neptune1bond

Musicians have been trying to push the boundaries of what can and cannot be considered music as well as what can or cannot be considered art for a long time now. The truth happens to be that there is an audience for almost every type and so you would have a difficult time trying to claim that something isn't music without receiving a huge argument.

Some people have a hard time with aleatoric music since the composer did not make all of the choices in what is and isn't performed. The more indeterminacy, the less some people consider it music.

Some people have a difficulty considering serialism (and integral serialism) as music since, although it requires a lot of thought and effort to do it well and it does have a method, structure, and form, the end result can sometimes sound like a child pounding and pressing random keys on the piano.

Some people might say,"screw serialism, I don't even consider free atonality to be music" because of some of its extreme dissonance and usual lack of chordal progressions easily recognized by the tonally oriented ear.

Even I have a difficult time with some of the avant garde "music" just before the turn of the century. I mean what does Nam June Paik telling a performer to "creep Into the vagina of a living whale" in his "Danger Music for Dick Higgins" or Takehisa Kosugi telling the performers to "Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later" in his "Music for a Revolution" have to do with music? Are we meant to enjoy the sounds of performers scooping their eyes out or the sounds of the inside of a whale's vah-j-j? Or how about this? For Toby Driver's "The Lugubrious Library Loft" (this one was actually done in 2005) ALL of the instruments were played using two people (for instance one player played the keyboard of the piano and another played the strings with mallets). The thing that makes this really strange is that one of the instruments was voice. The way that this was played by two people is one sat with their mouth open while they sang "Ah" and the other performer placed their lips, tongue, and teeth against and in the other persons mouth and moved them around to form the "enunciations."

In light of these, I have absolutely no issue with the idea of electronic music (I frequently use computers and computer sounds in my own compositions). In fact I've actually found some of the stranger methods of composing music (not including whales and shoving spoons in your eye) useful for expressing certain types of emotion that tonal music is just flat out incapable of. I think my personal definition of music has become the simple and nondescript,"any collection of sounds (or lack thereof) that someone, somewhere enjoys for whatever reason" which I guess could include everything ranging from the inside of a whale's chacha to Mozart to a person speaking rhythmically with an "off da hook" beat to Journey to Rachmaninoff to Gregorian chant to having players perform music composed by having a handicapped person tape a crayon to his head and repeatedly bank it against a wall that has a piece of manuscript paper taped to it. Although I would only consider it to be music for the person/s that enjoy that music (for whatever reason) and most possibly not for those who don't.

Now, as to what i consider to be good music, beautiful music, or a masterpiece, etc.? That's quite a different story. This, for me, has less to do with the method of composition chosen and has more to do with the results. I would have to hear a well-prepared performance and then I would only be able to judge that individual performance separately (even in popular music I sometimes thought the recording was good but then went to hear them in concert or see a performance on you tube only to think to myself,"holy crap these people suck monkey-balls!").

The op makes me question something though. In a good deal of computer music, the music is played by a keyboardist and then simply recorded into some sort of a sequencing program. Do you only have a problem with the point-and-click-a-note compositions or any music that is played using samplers and synths? And if it has to do with the fact that music using samplers and synths played by a live keyboardist is also an issue for you (or is the only issue for you), is it because the live musicians final sound is actually created through electronic means (which would also include electric guitars and basses) or because they re-record each line until it is perfect, so it's not a played-through performance (in which case you'd have to question every c.d. recording that you have in your collection since that's kinda what they do in a recording studio for the vast majority of recordings available)?

I can say that I do have an issue with "musicians" that use loops and grooves previously composed by other musicians to "compose" their own music since they had so little to do with the compositional process and their part didn't require very much "musical skill" (although I still would consider the end result to be music). I mean, the truth is, they have video games that do something quite similar (plug and play samples of music created by an actual musician) and my seven year old cousin was quite capable of creating something that sounded as good or better than anything else composed by the same process. I still wouldn't call my cousin a musician or great artist by any means. I'd just call him a gamer.

Wow, realized how long I rambled for after I clicked post and had to add an apology to those who were annoyed and thank you to those who actually bothered to read it.