Bill Pirkle:

>I agree with music development, and your remarks, with the caveat that if
>music develops to the same extent that art has (modern art) it might cease
>to be music at all - no harmonic center, incomprehensible
>melodies (themes), obscure form, etc.

At this point, you've assumed that you know what music is.  Please tell the
rest of us.

>I offer Rap music(?) as an example of what rock "developed into".  From
>the Beatles to Rap - wow, to my ear a giant step backwards.  (not to slam
>the genre, its a billion dollar industry, after all, possibly bigger than
>CM)

Okay, you think rap is a step backwards.  I don't care for most rap,
myself, but I don't think it's a step back or forward, since I don't
believe in the Progress or the Decline of Art.  The most I can say is
that it differs from the Beatles and I don't care for the difference.

All that said, I can certainly think of rap's musical advantages over the
Beatles (just as I can think of the Beatles' musical advantages over rap).
So can anyone who takes the trouble.

>If a painter gives an exhibition displaying painting in a traditional
>form it OK but if a composer wrote a set of Baroque Prelude and Fugues or
>two part inventions, etc he might be accused of not being very creative.

Ummmm.  Painters closer to traditional styles run the same risk as any
other artist: what they produce might not be worth anybody's time.  "New"
artists have a certain advantage over the traditional one: they don't
compete with acknowledged masters of traditional styles.  One doesn't
criticize a piece of music because it sounds like Bach; one criticizes it
because it doesn't sound as good as Bach who used the same style or because
it doesn't sound interesting on its own.

>As I have said on other posts, Hollywood writes the closest thing to
>classical music for movie scores.  Its amazing how your thinking changes
>when you have to make a profit and are not funded by the National Endowment
>for the Arts.

Virgil Thomson pointed this out in the Thirties in The State of Music.
However, you're simply making an argument vox populi.  Fifty million
Frenchmen can't be wrong.  Let's count up the votes.  In that case, you've
made a very good argument for the marginalization of all classical music.
The movie score isn't necessarily more interesting than the Endowment score
(although, of course, the NEA doesn't fund individual artists, contrary to
what Jesse Helms, that profound aesthetic thinker, would have us believe).
The really good is rare in any case.  Fortunately, it can be found in a
variety of places, including on occasion the academy.

>As I write this letter I am listening to the Warsaw Concerto on the
>Arts channel as a fine example of music written in this century but in
>a traditional style.

The Warsaw Concerto I find a clever pastiche, rather than a fine example -
one that's all elbow-nudges to the ribs.  So I will offer the example of
Medtner's Piano Concerto No. 2 as a fine example of music written in this
century but in a traditional style.

>I wish we had more of that and less music that attempts to warp every
>tenet of music.

Again, you assume you know what these tenets are.  I suggest that you
don't.

You've had to think about what music is in such detail that your program
can compose it.  You regard the greater approximation of the computer's
output to human music as simply program refinement.  I think that's a
fundamental mistake.  You know what your idea of music is, but you don't
know in as great detail Mahler's or Hindemith's or Schoenberg's or Bartok's
or Copland's or Vaughan Williams's or Debussy's ... Human beings have
the capacity to imagine music of fundamentally different types and to
synthesize many types - Stravinsky's take on Pergolesi, for example, or
Dallapiccola's take on Schoenberg.  In short, there are too many paths to
too many goals for the program to handle.  My Turing test for your program
would be for it to write several pieces: a Renaissance motet, a Bach
fugue, a Beethoven allegro, a serial piece a la Schoenberg, a chance piece
a la Cage, and a cross between Bach and Schoenberg.  That, to me, is a sign
of human, rather than digital, artistic intelligence.

So, to answer the question you've already put before us: I don't believe
that all of us would agree on what classical music is, because there is no
single thing as classical music.  There are several.

Steve Schwartz