pearl recalled the moment he was inspired to pick up the bass: "It was hearing Marvin Gaye's `How Sweet It Is,' the bass line on that by James Jamerson. My family was going fishing. I was sitting on an ice chest between my mother and father in the car, and that bass line just caught me. I said, `Man, I just want one of those instruments.' "
But as Mr. Thompson said, "You can't emulate what you don't see." As live music loses its pop-culture visibility, fewer and fewer future Gadds, Jamersons or Saddiqs are inspired to learn instruments. "I can count the skilled teenage musicians I've met on the fingers of two hands," Mr. Thompson said.
Someone who wanted to argue with Mr. Thompson might point out that guitar sales are currently up, membership in high school marching bands is on the rise and enrollment at the Berklee School of Music, the Harvard of the working pop musician, is healthier than ever. But as the demand for skilled pop instrumentalists dwindles, where will all those Berklee grads find work? (Jazz faces a similar problem: its newfound academic respectability means that more and more hard-blowing jazz studies majors are coming into the market at a time when commercial jazz venues are melting away.)
The old emphasis on virtuosity covered a multitude of sins: elitism, a closed-shop mentality, resistance to change. But digital music making, which claims to put the means of musical production into the hands of the many, isn't the democratizing force it purports to be. "Manufacturers and musicians' magazines convince everybody that by buying the gear they become independent producers," Mr. Thιberge recently told another writer. "But the constraints of talent, distribution and demand dictate that few will really prosper." At bottom, he said, it's "a good way to sell a lot of equipment."
When the loudest advocates of "democratization" are those whose sole interest in music is its profitability, one's alarms go off. "This is an exciting time for youth culture," said Tom Calderone, vice president of music programming for MTV, in a recent article about the rise of D.J.'s. "You're putting music back into the consumer's hands, and they're creating their own music" without the skills musicians once had.
To be fair to digital music making, it is already creating new skills, a new sensibility. "There's a difference between the Chemical Brothers or Moby and some kid next door with a sampler," Mr. Rodgers said. "Powers of organization, powers of memory. When I started hanging out with some of these guys, I kept hearing them say, `That goes with this.' I didn't know what they were talking about. Then I realized they have these incredible filing systems in their heads. These kids worship old records; they talk about vinyl the way we used to talk about grades of pot. And whoever can extract the most interesting bits from obscure records, and piece them together in a cohesive manner, that's the coolest guy." If rock was conventionally modernist, its creators mining their souls in search of inspiration, then hip-hop and dance music, with their negation of traditional skills and rummage sale, frankly appropriative aesthetic, are pure postmodernism.
The English band Underworld prides itself on discovering how to make programmed music spontaneous; Rick Smith, the band's master of machines, recently told an interviewer that he wanted to "manipulate electronics in a way that electronics don't want to be manipulated." I like some of Underworld's music, but I don't know its ins and outs, nor have I seen the band perform. Whether attempts like Underworld's can forge a new language is an open question.
To glance at the art world for a quick parallel: the critic Deborah Solomon wondered recently whether "the new-genre art favored in the 90's, the videos and installations, will ever be able to compete with the epic achievements of this century, the oil- on-canvas masterpieces done by modernists who may have mocked academic values but who made sure they knew how to draw.
"Running into U.C.L.A. art professor John Baldessari," Ms. Solomon continued, "I asked him whether he thought video art would ever produce a Picasso or a de Kooning. `Video won't happen,' he said, `until artists use it the way they use a pencil.' "
In other words, when they get get past bug-eyed amazement at its technical possibilities and challenge it, probe its capacities, master its grammar.
A half-decade ago, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn of the English duo Everything But the Girl got interested in dance music and found themselves working with the trip-hop band Massive Attack. "I was astonished at how amusical, in some ways, their approach was to piecing together music," Mr. Watt said. "They couldn't talk about chords, they couldn't talk about notes, they couldn't say to me, `This is in A minor, and it modulates to G minor.' They weren't brought up that way. So you discuss things in other ways. You just play until they like it. Often they'd respond to sound, to the sonic texture of something I played."
Which touches on one way that digital music, with its vastly enlarged sound palette, is (at least according to its adherents), breaking artistic ground. "The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations," Susan Sontag wrote in her 1965 postmodernist manifesto "One Culture and the New Sensibility." She could have almost been discussing the unnameable shudders, tweets and groans that animate the drum- and-bass music of Roni Size, proof of an unexplored sonic universe.
But sound alone isn't music. Paul Simon's new album opens with the words, "Somewhere in a burst of glory/ Sound becomes a song." Becomes, not is. It's a transformation that requires the hand of a craftsman who is disappearing from our midst.
In 1986, back at the dawn of the digital age, the producer and arranger Quincy Jones whose work with Michael Jackson was pioneering automated production while he was acutely aware of the beauty of what he was helping to eclipse told me, "Nothing can replace a live orchestra, flesh on catgut."
Nothing has.
Tony Scherman's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was about Bill Monroe.
