All research institutes are open to Orwellian comparisons, but few have attracted as many as IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique), the bunker under the Pompidou Centre that houses France's national electronic music centre. Founded in the mid-'70s by composer Pierre Boulez, it occupies a unique position in French cultural life - and in the minds of Europe's art establishment, who see IRCAM as evidence that high-minded government intervention really can create new culture.
Anybody who really believes that art can be as simple as that should read Georgina Born's excellent new book Rationalising Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalisation of the Musical Avant-Garde, University of California Press, (01243) 842165. Born, who recently became the BBC's official anthropologist, spent several years inside IRCAM during a pivotal period in the mid-'80s when it was in the grip of a bitter civil war, fought on two fronts. One front pitted the adherents of high modernism against their post-modernist counterparts. The second pitted big-machine mainframe computing against its upstart desktop rival. It soon became clear that the two fights shared common themes: monolithic top-down systems in conflict with distributed, networked ones. IRCAM was never the same again, and European culture is still feeling the repercussions.
As a modernist, Boulez was definitely a fan of big-machine computing. Like most Europeans, he was raised to revere the cultural high ground: the idea that there are cultural experts whose taste has to be respected, and only those experts are qualified to fulfil the modernist dream of finding a rational ground for artistic expression. So it was no great intellectual leap for Boulez to believe that similar experts, imbued with a similar culture, filled the world of computing.
Unfortunately those were not the experts he hired. IRCAM bought the best computer expertise it could find - which by and large was American. IRCAM's dismayed musicians found they were in bed with the US military-industrial complex, taking software and technicians from Stanford University and the Los Alamos defence labs. Apart from this new moral problem, the computing culture also brought an influx of nerds who had no reason to value mainframe machines, centralised authority, or high-cultural credentials. Old and new world-views were doomed to collide.
Boulez was unimpressed by the Americans' "small machine" ideas. His hostility grew so extreme that at one point he sniffed that Apple Macs would enter IRCAM only "over his dead body." This was ironic since, as it turned out - after 20 years and millions of francs - probably IRCAM's most tangible success is a Mac- based MIDI-control software package named Max.
Rationalising Culture contains much surreal black comedy as IRCAM's inmates struggled to impose their aesthetic onto an uncooperative technology. The doomed three-month visit of a British composer is described in heart-rending detail. Despite fighting bravely, he managed to prise just 72 seconds of music from the perpetually crashing mainframe.
The strangest and most revealing story in the book is that of the turbo-charged Casio VL-Tone. This early digital keyboard, about the same size and sound quality as a GameBoy, was marketed in the early '80s principally as a novelty. A disenchanted American hybridised his VL-Tone by inserting a few cheap analogue components. Thus modified it could produce amazing sounds, from blistering electric guitars to mighty cathedral organs. Instead of embracing the development, IRCAM researchers shunned the machine. This was not due to its sound (which you might think important at a music research institute) but simply due to its small-machine political incorrectness. Worse still was the treatment it received at Casio, where the inventor was offered money to take his discovery away and bury it.
Born's fascinating book is a lesson in how institutions can fall prey to irrational orthodoxies, and a parable of the inter-relation of art and technology. Ignoring either aspect guarantees failure.