Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: Music-Research Digest Vol. 5, #21 Summary: being a composer versus learning about composition Keywords: possibilities, compositional freedom Message-ID: <12486@venera.isi.edu> Date: 20 Mar 90 16:38:33 GMT References: <132393@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <8077@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <14531@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2461@randvax.UUCP> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 63 In article <2461@randvax.UUCP> edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall) writes: >In article <14531@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger >Lustig) writes: >> 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? > > 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. > This debate is beginning to remind me of a paper Seymour Papert once wrote entitled "Teaching Children to be Mathematicians Versus Teaching About Mathematics." Ed's point is so well taken that it applies to more than computer music. For example, it applies to most of what John Cage did before he got anywhere near any form of electronic technology; and it applies to Gordon Mumma (to keep Christopher happy), who did some of his finest work with analog circuit design long before he had access to computer technology. On the other hand, NONE of these observations negate Roger's point, which is that we have a tradition of the relationship between a composer and his/her audience which can offer insights beyond prohibitions of parallel fifths our doubled thirds. The question is whether or not PEDAGOGY, as it is currently practiced, appreciates Roger's point! Following Papert, let me draw an analogy with mathematics; but let us consider graduate students, rather than children. A graduate student in mathematics takes a course in, say, real analysis. During this course he is exposed to all sorts of wonderful theorems about Banach spaces and Hilbert spaces, and he is expected to study the proofs of these theorems. However, becoming familiar with a documented proof of a theorem does not necessarily imply a command of the ability to actually PROVE that theorem. In other words, you can "play back" the proof you read without necessarily having any insight into the mental processes which yielded it. There is a similar danger in the pedagogy of composition. You can invest considerable time in the study of the artifacts of our tradition and master any number of approaches to analysis which tell you just how all the pieces fit together. However, none of that kind of analysis provides any insight into the BEHAVIOR of the composer who actually put those pieces together. Actually, I'm not sure pedagogy, as such, can ever make much progress with such insight. In an earlier article Roger raised the alternative of apprenticeship. This is such a good suggestion that I wish we saw more of it, not only in music but also in mathematics or practically any other technical discipline. If, ultimately, you are concerned with insight into PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR (which is what composition is fundamentally all about), then I can think of no better approach than to become part of a community of individuals engaged in that behavior. Many of us have probably acquired most of our computer skills that way . . . learning more from the people we work with than we do from the classroom. ========================================================================= USPS: Stephen Smoliar USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001 Marina del Rey, California 90292-6695 Internet: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu "Only a schoolteacher innocent of how literature is made could have written such a line."--Gore Vidal