Wes Crone advises me:

>Don't quit your day job professor.  I think it an awful thing to criticize
>music in any way just because it sounds as if the author used harmonies
>which have already been used.  IF the author hears music in his/her
>head...it is their music.  If I write a song with a C chord going to an F6
>b5 and proceeding through several diminished and chromatic mediants and
>even an omnibus progression..I am sure somewhere in the world...that same
>progression has been used before.

Now that I have embraced Wes Crone's good advice about day jobs let me
correct his interpretation of my remarks.  What I was referring to was a
situation such as the following hypothetical: composer hears Schubert's
Trout Quintet, says: I love that music and I can DO that, and turns out
a very, very similar piece we shall call the Salmon Sextet.  That is in my
opinion not an authentic creative endeavor.  But heck, Wes Crone's day job
IS being a composer, so who am I to criticize? Meanwhile, I shall return
to my own modest testing of the waters, so to speak, with my Guppy Duet-
a small first step.

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University