The above quotation from one of the early fathers of the church has been grinning at me from atop one of the pages of this website for some time. This is just the tip of a rather uncivil iceberg; a few other examples of persons of eminent standing thinking of musicians as generally low quality people can be found on these pages, culled from a vast mine of such writings. Not that musicians, despite a long history of being disparaged, are alone: probably someone can be found who thinks of your own profession (whatever it is) as completely useless, and possibly destructive. Of course, when you add a religious dimension to that, you get personal opinions to the 3^rd power. One of the things I find funny is how Basil ends his diatribe. Not only is musical activity of no use, but it leads ‘to destruction.’ And it isn’t just his opinion. St. Paul said it. Case closed.

Actually, I haven’t combed the epistles lately looking for the source of this epithet, but my suspicion is that Basil is doing the usual religious-commentator/church father thing of taking what was in the text and adding some additional steps to it. In other words, Paul probably sums up one of his ‘sin lists’ by saying ‘the result of these is destruction.’ Maybe ‘sloth’ is part of the list. Basil figures playing music is a slothful activity, therefore music=sloth (according to him) and sloth=destruction (according to Paul), therefore music=destruction. Paul didn’t say it but that is surely what he meant, right?

I’ve including the quotation at the top of one of my pages on which there are several recordings. According to Basil, the reason music is a ‘useless’ activity is because as soon as you stop playing ‘the result disappears.’ I wonder what he would have thought if he had known that, some centuries hence, we would be able to capture the sound and therefore the result would not disappear. The sounds I made last June can still be heard for an indefinite period into the future. I think this is pretty cool.

There is no longer anything new about this and therefore I am supposed to take it for granted, but I still like to be grateful for it anyway. Brightens my day a little, and the rainy, gloomy day on which I am typing this needs a little brightening.

But human inventiveness doesn’t stop there. These days, it is even a question whether you need to make the recording at all--or, at least, how you make it.

A few months ago I mentioned the wide world of virtual organ sounds. There are a number of websites and Youtube channels devoted to recordings made on virtual organs, some of which feature recorded sounds from the famous organs of the world. One of those enterprises is called Hautpwerk, and it was created by the husband of the previous organist at my church, interestingly enough.  Some of them appear to originate from a human being playing a keyboard with virtual software to simulate the sound of those world-famous organs; however in some cases I suspect (this is rarely made clear) the music is chiefly programmed in (this is not really that new--MIDI files started allowing this about, what, 20 years ago?). Can you tell the difference? There was a time when anybody with a decent ear (which was already sort of a problem for a professional because a lot of people don’t have one and therefore would not notice) would be able to tell if a ‘robot’ was playing the music. A human being would have a clear advantage, because a ‘robot’ would do absolutely none of the phrasing or make any of the scores of interpretive decisions that are absolutely necessary to even the most apparently objective approach. Even the most diehard ‘let the music speak for itself’ reading does not hold literally to the exact relationship of every quarter note to every half-note on the page without pausing a bit for air between music phrases, and to inflect the more important notes slightly so that there is a sense of musical syllabification, and a sense of goal. Tension, relaxation, overall meaning, expression of various kinds: you don’t get these without imposing something that isn’t among music’s diacritical marks. You have to bring something to the music.

And people are: these days, software is sophisticated enough to allow human beings to make enough decisions to make the recordings sound more human. Hear that slight prolongation of the bass note (for emphasis)? That wasn’t scanned in; a human being put it there, for a musical reason, even if he or she programmed it in. Add to that the fact that the virtual instruments sound a whole lot more realistic than they used to, and you have a whole new ballgame.

I’m not particularly well versed in this area, since I make my recordings the old-fashioned way, by pushing my digits against the plastic levers of a mechanical instrument and recording the resultant sounds with microphones, but the way some of these popular programs work seems to eliminate one thing: the need to learn how to play an instrument. And that seems like it might be a bit of a concern. I mean, I went to school for years to do what I do, and you are getting more or less the same result without needing to learn any of that?

Making things all the more complicated is the fact that many of the recordings made on 'virtual' organs were actually played by human beings--in some cases, some very good ones. But then, there are some which were programmed in, and did not require a musician at all. How long until you can scan a score and the machine will play it? My Finale composition software will already play what I've written simply by hitting a button, but it's not very convincing. Ditto to some of the virtual recordings on Youtube. They sound like they are being played by machines. But the machines are getting a lot better. Sometimes it is not so easy to tell the difference. As if organ manufacturers didn't have enough to worry about these days! The new ways of doing things facilitate a whole lot of interesting, and sometimes great, things (I recently heard a stellar performance by a terrific organist in his livingrom on a virtual organ, but then, I've heard a whole lot of junk, too). But they make it harder on the craftsmen as well. Virtual organs are much cheaper, and who but the most discriminating ears can tell the difference? Virtual organs are cheaper, and so are virtual organists!

