In regards to your post

 

Regarding notation software it is very easy to fall into a cut and paste scenario and it can then feel like the software is leading the way.Being very conscious of that does help me avoid that but Jayzuz it does help with ostinatos.

 

Also I do tend to think of compositions a bit like frozen improvisations and improvisations like molten compositions.Improvosing or comprovisations if you like.

 

The phrasing and clef jumping is hilarious

EDIT - A baritone singer or cellist would possibly want to strangle you

 

Aye the clefs made me laugh

 

I haven't really tried using beat making software so I'm really intrigued by how the people who make that kind of music go about it because that for me is a new approach it's not something I've heard synthesised with orchestral music for example.Though saying that the late Martyn Bennett whose last album was composed almost entirely using samples had his music converted into a live performance by a man who wrote everything down forna Celtic connections concert is the closest I've heard.He was famous for marrying electronic music to traditional music.

 

It's interesting you raised that. A lot of people have put forward a pile of different ideas with varied styles and techniques from prog rock, jazz, classical and more. This post of yours also reminded me of the Euro synth period as well which is another type of composing. For example, Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk. They tried a few parallel concepts of merging but not in the same fashion.

 

You are down right delusional or actually have never listened to (or both) in order to be able to say that Pink Floyd are overrated as creative artists. They might not be your cup of tea as there is no accounting for taste, but subjectively they most certainly are.

You are spot on about Zappa though, he wasn't good, he was a fucking musical monster and composed, played, orchestrated and conducted perhaps hundreds of treasures of our shared musical heritage with some of the best musicians this side of The Milky Way.

You misspoke.

 

And if you'll forgive me an example of Martyn Bennett showing how he composed

 

I enjoyed watching. In a way you have answered the question you proposed to everyone. Martyn's imagination has spurred on much of this.
The Zappa, Floyd etcetera that everyone has put forward, the music contains the same ingredient.
Possibly the most important ingredient in composition might be imagination.

 

Indeed, growing up in the 70s I wasn't very interested in the early rockabilly musicians, or bluegrass, or big bands, or bebop, or Burt Bacharach, or ragtime, or Dixieland, because I was a F**KING YOUNG PUNK DUMB-ASS. Eventually, I woke up.

 

As a two-minute aside - just a complete distraction...
(maybe I can squeeze this into 'on topic' status by claiming it's something that gets in the way of composing )

I just collected a few random snippets from the Internet about NEGATIVITY.
Everyone can treat these as merely anecdotal pop psychology, but they make an entertaining two minute read.

My personal summary from the snippets below would be...
At times it is entirely right to criticise something (it's an important skill and part of a positive attitude),
but when someone endlessly and boringly goes around saying "This is crap, that is boring, this is useless, that is garbage", etc, the one thing left for them to do is look in a mirror and say...
"that negative brain and negative attitude is the most authentically crap thing I've seen all day".
Then take a year off and "go fix it".

Internet quips...

• Negativity is a tendency to find the bad side in any situation, to expect or pro-actively find the worst, even about circumstances that are benign or viewed positively by other people.
• That negativity manifests in an unwarranted pessimistic attitude and is accompanied by a downbeat and disagreeable attitude that drains the life out of the reasonable positive attitudes that others feel.
• When you look at people with negative attitude to life, you will notice that these people are also very insecure and diffident, they basically lack confidence. But they would (of course) be vehemently negative about that diagnosis.
• The excessively negative person gains a false sense of comfort by attempting to drag everyone else down to their negative level.
• They never move outside their comfort zone. Moving outside the familiar world is anathema to those who are negative. They cannot face the possibility of more fear, discomfort, challenges or failure. They are thus never able to try out new experiences and are doomed to dwell in their dull and dreary comfort zone.
• Negative people tend to whine a lot, convinced that the whole world is against them.
• Those who are negative are likely to be over sensitive to criticism, even taking compliments the wrong way. They interpret innocent remarks as being condescending or rude. They are well below average in their willingness to be open to constructive feedback.
• They don't limit their exposure to bad news and will also invent as much illusory negativity as is required to make their negative attitudes feel valid.
• When people start telling you what you should do instead of what options might be worth exploring, it's a possible indicator that they are in the negative squad. They do not realize it but this is a sure sign that they have not sorted out their own life issues. It is just so much easier to tell everyone else how to live their lives.

---
Oh damn, the negative feedback I'm going to get for this comment will be off the chart

 

I'd be interested to hear from anyone that uses it a lot to see how they think about it.
For example, might they regard it as a kind of 'assisted instrument' ?
What I mean by assisted instrument is that someone is, in effect, still improvising in real time, they have an improvising mentality, but they're using software to carry out the heavy lifting of the 'playing instrument' while they're still in the musical driving seat and hands-on manipulating what's happening in realtime.
(I hope that convoluted sentence made some kind of sense)
It seems like someone composing rhythms might be working that way when working with drum machines or beatbox style software. They might be very focussed and led by what they are imagining, or they might be just tweaking everything and hoping to find something interesting. Would that be a difference that still matters? and even if it might not matter for purely rhythmic composition would it start to matter again for compositions that are melodic-harmonic?

 

That's also interesting.
A great improvisation often has many of the ingredients of a great composition, so it is technically composition-on-the-spot.

 

Just a guess, off the top of my head, I wouldn't be surprised if in Bach's era, they would be baffled by our modern tendency to more rigidly distinguish between improvisation and composition.

 

Last edited: Jan 16, 2020

It's a safe bet that you've already read interviews with Steve Vai talking about his auditions for Zappa.
If not then highly recommended - they're great fun to read.

 

Today too classical trained musicians, if not jamming on the side of their rigid studies, cannot at all jam. Their chops seem only to go as far as reading dots on a page and following direction. Saying that, my sight reading skills are woefully in decline after so many years of not needing to and only reading charts.

 

I think I understand it a little bit better today, but I still remember being totally gobsmacked and baffled when I first encountered some players, with really brilliant playing skills, who would become totally paralysed if you removed their sheet music. I quite simply could not believe that this was a real phenomenon.

 

"musicians we now listen to" - if you can't hear any of its traits remaining, there is no influence. You may like and listen to ethnic African chants and extreme metal, but composing typical bubblegum pop songs aimed at 12-15 years old girls in your actual work (for a living).There would be no connection, innovation is not well received in genre music (unless you are already super famous or some kind of virtuoso).
I don't know how many non-musicians you know, but from what I have seen, there are many people that are totally brainwashed by top 100 radio/tv/streaming charts. I even know a guy that follows all the gossips about "pop stars' " and similar crap. (Seriously, how retarded you have to be to do that?)
About prog. rock and various artsy acts - yep, they may be a level above the average pop song, but on structural and thematic level, they are below "serious" music. This is valid for a big part of the jazz, too (still, it is not hard to find some "serious" jazz compositions, but that's not the norm.) I am not against simple music, but... people are 100 % overrating (because of nostalgia or because they compose music in this vein) certain acts from the past.
Many composers and pieces in the classical canon are also overrated and it is not hard to find similar sounding stuff by totally forgotten composers. It is the critics that made certain people considered as great. Today noone gives a f**k about critics, so being famous is all about your (fake) artistic image and saturating the media with adverts (about your personality). (Interestingly,even in the punk and other marginal music scenes/societies, where it is not that much about the music, but more about the "message" that you belong to a certain group with some kind of ideology or lifestyle. Even many jazz or classical listeners listen to such music only to be "intellectuals/snobs/high-life" etc.)