Dear Jill Neimark and Stacey Ake!

I respond to the double article that appeared as Metanexus:  Views, October 22, 2001, and that treats EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), a computer program that analyzes and copies a composer’s music.

Let us commence by setting several decisive points:

The process is utterly dependent upon the prior work of a composer.  No composer, no synthetic sound.  If there had never been a Johann Sebastian Bach, then the Brandenburg Concerts could never have been artificially plagiarized no matter how genial the technique employed.  In itself, this is demonstration enough that a composer’s “Soul” remains unblemished.  This may be dramatically demonstrated by asking the musical coryphee to tell us who is being copied as he listened to machine music.  If he can differentiate between a rehash of a Vivaldi violin concerto and a Bach or Telemann composition for the same instrument, then it is the distinctive characteristics of the composer he is listening to, not the cleverness of the electronic device employed.

The process is completely unable to suggest growth in a composer’s work.  If one commences with Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony, no electronic device could inform us ahead of time that a soul-rending, massive, atonal chord would figure in the first movement of his Tenth Symphony.  To have thoroughly acquainted oneself with Alban Berg’s opera, “Wozzeck,” provides one with no hint as to what he would do in his opera, “Lulu.”  A machine can only set to work once the notes have been written down.  That is to say, it cannot predict what will come next in the oeuvre of a composer of substance, nor can it suggest what the next step in the history of music will be.  There is no hint in Wagner’s opera, “Siegfried,” to the manner in which Gustav Mahler would elaborate enharmonic sound.  If one is well acquainted with Arnold Schoenberg’s “Gurre Lieder,” then one is quite surprised upon hearing his “Pierrot Lunaire.”  Nor does the latter work prepare one for Schoenberg’s “Moses and Aaron.”  In the same fashion, Anton Webern’s “Im Sommerwind” does not set one up to grasp his “Five Pieces for Orchestra.”

The process cannot synthesize two or more styles distinctive to any combination of composers, each working in his own fashion.  Nor can it sense the possibility that an unknown composer could incorporate in his work elements that we normally associate with Richard Strauss (viz. his “Rosenkavalier”), others with Puccini (viz. “La Boheme”) and yet other with Verdi (viz. “Othello”).  Yet this composer, sadly neglected today, but strikingly original in his work, exists:  Franz Schreker: “Die ferne Klange,” “Die Gezeichneten.”

But the ability to compose in a given composers fashion during a distinctive phase of his life can be HIGHLY commendable there where the composer’s death prevented the completion of his last works.  Consider the later movements of Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, which exists today in a concert version produced by Deryck Cooke who was left to his own devices in reconstructing the score.  Consider Alexander von Zemlinsky’s unfinished opera, “Der Koenig Kandaules,” which Antony Beaumont - occasionally completely on his own with no hint from Zemlinsky - completed (cf. Capriccio, 60  071-2).  Consider Edward Elgar’s “Third Symphony” which lay useless for decades before Anthony Payne made a concert version of it.  Think how tragic it is that the last act of “Moses and Aaron” does not exist!

Camille Saint-Saen (1835-1921) ventured into the field of opera seven times during his lifetime, the last of his efforts was the opera “Ascanio.”  Only one of these attempts became a grand success, “Samson et Dalila.”  It rivaled Gounod’s “Faust” and Verdi’s “Rigoletto” for the frequency of its performances in the Paris Opera on into the twentieth century.  (Let us repeat that again!)  Indeed, I personally consider the passage from Act Two, Scene Three on to the final bars of the work to be one of the supreme triumphs of the stage.  But the other six attempts?  Why their failure, why does no one know them?  By means of EMI, one might very well answer the question and in the process bring Saint-Saen back to life with one or more composite works that seek out those portions of the unplayed works which compare favourable with the ingenuity of Samson.  It might prove to be a highly rewarding experiment, worthy of applause, aye, maybe even for a stipend to cover the investigator’s labours with a generous bonus added on.

Here EMI may (1) assist and (2) check out the acceptability of the labours of others!  Dmitri Shostakovich was delighted with Rudolf Barshai’s rescoring of his own String Quartets for a chamber orchestra (op. 73a, 83a, 110a, 118a).  The latter received Shostakovich’s personal, face-to-face, approval.  What would Shostakovich have said to Krzysztof Meyer’s completion of his unfinished “The Card Player” with nothing before him but the text of Nikolaj Gogol?  And Gustav Mahler’s rescoring of Franz Schubert’s “Tod und das  Madchen” is an unending delight to hear.  Crucial in every case is EMI’s programming exclusively to the music of period in a composer’s life in which the uncompleted work lay.  Anything else must be adjudged childish playing.

