Bagpipes and Theremin Together On Stage

I uncovered evident pentimento on this masterpiece...

Hahaha! Excellent.

Fred - taken to its logical conclusion, a top end etchasketch with suitable adaptations for professional use would basically be a pen plotter.

As for a suitable artist, how about Aubrey Beardsley. A Beardsley on a pen plotter, that could work.

Gordon wrote: "I remember having an etch-a-sketch as a child, and not using it to recreate, with difficulty, masterpieces of the past..."

Ironically, Gordon's Etch-A-Sketch analogy is quite valid but not for classical musicians. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is valid only for the kind of musicians who make the sort of music Gordon makes!

Suggesting, for example, that Vladimir Horowitz playing a Beethoven sonata, or Maria Callas singing TOSCA, is akin to a child using E-A-S to re-create the Mona Lisa, is misguided to say the least. Beethoven and Puccini created their works specifically in order to have them reproduced by others. It was never the intention of Leonardo da Vinci (or any other painter I have ever heard of) to have generations of individuals attempt to replicate his masterpieces, and I'm sure he was well aware that it would be impossible anyway.

What is curious is that the aleatoric theremin music of Gordon (and others of his particular musical bent) cannot be reproduced either. I doubt that Gordon himself could play one of his compositions a second time, any more than Jackson Pollack could throw paint randomly at a canvas and accurately reproduce something he had already created using the same process. He could endlessly create something new in the same style (and God knows he did) but he could not replicate something already done.

What I am saying here is that aleatoric, experimental music, like the Mona Lisa, is frozen in time. Classical and popular music, on the other hand, are not. 

A great painting survives as long as the canvas exists and people can see it and appreciate it. Classical and popular music depend on reproduction for survival, and exist only as long as works are performed and experienced by audiences and performers alike.

Gordon's compositions are indeed like the Mona Lisa, in that they are one-of-a-kind and attempts to reproduce them are bound to fail, like the mawkish, shifty-eyed Mona Lisa caricature we see in the Etch-A-Sketch. 

None of the above is intended as a put-down or criticism of Gordon's work (of the the work of Jackson Pollock). I am only trying to make a distinction between music that lives through performance, and music that cannot be accurately reproduced and exists, like a painting, only in the form in which it was originally created. 

"Fred - taken to its logical conclusion, a top end etchasketch with suitable adaptations for professional use would basically be a pen plotter." - Gordon

Yep - but if the basic user interface (two knobs and continuous line) were retained, it would still be a flawed interface -  pencil and paper would still be easier and better for someone drawing a picture IMO.

Change the interface - make it a tablet or whatever, and one can have a better interface, even if one was using this to control the original etchasketch..

But enough! ;-)  one can always take any analogy too far..

Hmm, Coalport, you have set me thinking. Is my music as unrepeatable as all that? By me, certainly yes. I lack the necessary skills and tools to either transcribe what I play into some suitable notation, or to read a transcription and reproduce it on a theremin. But I do not think either is theoretically impossible.

(A quick aside - I'm reminded of a line from a Kevin Turvey sketch. The gist was "I rode on the bus. I could have driven but then I would have had to buy driving lessons first..." If you need to hear the original it's here, about 53 seconds in. http://youtu.be/xPLAcFHkASc )

Staff notation would possibly not be appropriate, but something akin to the notation Percy Grainer used for his Free Music, along with a description of the disposition of the various effects pedals would work.

(Another aside - his Free Music pieces were not specifically written for theremins - he felt they lacked the accuracy required - but for machines capable of exact reproduction of the notation. Nonetheless they has been reproduced fairly faithfully on theremins. I suspect Grainger would have been delighted by the Moog Ethervox and it's ability to play free music (or any other sort) directly from a MIDI transcription, and it would be absolutely possible to commission a computer program that could read Grainger's notation and convert it into MIDI notation that the Ethervox could read. So potentially at least, the Ethervox is a realisation of a Free Music Machine, but electronic rather than mechanical like his prototypes. http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/articles/FreeMusic.html )

At the other end of the spectrum, no two performances of a piece of sheet music are exactly alike. Each player brings his or her own artistic interpretation to the piece. So the question is, how much can two performances differ and still be considered to be the same piece of music? That's a very difficult question to answer definitively and has, on occasion, resulted in court cases to determine if a piece of music is original or derivative. I agree that my pieces (and many pieces of electronic music in general) can vary rather more than the typical piece of sheet music, but would assert that this is merely a matter degree rather than being a completely different kettle of fish.

