At 07:52 AM 11/9/02 -0800, Linda Worsley wrote: >Well, sure. I spent half a century learning the skills it takes to >be a "composer"... I resent the people who will not take the same >trouble to learn anything but noodle into MIDI devices and call >themselves "composers".
And if you produce bad music and they produce great music, who is the composer? >when I want to "compose" (according to the >dictionary,"to form by putting together; to form the substance of : >to create by mental or artistic labor': to formulate and write (a >piece of music);to arrange in proper or orderly form") I commit the >original musical thoughts I have to graphic representation that can >be read, performed, and interpreted by others. We have different dictionaries. Mine is simpler: "To create or produce (a literary or musical piece)." I don't see any lines drawn there. >OK, that's too rigid a definition, but sloppy definitions in most >areas have always driven me nuts, and never more than in the use of >"composer" by every Jackie Gleasonish clown or MIDI noodler who wants >a place in the pantheon with Bach, Beethoven, Bernstein and the gang. >Sorry, folks, but those hummers and noodlers, even the ones with good >ideas, need another designation, not "composer". Let's list the clowns, why don't we? (Jackie Gleason is in there -- he composed "Melancholy Serenade"). Stockhausen, Cage, Oliveros, Coltrane, Bernstein (he didn't do all his own orchestrations, right?), Loggins & Messina... oh, heck, let's just take everybody off the list whose compositions aren't "dot-music" (what EA composers call pen-and-ink music). They don't need another designation. They *are* composers. You can't just define them out because they don't fit what you do, or because you're angry because they haven't troubled themselves to learn what you did, if it isn't important to their work. Am I angry because I spent a long time learning spelling and grammar (and making my living as a writer for two decades), only to discover that there are "writers" who dictate their work and have others type it, edit it, and send it to them for approval? Hardly. Do I feel that composers who use aleatoric generators to work out ideas (such as Barlow, Didkovsky and Harrington) and then choose among them and polish them up, are exploiting the 35 years I spent learning notation? Not at all. In fact, I'm excited by their inventiveness. Will I feel slighted that my notational skills are unimportant when intelligent transcription becomes a reality? No, I look forward to it, just as I was delighted when I could stop picking up a pen and ruler to notate. Am I horrified because a certain Eurocentric model of composition transmission is fading into history? No -- again, I'm happy about it. >With all the great music being >written these days by people "of color" and with all the fabulous >women who are writing music, they chose a . . . well, you know what >the fabulous Billie was, and in the biography that accompanied each >work, it was fairly clear that this was not a good role model for >young women, African-American or not, nor for aspiring "composers". >She was not a "composer" in any sense. Barely a song writer, even >though she was a stunning performer. Anyway... I was furious. I'm >still furious. So this was a stupid choice in a stupid educational atmosphere. It's also not especially relevant to the discussion, except that those pieces she composed made her a composer, even if she was primarily a performer. (And you did what about this?) >> If >>notation were required for the 'serious' composers among us, the who field >>of electroacoustics the early 1950s would be washed away. > >I'm not sure what this sentence was meant to say "the whole field", not "the who field". >I consider those >who fashion electro-acoustic pieces "performers" not "composers"... >in the tradition of jazz and other non-transcribeable music. I don't >invalidate it. I just don't want it called "composition". Well, there you're just plain wrong. Tryng to define away composers is just silly. If the notation is entirely made up of a computer program, is that not composing? If I represent the Grosse Fuge as a piano-roll notation system, is that version less a composition? At what point is a composition not a composition? And a composer not a composer? I've already made this case to Andrew Stiller, but I'll repeat it here because your argument is every bit is wrong: So electroacoustic creations from Stockhausen forward are not "composed"? And only the percussion part of my new piece for percussion and computer is composed? Are works composed as computer programs composed because they are 'frozen' and reproducible? What if those programs are algorithmic? How about the aleatoric compositions? Or the aleatoric parts of compositions? Compositions based on algorithms and then auto-notated? How about the solo performers whose work is consistently recognizable and who have created a compositional style that is imitated and written -- even without them writing it down? What about pieces for non-specific ensembles? Or pieces specifying chords but not voicing? Which of these are compositions, and which are not? >Are we going back to the caves? to the cloisters? Even then they >were struggling to find a way to write music down so that others >could perform it. Some were. And the Minnesingers, say, or Trouvères? How about the entire composition of songs since the advent of recording? Because technology first enabled written composition and then diminished its relevance only redefines 'composition' and 'composer', not its practice. The word doesn't draw an in-crowd out-crowd circle of practitioners; the practitions shift the significance of the word. >Of course not. And those who can't write their music down provide a >lot of work for composers like me (and others on this list and around >the planet) who labor to do the heavy lifting for the amateurs. But >those people are not "composers." Amateurs? So the whole panorama of comp... uh, creative people whose comp... uh, creations came to be standard repetoire are discredited because you think that putting dots on a page is "heavy lifting"? Whoa! The "heavy lifting" is the imagination it requires to comp... uh, create something original and substantial, not in dotting it down. >If I had spent my life studying and refining my skills as an >architect, I'd resent it if some wannabe with a good idea as to what >his house should look like, and who could draw a little, called >himself an "architect." Sure you would. Especially if, as an architect, you did twaddle creatively and had a whole team to do your drawings and plumbing specs and paint manufacturer choices for a no-'count office building, and the imaginative arch... uh, lego-guy with no team and the sketchiest (no pun intended) background in which way wastewater flows came up with a stunning building that revised the entire history of architectural thinking. >Before this sets off an entire flame war or convoluted thread-debate, >let me just admit that I am nitpicking, being rigid and narrow in my >definition of the term "composer". Guilty as charged. Too easy! No cop-outs allowed! :) Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
