David Cope: Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (2001)

Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author’s responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity.

The book includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.

With commentary by Douglas Hofstadter
And with perspectives and analysis by Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Bernard Greenberg, Steve Larson, Jonathan Berger, and Daniel Dennett
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 026203283X, 9780262032834
565 pages

Experiments in Musical Intelligence (author)

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-6-13)

John Cage, Joan Retallack: Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music (1996)

“The entire range of John Cage‘s work and thought, explored in three wide-ranging dialogues, which constitute his last unified statement on his art.

‘I was obliged to find a radical way to work — to get at the real, at the root of the matter,’ John Cage says in this trio of dialogues, completed just days before his death. His quest for the root of the matter led him beyond the bounds of the conventional in all his musical, written, and visual pieces. The resulting expansion of the definition of art — with its concomitant emphasis on innovation and invention–earned him a reputation as one of America’s most influential contemporary artists.

Joan Retallack’s conversations with Cage represent the first consideration of his artistic production in its entirety, across genres. Informed by the perspective of age, Cage’s comments range freely from his theories of chance and indeterminate composition to his long-time collaboration with Merce Cunningham to the aesthetics of his multimedia works. A composer for whom the whole world — with its brimming silences and anarchic harmonies — was a source of music, Cage once claimed, “There is no noise, only sounds.” As these interviews attest, that penchant for testing traditions reached far beyond his music. His lifelong project, Retallack writes in her comprehensive introduction, was “dislodging cultural authoritarianism and gridlock by inviting surprising conjunctions within carefully delimited frameworks and processes.” Consummate performer to the end, Cage delivers here just such a conjunction — a tour de force that provides new insights into the man and a clearer view of the status of art in the 20th century.”

Publisher Wesleyan University Press, 1996
ISBN 0819563110, 9780819563118
408 pages

Publisher

EPUB, EPUB (updated on 2019-7-4)

Paul Griffiths: Modern Music and After, 3rd ed (2011)

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths’s survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez’s radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage’s development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt’s settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich’s unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono’s pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis’s view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio’s consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven’t yet stopped unfolding.

This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths’s study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino.

For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

– Provides the most comprehensive study in English of musical composition from 1945 on
– Offers a keen examination of how important composers have responded to the constant flux of their cultural environs, both socially and technically
– Griffiths is considered by many in the field the finest writer on modern “classical” music in the English language today

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0199792828, 9780199792825
480 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)