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Fellow composer here - I completely agree, and I suspect the great classical composers often felt as much, that their own musical ideas led them in a totally di
by thirteenfingers 9y ago
Fellow composer here - I completely agree, and I suspect the great classical composers often felt as much, that their own musical ideas led them in a totally different direction than they originally intended.
My personal feeling about Eno's approach is that it almost deserves a different label than "composing" - maybe "incubating" (you know, like a startup incubator). For me, and I suspect for a great many music lovers, "composing" implies a process that may be evolutionary to some degree but is still overseen and directed from beginning to end by a particular artist. Contrast that with the case of traditional music from $REGIONAL_CULTURE where the process is more truly evolutionary as songs are passed from one generation of bards to another.
(I don't mean to say that Eno's approach to making music is somehow less legitimate than any other. It just seems better described by some other word.)
- TheOtherHobbes 9y agoCoincidentally I was pulling apart a generative music app when I saw this post. I think you make a very good point - which is that in the bigger picture, music is inherently evolutionary in a way that generative music isn't. Having some experience with generative apps, I know that they absolutely do not make music spontaneously. You have to invent them, build them, and tune them - all by hand/ear. It's more like building an instrument - i.e. a machine - and tuning/debugging it than cultivating a garden. Music as a whole is much more free. When it's loose in a culture, it can evolve in weird, unexpected directions that no individual composer would ever be able to imagine, and no app today would come close to copying.