The thing about aleatoric theremin music is that much of it cannot be reproduced because it is impossible, regardless of how skilled the musician may be. You can wave your hands wildly about and make some wonderful effects, but you will never be able to wave your hands in exactly the same way ever again...and neither will anyone else. I compared this to throwing paint at a canvas, a visual aleatoric technique that many painters have used with great success. 

Yes, the interpretation of a Beethoven sonata may vary slightly from virtuoso to virtuoso, but there will be no doubt in the mind of anyone who is acquainted with the music that what is being played is "THE MOONLIGHT".

That would certainly be the case for theremin music made by waving ones hands about wildly, but my experience is that that seldom produces anything I would describe as wonderful. The unpredictable aspects of what I do are that it is very largely improvised, and that when I jump to a different pitch, I have some notion of where I am heading, but exactly which pitch I land on is unpredictable and I stick with it whatever it is. 

Not that I am particularly concerned about reproducibility, whether it is theoretically possible or not. As you noted, an improvisation is a moment frozen in time, which is why from time to time I freeze them as audio files too, which permits the moment to be reproduced, not exactly, but very close to exactly. I imagine other experimental thereminists who find something of interest in what I do (if such a creature exists) would prefer to take ideas and techniques and adapt them and hopefully improve on them rather than attempt to reproduce any of my works verbatim.

Incidentally, I should note that a lot of what I do works with precision playing too. I have had a few opportunities to badger some rather good classical thereminists into having a go with an echo pedal and it is really cool. I would encourage any player who has opportunity to set a nice long delay - the length of a bar or two - with plenty of feedback and play a round with themselves. It's fun. :-)

"As you noted, an improvisation is a moment frozen in time, which is why from time to time I freeze them as audio files " - GordonC

Isnt it this factor which changes everything?

Coalport's "A great painting survives as long as the canvas exists and people can see it and appreciate it. Classical and popular music depend on reproduction for survival, and exist only as long as works are performed and experienced by audiences and performers alike."

-  was certainly true before we were able to make accurate recording, or able to make accurate copies of works like the Mona Lisa.

But now, Classical popular music (and all othe music / sounds that have been recorded )would still "survive" even if there were no performers able to play it, and great paintings would still survive even if the originals were destroyed - And this becomes truer as technology advances - Paintings, for example, can now be scanned in 3d, and a 3d replica produced complete with the colour and texture of the paint on the canvas being perfect enough that no person could tell which was the copy and which the original.

I know the above deviates somewhat from the main arguments, and I know there is a massive difference between attending a live concert (whatever the genre) and listening to a recording of that concert even on the best Hi-Fi - So I am in no way saying that we only need musicians in recording studios churning out mass copies of what they do there.. or that because every classic has been recorded multiple times there is no need for classical musicians anymore..

But I do think that the technology evolved over the last 100 years has completely changed the parameters, and stuff which, in say the 20's,  could only exist "in the moment" is lost to us - as is any masterpiece we create today which we dont record and for whatever reason are not able to repeat ... But everything we record "in the moment" now, can be repeated, even if we are unable to manually come close to replicating the performance or whatever..

So I do wonder if a lot of the arguments in this thread which were valid in say the 30's are really valid today.

Fred. 

(oh, there is still some art beyond the reach of todays technology to replicate or preserve - Architecture for example, or works on a scale for which there is no means of replication - like paintings on walls, graffiti etc - one can take photos, but not get the wall or environment)

I think that "aleatoric" (chance) components in some music have "survived" only because they were captured in recording - An example of this perhaps was the "ping" sound in Pink Floyds "echos" - this was never "planned" - it was a faulty transducer which produced it, the artists retained / exploited it, and from this a wonderful (IMO) piece of music was created which would have been lost had the sound and its influence on the resulting composition  not been recorded.