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From: d88-sli@nada.kth.se (Stefan Lindmark)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: What makes a piece of electro acoustic music a masterpiece?
Message-ID: <2825@draken.nada.kth.se>
Date: 2 Feb 90 10:32:15 GMT
References: <1990Feb1.074731.19127@intacc.uucp> <20400@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Reply-To: d88-sli@nada.kth.se (Stefan Lindmark)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 35

In article <20400@watdragon.waterloo.edu> dmnhieu@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Duy-Minh NHIEU) writes:
>Now a days you can hear lots of electro-acoustic music outthere.  (I don't
>mean the ones that was written traditionally but have a new arrangement that
>you play on a synthesizer, I mean those that are composed newly)  What makes
>it a masterpiece or a piece of junk?  What is the criteria?  (I think music
>is an art, it is hard to give rules that judge what is a good piece of music,
>but nevertherless, you can say something about it.

Many composers are fascinated by synthesizers and electronic instruments. The
problem is that quite a few of them are writing the same music for those 
instruments as they would have using "old" instruments. Therefore I think that
the quality of electro-acoustic music is depending on whether the music is
performed on electronic instruments using all their potential capabilities, or
if it's performed using only the features inherited from acoustic instruments.

A dilemma is that much music is written "the other way", i.e. the composer
have been looking on what the specific synthesizer can do, and then composed 
his music, trying to include those features. This leads to a great lack of
feeling in the piece (not saying that those pieces don't have a special kind
of charm).

A masterpiece can be recognized when you can hear that the composer have had
the ambition to put a specific feeling into his work, and then looked for
the means of doing it and found that the best way was through synthesizers, 
since acoustic intruments would limit the spirit of his work.

Of course, these are my personal thoughts, and this topic can be discussed for
as long as we live. But isn't that the whole point of music? That no song will 
make the same impression on two different people, no matter if it's a master-
piece or not.

-- 
Stefan Lindmark  Email: d88-sli@nada.kth.se  Snail-mail: Don't even bother...

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