Of crucial importance to an electronic device’s creation of music of any genuine substance is the matter of structural form, the interrelation between its elements.  The mass of humans are satisfied with the primeval form:  A, followed by B, followed by a return, once again, to A.  The letter A in this context refers to the collection of tones following one another over a length of four, perhaps eight, bars of music, and B designates the contrasting assembly of tone in the piece’s second phase.  Having done this, \one might continue - after all the listener has only heard twenty-four bars of music to this point - one may transpose the tunes involved from the Tonic of a given key to its Dominant (five notes above the initial tone of the scale in question), treating the Dominant now as the Tonic of a new scale.  To give an example, if the tune and its accompaniment begins in the key of C, then the repletion of the A B A form begins on G and, treating the latter  tone as a new key, one is now in the key of G.  This procedure gives the piece a touch of refinement and possibly stimulates the listener to hang around a bit longer, curious as to what might happen next.

Still, this is quite beneath the expectations of the connoisseur of Western serious, concert-hall music.  It is tolerable only in folk songs, pop, rock, and bandstand marches for the picnickers on a sunny afternoon in the park.  Even Jazz goes considerably beyond this simple form, modifying, metamorphosing the scatter of notes played at the outset of a rendition.  Until the appearance of a-tonal music - one thinks immediately of Arnold Schoenberg, its originator - the decisive form in Western music was the sonata which sets multiple (at least two) motives at work against one another, breaking down the themes initially presented in the process, extracting as far as the imagination of the composers is capable, the potentials inherent in his/her thematic materials.  And to the demands placed upon the composers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century the structural aspects of musical form in the a-tonal music of today adds (1) yet greater form-related demands, and (2) a wealth of additional instruments to be integrated in the palette of sound, challenging the composer’s creative abilities as never before.

The ultimate domain of EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) lies precisely here.  It is not the cluster of distinctive notes at any given instant (although that is also important), nor the tune the listener might whistle after the piece is over, but rather the inherent inner logic of the wave of sound produced as it proceeds through time that counts.  The apparatus quite simply MUST comprehend and reproduce acoustical structural form through time.

Perhaps there is a cut off’ point beyond which EMI doesn’t cut the mustard.  Feed Alexander Scriabin’s (died 1915) Third Symphony and/or his “Le Poeme de l’extase” into the electronic device and see whether it can produce a pseudo-Fourth Scriabin symphony that duly respects the intricacies of the latter’s torturous play with structural form.  Scriabin stands at that moment in the evolution of our Western music when tonality was breaking down - possibly to the dismay of the traditionalist, but to the joy of avant-guarde.  Or let us jump to leading figures of recent times, to a Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934), to Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1991), to Luigi Nono (1924-1990).  Can EMI handle Lutoslawski’s Piano Concerto of 1987, Birtwistle’s “Gawain’s Journey” or Nono’s “Al gran Sole carico d`amore”?  I’ve my doubts frankly.  And should my surmise be correct, then we reaffirm dramatically the indispensability of the composer and superfluousness of creating a Schumann’s Fifth, a Brahms’ Fifth, or a new Wagner “Music Drama” to fill out yet another five hours of performance time on the stage of his Bayreuth Festival Hall.

Stacey, you wrote, “Music soothes the savage beast, or so I have been told.  And I think we have always thought that this soothing capacity resided in the emotional depths and spirituality heights achieved by music. The story goes that music is an expression of the human soul.”

Maybe we’ve lost very little.  Maybe it makes little difference.  Perhaps we’ve even won a bit on the side.  In terms of the cyborg future predicted for mankind, perhaps we have even crossed the Rubicon and, far from replacing a defective fleshy foot, thigh, lung or circulatory system with an advanced, electronic one, we have successfully transplanted an unimprovable superior human component into a machine.  Perhaps we have found a new receptacle for the human soul!  That brand new Seventh Brandenburg Concerto just might be, de facto, the reincarnation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s soul!  Put that in your pipe and smoke it; no better:  in your flute and play it!

With the rhythms of the Cosmos in my breast, I greet you,

Mike Conley, Erfstadt-Lechenich, Rhineland.