The Laptop Orchestra was a movement (or perhaps a trend) that in the mid-naughts seemed ripe to take the world of Sonic Art by storm. Since then, the form has largely dwindled. In an unpublished essay, Nicolas Collins describes laptop orchestras as, "lost opportunities--technologies and genres that, like the hologram just haven’t lived up to their promise or hype." But what hype is that? I seek to partially answer that question here. Although they are separated by decades, technology, and media, contemporary Laptop Orchestra works continue a discussion started by Fluxus.
Formally, contemporary laptop orchestra continues the practice of prose scores. Rather than focusing on musical qualities like harmony or rhythm, the event scores of Laptop Orchestra and Fluxus draw attention to the conceptual gesture, then that attention can be directed towards the trappings of performance (What is music? Do we need instruments? What does it mean to play an instrument?)
Laptop Orchestra and Fluxus share a dependent engagement with standard objects. For the orchestra, it is a mass-produced MacBook. For Fluxists, it was often musical instruments themselves. Andy Warhol said, "A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." By engaging with the MacBook as a standard object, Laptop Orchestra works seek to challenge the (growing) role of the laptop in musical performance.
In Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Matthew Fuller writes of the standard object that, "Other elements that enter into compositional arrangement with a standard object do so on the basis of adopting some of its terms, metrics, protocols, rules, coupling systems, and so on." (Fuller, 106) Some laptop orchestra pieces seem to argue that 'typical' computer-music performance does not live up to this compositional arrangement. It's easy to click play to start your violin sample, but the best laptop orchestra compositions posit that the laptop can be used not to emulate existing instruments and interfaces, but in its own right.
Ge Wang's piece, CliX, for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra is an early such exploration. Many people connect MPC-style drum pads to a laptop, but ignore the built-in keyboard: a percussive interface everyone has practiced speed and precision with for years. CliX exploits this practice. Like George Brecht's 1962 Flute Solo, ('disassembling / assembling'), CliX deconstructs the tools of contemporary music production.
LOrkworks and Fluxus works both use prose scores as an effort to draw attention to conceptual gesture. Then both apply that attention to the deconstruction of the roles of standard performance objects. Whether the flute, the automobile, or the MacBook, it is important for artists to question the power and assumptions of their implements. This becomes only more true as we use complex tools controlled, created, and designed by corporate entities.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. Book.