The/. title calls it a "Newly-Completed Bach Work." Just to be clear, the final fugue from "Art of Fugue" has been "completed" many times over the past two centuries. Musicians as eminent as Riemann, Busoni, and Tovey have proposed completions that have been published, performed, and recorded. Wikipedia has a good article.
I haven't heard Ishizaka's version, but no matter how fine it may be it cannot be what Bach would have composed had he finished the final fugue. At one time the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff suggested that Bach probably finished the piece at some level and that the manuscript was lost. There is another theory that Bach left the final fugue incomplete on purpose.
This was not a case of Bach on his deathbed racing to finish his magnum opus. He worked on "Art of Fugue" over several years, amid many other projects, but he became blind and then died before he had the chance to wrap it up. It is astonishingly great music but not for children. By design it is free of narrative, and it may be too austere and personal for a typical concert setting.
The article is packed with assumptions suggesting that Zanette is not familiar with contemporary music theory. He does not employ standard music terminology. His concept of what constitutes a "note" doesn't make sense in tonal music. He seems to use simple scores (ot MIDI implementations of scores) as input, thus ignoring, for example, the evolution of notation and notational conventions. (Dude, a sixteenth note and an eighth note in a Bach piece might actually have exactly the same duration in an informed performance. No notated version of "Black Dog" describes exactly what goes on, metrically, between Page and Bonham.) The comments on Schoenberg and nontonal music are embarrassing. Statistical analysis of music has been around for decades and has yielded some interesting results. Zanette's results, alas, are not interesting and can be reasonably explained without reference to another inane "music is like language" assertion.
To paraphrase a statement found in an early (and influential) collection of pop music criticism: pop music criticism is criticism of music that is, by definition, not worthy of criticism.
Meanwhile, if I sit down with Finale, I can have it done in an hour.
But then you're stuck with Finale's output, which is mind-numbingly uniform and, thus, vastly more difficult to read in performance than Lilypond's more beautiful output. Yes, true. I'm not talking about in pop stuff or other simple music, but in music that is complex enough so that it must be read in performance. John Cage, one of your examples, created music that is inherently difficult to memorize; it is unpredictable enough that it cannot be reduced to pattern or algorithm. (Generally, Crumb and Schwantner, two more of your examples, are not difficult to memorize.) Since there may well be more reading going on in complex music than in simple music, in complex music, like Cage's music, the quality of the score become very important.
Music engraved by experts is better than Finale output because it is easier to read. Well-engraved music provides all sort of visual cues to help a performer play the correct notes in the correct rhythm, keep his or her place on the page, etc. A sort of visual grammar has evolved over centuries of engraving, and even nexperienced musicians respond to it with hardly a thought.
The Lilypond programmers seem to have done remarkable work in parsing this grammar and deriving rules, then using the grammar to improve score output. Finale and Lilypond are night and day in terms of ease in reading.
I am a musician who performs a lot music of the last fifty years--Crumb, Cage, and Schwanter, among many others. I have used Finale regularly since 1989. I tried Lilypond a year ago, and I won't be going back.
A Google search shows that the album was reviewed by Computer Music Journal (Fall '77). It seems to have been the work of Prentiss Knowlton, who is cited in a different online source for connecting an electronic organ keyboard to a PDP-8 computer. There are some other references to Prentiss Knowlton on Google that might help you track him down.
Ziemann wonders how he can manufacture new CDs at Discmakers for $1.89 each, yet the record companies charge $12 wholesale and still claim to make no money.
I don't doubt that making CDs cost the big companies a great deal. Read Mixerman's diaries to see why.
The music industry has inherited from the movie industry a fetish for "technical" (studio) perfection. "Smithers, fly in that mastering engineer from New York to work on those two tracks." The level of waste is mind-numbing.
It is a culture that conceals the scarcity of creative ability in the companies represented by the RIAA.
One can spend millions of dollars to produce an album which will probably be a commercial failure. One could also have handed Lennon a guitar and turned on the cassette recorder. Then you'd have something worth buying.
> So how will we deal with another society 17,597,088,000,000,000 miles away?
Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter would be appointed to head the Alien Total Information Awareness project.
President George W. Bush would extend his "Axis of Evil" to include the alien civilization. When the aliens fail to heed the the U.N.'s call to disarm, President Bush will declare war.
However, members of the Organian Council would use their mental powers to heat all Federation and Klingon weapons to 350 degress Farenheit, thus rendering them useless.
The author's list of rules is predicated upon many assumptions about the act of typing. Has any been verified scientifically? I think not. To discover whether the Dvorak keyboard or any other keyboard provides verifiable benefits beyond QWERTY would require extensive training and testing of a large sample population.
Of course, if you like Dvorak and any other layout better than QWERTY, then you should use it.
Congratulations to Jon Katz and others involved in the Hellmouth book. I am the parent of three unabashed geeks; I receive from them daily reminders of the intolerance of otherness that pervades American schools. Various threads in the national response to the Columbine Tragedy should alarm everyone, particularly those who cultivate otherness.