 I imagine that in some ways this encroachment upon another’s area of expertise is somewhat like my running this website without knowing very much about html code or java script, or my putting recordings on the web without being a recording engineer, or putting my compositions into printed form without needing a publisher. I can see how this represents a problem on several levels for the professionals in many areas. And, since I’m on the other side of the argument in these areas, the amateur side, I can see how not needing to know all these things can be liberating. It appears that, as the world keeps on turning, we are all destined to be amateurs in more and more things, and, miraculously, can get results that are not too far removed from the ones the professionals are getting, or at least, close enough that most of us won't be able to tell.

But if the performer is starting to lose his unique status in bringing a musical composition about, what about the composer?

If you haven’t noticed this already, people are training computers to write music as well. This isn’t a new idea either (actually, I spent a couple of unproductive afternoons as a child trying to teach my little home computer to make up tunes on its own, but the results stopped well short of Cole Porter), but, just like on the performance end, it is starting to improve. The last demonstration I saw of this, however,  still sounded like a machine trying to be creative, despite the claims of the inventor. I’ll grant that it is many steps superior to what came before, but I still didn’t get the sense that the computer had mastered the finer points of structure; to be fair, a lot of human beings aren’t doing a whole lot better. But suggesting your computer is the next Tchaikovsky is an over-reach, though again, there may be a lot of members of the public who couldn’t tell.

I expect it to take longer for a computer to be able to duplicate intelligent creative work than re-creative work. But some of that depends on the direction our creative philosophy takes us, and much of 20th century creative philosophy has indeed paved the way for machines to make their mark. Who could blame them for seeing their opportunity and capitalizing on it? If art is to be more of a mélange, without an overarching guiding principle, than who says a computer can't randomly generate something that humans themselves are striving mightily to randomly generate?

In the middle of the last century, John Cage and others were divorcing human will from the act of composition. Allowing art to be whatever is around us rather than imposing ourselves on our environment may be a useful--and liberating—idea in lots of ways. And although it has never caught the public fancy, exactly, or rewritten the definition of art except among a minority, these ideas continue to spawn compositions.

One of the composers who works in this area is on the faculty at the University of Illinois. I had a conversation with him in which I asked what sorts of styles young composers were writing in these days. Are they tonal? He said “We don’t encourage this.” If you are out of the loop, the vast majority of the music on mine, or anybody else’s website feels like it has a center, and a series of relationships among the notes: predictable ones, generally. “A-tonality,” which was largely the invention of Arnold Schoenberg in the early 20^th century, flourished around the middle of the century, and then saw hordes of composers return to music ‘in a key.’ There are many—perhaps most—of us for whom it is now atonal music that is the historical cul-de-sac, rather than all of the previous ‘tonal’ music which the disciples of this new way of thinking said was outmoded and, in so much academicese, so ‘over.’

After our conversation I thought I’d read up on some of the interesting computer-involved music he talked about, and I came across a magazine article in which he roundly declared that the very act of predetermining (i.e., planning) a composition was part of the ‘old way’ of doing things. I had to laugh, because it occurred to me that the very act of putting down a phalanx of words in a particular order, making choices about their use and placement, was what allowed him to communicate his ideas in the first place. Why is music to be separate from other forms of communication? (unless perhaps it is not to be viewed so at all).  James Joyce may have stretched grammar and punctuation a bit in some of his work, but I don’t know any novelists who toss coins and put letters on a page accordingly (maybe I just need to get out more).

At any rate, human beings have had to make a lot of adjustments In the last two centuries, and it is hardly considered even proper behavior to lament that the ‘machines are coming’ (except in reactionary sci-fi movies; get with it guys, that’s been done). But every so often we do look back and they seem to be gaining on us. In new and unexpected ways. And at the same time helping us to do things we could never have done without them.

I figure at least part of my gainful employment is secure: as a church musician, I have to make so many adjustments, play in so many styles, make so many quick decisions, that I imagine it will take a while before a computer can do what I do in toto. There’s an organ in town that will record what you play and reproduce it at the touch of a button (and others that will play downloaded midi files which can be purchased like a recording and may or may not have been performed by a human being to begin with). But put everything together that I do and it still takes a human being. So far they aren't making accompanists that can adjust to the soloist, skipped beats, held notes, dynamic changes, and all, though they seem to be working on that one too (and there is some software that will do this to some extent). And just in case you feel like going to a live concert, you will probably want or need a person to play the music. Lip-syncing scandals in the pop world aside, I doubt the New York Philharmonic could get away with playing a recording. I think we could say the same for piano soloists, too. We may not get most of our music live anymore, but we still want to think it originated with a human being. Even when we don't really need one, I think we still want one anyway, right guys?

Right?