> On 15 Mar 2014, at 8:25 am, Platonist Guitar Cowboy > <multiplecit...@gmail.com> wrote: > > So one could play you some Ferneyhough, say Shadowtime, and you'd be able to > score it on first listen? I know nobody that has an ear that good, but then > every person makes me wrong every day anyway :-)
Ha ha haaaa! I don't think anyone can transcribe Ferneyhough. Not even a Watsonesque super computer. The reason is, the music is utterly tied to the notation - not the other way round, which is kind of more "natural" - in that the sensory qualia of the sounds themselves arise in the mind first and are then transcribed into notation. That's the traditional way. Brian does the reverse; he gets out his slide-rule and his pocket calculator, ingeniously invents a way of organising a composition and then lets the numbers produce the result. He doesn't even aesthetically evaluate his piece; he just stands back and says "OK - this is what the numbers and algorithms gave me. Because it's built by explicit algorithms, the result must be accepted since how do you argue with a bunch of numbers??? ;-) Yes, a bit of the false is very much what makes the truth/beauty thing of music work. Music notation is only proximate. The fallible humans that play it are so unreliable in processing those algorithms that - bless me! - they seem to play it differently each time they play it. But strangely, that's what listeners seek from the experience. Brian's music, played live "suffers" from this as well, but he can always say " the musos didn't play it well enough to render it accurately." He is that class of composer who writes computer-music for humans to play. A Universal Machine using machine algorithms to design algorithms for other Universal Machines to play. But they cheat in peformance! Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
