insta-music

It's Xmas in July and I'm playing with my new toy...er, tool...for, um, composition...my compositional tool...uh, I'm expanding my available musical, uh, resources for the purpose of generating a, er, broader, um, breadth of, hm, expression and, ahem, freeing once, uh, inhibited musical ideas.

CODE FOR: I bought some software in the hopes that it would make me a better composer...by making me have to work less.

Now really, though, is that fair to the wonders of Stylus RMX, an impressive groove-editing tool with a huge array of options for customizing loops?



And the key work there is "customizing." Do we really have an adequate word to describe the act of combining pre-existant music into larger amalgams? I don't think DJing is quite the right word - it's simply one of the forms this type of composition takes (another form is mash-ups). But I'm talking about the act which encompasses all those activites and more. Then again, why not use the word composition? Have I been conditioned to attribute the act of composition to the creation of highly "original" music (built from the ground up) by a single (dare I say heroic) individual.

That form of composition is quickly falling by the wayside as group composition takes over. By that I don't mean a group of people simultaneously sitting in a room dreaming up melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and textures (though many bands work that way and the commercial music world thrives on that type of composition - for better or for worse). I mean the collective act starting with one person creating a snippet of music and then another person taking that snippet and making it a part of a larger piece. That process has become terribly complex with companies employing composers to create tracks that will then become samples or loops or grooves in software like Reason or Fruity Loops or Stylus. Those loops/samples/grooves are not considered pieces in their own right but building blocks (albeit sometimes rather complex and complete ones) ready to be dropped in or layered or recombined in someone else's piece. How can I take credit for "composing" music which was created using this process?

The Stylus FAQ addresses the legal end of this by saying: "...the lifetime license fee to use the samples is covered in the purchase price of the instrument. You can use it on as many of your own projects as you like and we hope that you make some hits with it!" Regarding the issue of credit, the FAQ states: "It [giving credit to Spectrasonics, the company that makes Stylus] isn't mandatory for our instruments...but we certainly would appreciate it!"

So legally we're covered. But then there's my pesky conscience. I whipped up the following snippet in about 5 minutes using Stylus. How much of that am I responsible for? I can probably bet you that that particular combination of loops/grooves has never been tried (along with other settings - filters, envelopes, randomization (what Stylus calls "Chaos" - an amazing feature). But I'd have a hard time feeling good about myself if I were to pass that music off as my own. And yet that's just we're asked to do.

This is a huge topic of course and an interesting, though obvious, perspective is: how responsible was Mozart for his music. The following excerpt from a Slate.com article hints at this issue:

The story of the mystery symphony is basically this: Scholars in Vienna recently stumbled on a symphony in D that bears Mozart's name—but it's a discovery with a twist. A nearly identical symphony has been unearthed in a library in Zagreb bearing the name of David Westermayer, a compatriot of Mozart's who has long since sunk into obscurity. So, who really wrote it? The puzzle has sparked some notable musicological detective work. However scholars end up resolving the question of authorship, it highlights a side of Wolfgang his father preferred to gloss over and popular legend tends to ignore: The boy genius, for all his originality, was also an impressionable imitator. Either he availed himself of a score by an elder and rearranged it somewhat (as he did with some early concertos), or, if the work is shown to be his, he was composing derivative music that experts could mistake for that of a mediocre adult contemporary. In other words, young Mozart was not simply a little boy who was visited by inspirational bolts from the blue. He was an industrious student inundated by contemporaneous influences. (Mozart and Us: What the ur-prodigy has to teach his successors; by Ann Hulbert; Posted Wednesday, June 1, 2005, at 4:22 AM PT)

Take it one step further: when I choose to compose music on a 5-line staff, am I bending the musical throes of my soul to fit it into a system of dots and lines or have my musical throes already been programmed to birth music in a style which can easily be notated?

God, I've been in school too long. As a tangential antidote, play with this toy for a bit. It's a fun tool called polyPulse by NYU colleague Chris Ariza.

Here's his blurb:
polyPulse is web-baed on-line MIDI poly-rhythm generator. This tool allows the user to easily generate five-part polyrhythmic constructions through a web-based interface, and hear (and download) the results as a MIDI file.