The Reincarnation of Blind Tom: Music, Machines, and Subjectivity

Czech writer Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. [Rossum's Universal Robots, 1920] portrays conflict between human capitalists and a new source of labor, the “robota,” a term that has come down to us as “robot.” Čapek’s model for the play, the robota system of Bohemian serfdom, was similar to the later American “sharecropping.” While Čapek does not directly refer to US chattel slavery, his play presents the robotic equivalent of “house” slaves, robots who do the cooking and cleaning, and “field” slaves, robots who work the farms and factories.

On occasion, US slave musicians would somehow break out from these restrictions. Perhaps the most celebrated 19th century example was composer-pianist Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins. Born under slavery in 1849, Wiggins performed at the White House at the age of ten, and became one of the most famous American composer-pianists of his time--probably the first Black American composer to achieve that status. His most famous piece, The Battle of Manassas, which he wrote at the age of 14 in 1863, uses notated piano clusters to evoke the sounds of bombs and battles, more than 50 years before Henry Cowell and the Futurists.

Since around 1979, I have drawn upon AI and practices of free improvisation in creating a kind of music making that includes machine subjectivities as central actors in a real-time, co-created sociality. These “creative machines” have been designed to stake out musical territory, assess and respond to conditions, and assert identities and positions—all aspects of improvisative interaction, both within and beyond the domain of music. In an article from 2000 on Voyager, perhaps the most sophisticated of these programs, I wrote that this kind of musical work “deals with the nature of music and, in particular, the processes by which improvising musicians produce it.”

For both robots and slaves there is a denial of subjecthood and the capability for free expression. But critical theorist Fred Moten's important insight is that subjecthood can be heard. In R.U.R., the robots that could play music were considered more advanced, closest to being human. As a slave, Blind Tom was a mere commodity, but as a musician, as Moten says, "If the commodity could speak, it would be imbued with a certain spirit." Thus, for both Moten and Čapek, sound becomes a basis for subjectivity itself. This relationship between human and non-human subjectivities will be examined in this talk, with reference to musical and other artistic examples, including my 2024 composition, The Reincarnation of Blind Tom, a double concerto for symphonic orchestra, saxophone, and artificially intelligent pianist.

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