Re: Mozart's 42nd - yeah, right

[Bruce Petherick <b.petherick@vc.unimelb.edu.au>]

At 13:32 26/05/98 +0000, you wrote:
>Good article, lots of fascinating stuff. I fixated on EMI's 
>inventor's reaction to the statement of one man who spoke from the 
>audience after EMI's "Mozart." The man said there was nothing in 
>EMI's performance that sounded like Mozart. Cope, EMI's inventor, 
>dismissed this as the statement of a man who had come to the concert 
>with his mind already made up. Perhaps, but it does sound as if Cope 
>had already made up HIS mind about any audience member who was not 
>prepared to be blown away by EMI. That one man may have been the only 
>member of the audience whose opinion was worth having.

I have been interested in the EMI project for a number of years because of
an amount of similarity to some of my own research.  Last year (at exactly
the same time as Douglas Hofstadter co-incidentally) I ran a small seminar
for undergrad composition students on some of Cope's work, including a
performance of some of the works. My argument was that several of the works
are good stylistic approximations of the relevant composers, while others
don't come close. The Bach inventions are good - although they are really
rearrangements of existing works, and the Mozart sonata is not too bad.  I
don't think the Joplin works at all, nor the Bartok examples.  Hofstadter
seems to really like the idea of the computer as composer.  He has stated
(no references handy, but _I_ do have them - they may be private emails
'though) that the EMI examples are better than anything that an undergrad
could produce - a statement that I strongly disagree with :->

***********************************************************
* Bruce Petherick                                               *
* b.petherick@vc.unimelb.edu.au                   *
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*il n'y a pas de hors-text                                      *
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* Bringing Musicology to the masses                   *
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