There seems to be no question that for Mr. Katz and his collaborators this book is a moral initiative. I applaud their good citizenship and their thoughtfulness. No book will assuage the pain of the Columbine victims' families and friends, but this effort might promote the sort of conversation that will change the climate.
Slashdot Mirror
The /. title calls it a "Newly-Completed Bach Work." Just to be clear, the final fugue from "Art of Fugue" has been "completed" many times over the past two centuries. Musicians as eminent as Riemann, Busoni, and Tovey have proposed completions that have been published, performed, and recorded. Wikipedia has a good article.
I haven't heard Ishizaka's version, but no matter how fine it may be it cannot be what Bach would have composed had he finished the final fugue. At one time the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff suggested that Bach probably finished the piece at some level and that the manuscript was lost. There is another theory that Bach left the final fugue incomplete on purpose.
This was not a case of Bach on his deathbed racing to finish his magnum opus. He worked on "Art of Fugue" over several years, amid many other projects, but he became blind and then died before he had the chance to wrap it up. It is astonishingly great music but not for children. By design it is free of narrative, and it may be too austere and personal for a typical concert setting.
and it was positive: A.O. Scott in the New York Times.
a r.html
Registration required (and fix the slash'ed URL):
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/05/16/movies/16st
Or for a perceptive scathing (and amusing) review, see Anthony Lane in the New Yorker (right now at http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema).
The article is packed with assumptions suggesting that Zanette is not familiar with contemporary music theory. He does not employ standard music terminology. His concept of what constitutes a "note" doesn't make sense in tonal music. He seems to use simple scores (ot MIDI implementations of scores) as input, thus ignoring, for example, the evolution of notation and notational conventions. (Dude, a sixteenth note and an eighth note in a Bach piece might actually have exactly the same duration in an informed performance. No notated version of "Black Dog" describes exactly what goes on, metrically, between Page and Bonham.) The comments on Schoenberg and nontonal music are embarrassing. Statistical analysis of music has been around for decades and has yielded some interesting results. Zanette's results, alas, are not interesting and can be reasonably explained without reference to another inane "music is like language" assertion.
Yes, you have it right.
To paraphrase a statement found in an early (and influential) collection of pop music criticism: pop music criticism is criticism of music that is, by definition, not worthy of criticism.
Meanwhile, if I sit down with Finale, I can have it done in an hour.
But then you're stuck with Finale's output, which is mind-numbingly uniform and, thus, vastly more difficult to read in performance than Lilypond's more beautiful output. Yes, true. I'm not talking about in pop stuff or other simple music, but in music that is complex enough so that it must be read in performance. John Cage, one of your examples, created music that is inherently difficult to memorize; it is unpredictable enough that it cannot be reduced to pattern or algorithm. (Generally, Crumb and Schwantner, two more of your examples, are not difficult to memorize.) Since there may well be more reading going on in complex music than in simple music, in complex music, like Cage's music, the quality of the score become very important.
Music engraved by experts is better than Finale output because it is easier to read. Well-engraved music provides all sort of visual cues to help a performer play the correct notes in the correct rhythm, keep his or her place on the page, etc. A sort of visual grammar has evolved over centuries of engraving, and even nexperienced musicians respond to it with hardly a thought.
The Lilypond programmers seem to have done remarkable work in parsing this grammar and deriving rules, then using the grammar to improve score output. Finale and Lilypond are night and day in terms of ease in reading.
I am a musician who performs a lot music of the last fifty years--Crumb, Cage, and Schwanter, among many others. I have used Finale regularly since 1989. I tried Lilypond a year ago, and I won't be going back.
Cover art.
A Google search shows that the album was reviewed by Computer Music Journal (Fall '77). It seems to have been the work of Prentiss Knowlton, who is cited in a different online source for connecting an electronic organ keyboard to a PDP-8 computer. There are some other references to Prentiss Knowlton on Google that might help you track him down.
I don't doubt that making CDs cost the big companies a great deal. Read Mixerman's diaries to see why.
The music industry has inherited from the movie industry a fetish for "technical" (studio) perfection. "Smithers, fly in that mastering engineer from New York to work on those two tracks." The level of waste is mind-numbing. It is a culture that conceals the scarcity of creative ability in the companies represented by the RIAA.
One can spend millions of dollars to produce an album which will probably be a commercial failure. One could also have handed Lennon a guitar and turned on the cassette recorder. Then you'd have something worth buying.
No, it's not.
Britney.
the web's one true growth industry: spam, fraud and porn.
Um, that would be three true growth industries.
The author's list of rules is predicated upon many assumptions about the act of typing. Has any been verified scientifically? I think not. To discover whether the Dvorak keyboard or any other keyboard provides verifiable benefits beyond QWERTY would require extensive training and testing of a large sample population.
Of course, if you like Dvorak and any other layout better than QWERTY, then you should use it.
Citing Wayne's World as an antecedent ignores Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, the work that pioneered the pervasive use of "dude" in cinema.
There seems to be no question that for Mr. Katz and his collaborators this book is a moral initiative. I applaud their good citizenship and their thoughtfulness. No book will assuage the pain of the Columbine victims' families and friends, but this effort might promote the sort of conversation that will change the climate.