Bill Pirkle:

>My whole thrust in examining the underlying feeling that motivated a
>composer to do this or that is to better understand how to write it
>(or have my computer write it).  I am amazed at the difference between
>wandering through a museum looking at paintings and taking the tour and
>having them explained by experts.  They point out things that I never
>noticed and I enjoy the painting more by knowing these things.  I was
>wondering if the same thing could be done with music.

Yes, if you take "things" in an abstract way.  One difference between
painting - figurative painting, at any rate - and music is that painting
uses the external world.  Music doesn't in that way.  Strauss may append a
program to "Till Eulenspiegel," may even compose according to that program,
but I doubt that unless you were given at least the title, you would figure
out what that program was.  In other words, if he had called it "Merry
Variations," you probably wouldn't think of the story of Eulenspiegel.
This doesn't mean that titles or programs are unimportant when they exist,
since they're a useful way to set the listener in a more particular frame
of mind.  On the other hand, pointing out technical things also illuminates
a piece - for example, in the Beethoven fourth piano concerto, how every
theme in the entire work derives from the opening piano solo or in the
Eroica, exactly how Beethoven arrives at the famous dissonance.

>I can't help think that the composer's subconscious was actually
>controlling the effort, unbeknownst to the composer.  Freud and the now
>widely accepted notion of a subconscious occurred at the end of the 19th
>Century after all those 17th, 18th, and 19th century composers may have
>not themselves understood their true motivations.

Well, I agree that any artist's subconscious contributes to the creative
process.  It may even constitute inspiration.  However, I also disagree.
I can't believe that Bach was a dope or so unaware of how to make an
effect.  Freud didn't invent the psyche, after all, although he did set
current vocabulary for talking about it.  There's a reason why he called a
certain condition the Oedipus complex, because someone (namely, Sophocles)
had gotten there before him.  At any rate, such speculation is beside the
point.

I truly doubt that a programmer will be able to find a Chomskian universal
grammar of musical expression.  On the other hand, it's probably possible
to write a program that assigns certain procedures and devices to certain
emotions.  In this case, we have a personal iconography, just as we observe
it throughout art.  However, I do believe you're walking up a blind alley
by worrying about emotion.  Music, left to its own devices, is a sonic
Rorschach.  You read in, rather than take out.

By the way:  I've heard the music at your website.  I find it a remarkable
achievement in programming, if it works the way I believe it does - you
hand it the themes, it does the rest.  As music, however, I find that its
deficiency is not the lack of emotion, but its inflexible phrasing.  When
I first heard it, I was reminded a little of Virgil Thomson because of the
rhythmic regularity, but even Thomson varies.  The deficiency was most
noticeable in the piece based on Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." The strand used
is so four-square and the treatment is four-square as well:  BUM bum bum
bum BUM bum bum bum ...  for minutes on end.  I don't know whether you saw
the awful movie Immortal Beloved, but if so, recall the scene in which the
nephew is telling somebody that his uncle is going senile cites the first
measures of that theme.  One of the things that movement is musically
about is how Beethoven breaks up the rhythmic rigidity of that theme with
phrasing asymmetries.  Indeed, every composer I can think of right now -
including Sousa - does this.  However, your program doesn't seem to.

Steve Schwartz