From (I think) “Les Animaux,” by Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard Grandville, 1803-1847. (alamy.com)

My post on CAD – which I wish I’d called “CAD or cad?” – has drawn some comment on TradArch from the technique’s defenders. Among the most eloquent and entertaining is Nathaniel Walker’s assertion that computer aided design is just another kind of pencil. I agree, and perhaps my post seemed too hard on poor CAD. Here is his riposte:

CAD is awesome for any modular design grammar.  Rough on Picturesque Contrived Irregular Gothic, maybe, but fantastic for Classicism.  It’s ultimately just a different kind of pencil, gee whiz.

Are all the Garden Party conservatives as hung up on musical technology as they are on architectural technology?  Just curious.  I told Patrick the other day that I have a little test: if a Classicist only listens to Classical music, I get very very suspicious.  If they only feast on Classical music that was recorded on analog tape, not least so that no digital editing was possible, then I politely recuse myself and start to run.  If they refuse recording technology entirely and listen only to live cellists wearing powdered wigs and harboring imperial racist impulses, I know that running is futile, and begin to discreetly bend my silverware so that I can immobilize the bastards with a couple of Chinese Fork Ties before my iPhone buzzes and they fly into a murderous rage.

I have never used CAD, or even seen it in operation, and I can’t draw my way out of a paper bag (even though I once took an art class at the Corcoran in D.C.). But I do listen to music on the best technology that “modernism” has to offer. I listen mainly to classical and the more bluesy jazz, or jazzy blues, or whatever – more Billie Holiday than John Coltrane*, though Trane is the tits, as my oldest friend and jazz musician might put it. And, of course, I almost forgot to add, classical rock ‘n’ roll.

* Rather than the Trane, a better representative of the type of jazz I’m thinking of (and avoiding) is Ornette Coleman.