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From: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Music-Research Digest      Vol. 5, #21
Keywords: possibilities, compositional freedom
Message-ID: <2461@randvax.UUCP>
Date: 20 Mar 90 02:42:07 GMT
References: <132393@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <8077@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <14531@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
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In article <14531@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>In article <8077@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> pa2253@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (pa2253) writes:
>>They should be required to understand basic theory 
>>to the extent that they can communicate with their collegues but
>>they should be given the freedom to apply their own musical knowledge
>>toward personally defined musical goals.  
>
>COLLEAGUES?  I want them to be able to communicate with their
>audiences!  Don't you think there might be some experience that a
>thousand years of insightful composers might have picked up, that might
>be applicable to musics other than their own?

There is a strange paradox in all this!  Christopher Penrose, who wishes
to use high technology to create his music, has less faith in the march
of musical progress than Roger Lustig.

Let's accept for the moment Roger's (implied) assertion that
communication is one of the primary objects of musical composition.  It
does not follow that the techniques developed over 1000 years of Western
Musical Tradition are the only means of creating music which
communicates.  Technology has enabled us to use the entire range of
acoustical experience for communication rather than just those sounds
available from beating, stroking, or blowing strings, membranes, blocks,
or tubes.  This is a relatively new state of affairs that the WMT is
ill-prepared to address.

Communication requires a ``language'' which is at least in part shared
between the ``speaker'' and the ``listener.'' On this I think Roger and
I would agree.  However, I think that Roger has a highly constrained
view of just what elements can make up such a language.  A listener has
developed a large number of expectations concerning her acoustical
environment--expectations which are just as rich a source of
communicative gesture as those provided by the WMT.  For example,
acoustical expectations might concern the size, material and proximity
of the ``object'' generating a sound, the method used in exciting it,
and the ``space'' within which it is located.  Not only does the
manipulation of these parameters require a technical discipline quite
apart from the WMT, but the latter tradition only provides a limited
amount of help in structuring such sounds into a coherent utterance.

The result of all this is that computer music inherits the scientific
disciplines of acoustics and engineering more directly than it does the
WMT.  I'm hardly saying that the WMT is always irrelevant--there is
nothing stopping a composer from adapting traditional harmony and
orchestration to computer music.  But it is quite conceivable that a
highly evocative and communicative piece of computer music would derive
nothing from the WMT.

		-Ed Hall
		edhall@rand.org