🚀 go-pugleaf

;Date: Tue, 6 Feb 90 00:18:02 CST
;From: "Eleanor J. Evans @ 462-5330" <evans@com.ti.csc.lvipl>
;Subject: knowledge acquisition in music research
;To: music-research@com.sun.eng.bartok

;Mr. Handelman - from the perspective of a working composer, you 
;remarked that compositional processes vary widely between individuals.
;Do you see any similarities in approach?  Do common tools lead people
;to similar patterns?  If you and a fellow composer tried to talk to
;each other about how you work, would you be speaking the same language?
;Do you see any resemblances between your compositional process and
;that of a creator in any medium (composer, poet, artist, ...)?

;Eleanor Evans
;evans@lvipl.ti.com


Are there similarities in approach? Our musical practice
emphasizes orginality rather than similarity. A piece is not good "because"
it's similar to another piece. Consequently, composers tend to want to
eradicate similarities, rather than encouraging them. And this desire 
works its way down to the very process of coming up with music in the first 
place.

To give an example of how complex -- how unsuited for knowledge engineering --
the process can be, consider the following. Shostakovitch is said to
have had a metal splinter in his right hemisphere -- an old war injury --
that had a starnge effect. When he leaned to the right he could simply
hear music as though it were right there in the room with him. Penfield
discussed cases where patients heard music -- their own memories, really --
as though a radio were blaring in the room, when an area of the cortex was
probed. 

I myself have had similar experiences, though not quite as intense. In
a light sleep, I sometimes can "hear" what I'm writing, in a way that is
quite different from merely "imagining" music. Now I can jiggle and tweak
this "heard" music pretty much as I like: I can decide to make (say) the
horn section do something, and then hear it, virtually as though it is really
there. The imagination mysteriously fills in all sorts of details. 
Unfortunately none of this is exactly voluntary. I probably have to be 
overworked in order to get into the mood, and it does have something to
do with dreaming -- dreaming music, but with some sort of control over its
flow. 

Now experiences such as these have been pretty influential for me, not
exactly in the type of music I hear -- most of it's crap -- but in
my thinking about what music is, and what it is that I want to make it
do. Surprisingly, the result has been to move me away from "direct"
composition, just writing down whatever it is that you hear -- that was
the Nadia Boulanger approach, practiced by, say, Ned Rorem, and I don't
like the kind of vague imagistic music that this approach results in.
The approach, of course, determines the result, so I believe anyhow. What
interests me in this, rather, is the way in which music becomes, in those
moods, a very natural way to think -- it becomes a sort of alternative
consciousness, in which thoughts, perceptions, everything, is music. This
might sound mystical, but I think it's at the root of all musical experience
-- in dance halls, concert halls to a lesser extent, but particularly
whereever music is ritualistic and orgiastic -- this is not cognitive 
activity, but rather a form of alternative mental existence. If the music
is good you become the music. The music has taken over, or is at least
supplementing your inner existence. It's not something you're looking
at, rather something you've become, to greater or lesser extent. 

Now my perspective is this. If any of this is true, as I bvelieve it is,
then music is much more than a game with event cards, much more than the
process of making pretty shapes. In some sense the direct concern of music
is the supplementing of inner existence, or, as I like to say, the
transmission of a secondary consciousness. Music, as I see it, should move
towards the direct realization of that idea, without the interference of
strictly intrinsic, historically motivated concerns. And this is what I'm
working on (Ph.D. thesis, maybe 1990). I'm trying to show how 
certain (almost banal) compositional strategies can follow as a consequence of 
certain cognitive structures, simple models of sensation and consciousness
can serve as "critics" for composition programs. What I'm aiming at is music
-- preferably of great complexity, because I like music to be like that -- 
that is calculated strictly from the standpoint of the experience that it 
arouses in a given model: then the experience of music is the
experience of that model, the built-in listener whose perspective the real
listener may or may not be able to identify with, or may or may not want to.


Ok, so that's how I compose. To quote myself: "what a composer does
is to do crazy stuff." You can't talk about "expertise" because we're all moving
arounbd in the shadows without really knowing what we're doing, often
even what the point of it is. You can't talk about a "task domain" because
if you're writing somebody else's music, one of your many teachers will
say to you, "go find your own music to write." You have to find out for
yourself what it is that you're supposed to be doing, and in recent times
that's become increasingly hard to figure out. Nobody can teach composition
for that reason. I mean, you can get kids to make up melodies and you can
even teach them how to write them down. But I doubt that any of these kids
will ever become composers. If you're just carrying out instrauctions you
can never discover how to think musically, or that one can think
musically.

-Eliot Handelman
Princeton U., Music