Benjamin Williams

"Instead of mindlessly extracting—data points for statistical analysis, Clio intelligently adapts its attention to key aspects… —just like you and I do."

If this is truly "just like you and I do," then the study of music should at some level be a honing of "intelligently adapting [oneself] to focus on the aspects most critical to the mood." Perhaps I could make this more explicit in my own teaching. (June 11, 2011)

These were my initial thoughts in response to first reading about Clio from a blog post about how a computer might model the way we listen to music. …

I just finished reading Matthew Brown's Explaining Tonality: Schenkerian Theory and Beyond and wanted to take note of some observations.

Some of the most important ideas I learned while studying with Gregory Proctor involved the power of voice leading. I also became intrigued with the careful explanation for every single pitch in a piece as graphically analyzed by my colleague David Tomasacci. These ideas have been a central pursuit in my own compositions over the past two or three years. One further impetus for a careful interest in voice leading was described by Brown.

While I usually prefer to not dwell on the profitability of artistic production, I also find its economic peculiarities fascinating.

On the one hand, there is MPA fighting hard against IMSLP to protect the ideals of copyright protection; on the other, the realization that the entire music industry is hardly worth Google's effort to even put up a fight.

Every once in a while a topic will come up in two or more contexts of my awareness that I would probably not notice without the reinforcement. Two articles addressing issues of copyright law recently appeared in the New York Times in as many weeks:

1. Would the Bard Have Survived the Web? (14 February 2011)
2. Free Trove of Music Scores on Web Hits Sensitive Copyright Note (22 February 2011)

The first might be considered more of a philosophy of copyright law, whereas the second deals with practical issues. If not for both sides of this same coin, this might be a much easier issue to ignore.

This post is an open letter of sorts to David Tomasacci, composer and theorist, in response to his request for my thoughts on how a particular new music ensemble could be improved. However, I will make my recommendations in a generalized fashion and refer to particulars only infrequently.

This is the second post in a series addressing the idea of a 'composition app' and, more specifically, Joseph Freeman's recent opinion pieces in the NYTimes: "Compose Your Own" and "Compose Your Own, Part 2." The first post, "Composition? There’s an App for That… (Part 1)" involved the issue of sequence in music. [Note: While I initially had other topics I wanted to address, I will most likely end with this post.]

Via the twittersphere:

@fEARnoMUSIC: Hey composers! Please don't put bowings in unless you have played the instrument you are bowing for for at least 30 years. Thx! Mwah! Luv u!

So, is it really so bad for composers to mark bowings?

As the academic year comes to a close, I realize it has been a quite while since I have written a post. Initially, I thought I would just share some fun music-generating web-links that I ran across:

• http://balldroppings.com/js/ (my personal favorite)
• http://www.incredibox.fr/
• http://www.optuswhalesong.com.au/
• http://www.whitevinyldesign.com/solarbeat/ (thanks to Erin Gamble!) (not really composition per se, but it is fun…)

But then I got to thinking about the music-making involved and started asking myself questions such as "What does it to take to make an application that can generate more-or-less pleasing music regardless of musical ability on the part of the 'composer'?" That's just about when I began reading Jason Freeman's NYTimes opinion piece "Compose Your Own, Part 2" and its prequel "Compose Your Own." This led to a number of other questions that I will address in separate posts in the upcoming week.

Last night the Ying Quartet played the opening concert of the 2009–2010 Season of Chamber Music Columbus. If you live in central Ohio and have not availed yourself of the opportunity to go to one of these performances, I highly suggest that you make efforts to get to one (I will hopefully be at many, if not all).

Before the performance began, Emily and I were looking over the schedule for the season and in particular discussing one of the upcoming CMC concerts featuring John O'Conor on piano (3/6/10). One of the potential difficulties of listening to an evening of piano music is that it can become tiresome with the lack of variety in terms of timbre and dynamic envelope available to the pianist. Whereas many other instruments and the voice can vary these parameters in a variety of different ways, the pianist makes musical gestures out of a different set that, for example, includes intensity of attack, but not dynamic envelope.

As I read through various reports on Arts this morning, I found a common thread through three articles:

"Love the Art; Hate the Artist?" by John Schaefer

In Israel you still won't hear the music of Richard Wagner in concert. The music sounds just as glorious there as it does anywhere else, but the Nazi's appropriation of his music and of some of his anti-Semitic writings make it a painful listening experience for many Israelis who survived the Holocaust and settled there.…

If we remove all the art by artists of bad character from our lives, who are we hurting? Not a long dead composer… We're just denying ourselves the good—in some cases, perhaps the only good—that these people did.