Music Plagiarism

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Did it cross the line from inspiration to simple plagiarism? All the musical elements are borrowed/stolen with some rearrangement. 

Machine Learning Systems in Concert

My partner in crime (Dr. Bob Sturm) and I recently hosted a concert of music co-created with computers. The concert ended with the first performance of my piece Bastard Tunes:

Read about the composition process of this piece and about the research that went into creating the system.

'Folk' Tune 'Arrangements'

Standing on the shoulders of giants such as Bartok or Berio, I recently finished writing an ensemble piece titled Bastard Tunes. The piece was composed with the help of a machine learning system trained on transcriptions of Celtic music. The system produces short melodies that share many characteristics with the style it learned. But, with the possible exception of the fourth Bastard Tune, my piece applies more freedom in the way the system's output is used as compositional material. The piece will be premiered in a concert with other examples of music composed by and with computers.

Purcell What power art thou

The chromatic motion is in the vocal line combined with the pulse to a unique result:

Minimal music

But a totally different kind of minimal:

(Thanks to EnsembleXY for introducing me to this piece)

Bartok - Bagatelles Op. 6

These short piano pieces are wonderful sources for examining innovative harmony (and rhythm, and composition technique, and ...)

Leoš Janáček

An innovative composer of music that often sounds deceptively simple:

He found inspiration in the intonations of this native Czech language by notating speech fragments he heard as melodies.

Scriabin

Russian composer Scriabin in a jazzy(!?) mood  - the 2nd of his op. 57 pieces (composed in 1908).
The Preludes op. 74 are more typical of his style and sound world:

And a score + annotation (scroll down) of the harmony underlying these piece.

Threnody - Penderecki

An animated score of a seminal work of the 20th century:

Humour

Playing with some familiar music

Gesualdo

Some of the most extraordinary music we have with dramatic harmonic shifts:

His life was also rather strange and dramatic.

Ravel - Repetition

Ravel's famous Bolero (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra)

Berio

One of the foremost composers of the 20th century. Some recordings available on ubuweb. His folk songs are more then arrangements (and here is Voci a later piece which he subtitled folksongs 2). The series of sequenzas (e.g. viola, guitar) for solo instruments are a fantastic way to learn more about the instruments and imaginative ways to write for them. Coro integrates voices into the orchestra. His Sinfonia, particularly the 3rd movement, was discussed extensively. 

Automatic composition

In the words of the author:

"Autocousmatic generates electroacoustic music intended for acousmatic presentation. Based only on a seed directory of source sound files, a desired duration and number of output channels, the program creates multi-channel spectromorphological tape pieces. Audio analysis capabilities are used to discover 'useful' portions of sound files and assess processed files. The project investigates a deeper relation from machine listening to algorithmic composition tasks, and welcomes feedback."

Listen to some of the examples on the website and judge for yourself. And you can read Nick's CMJ article about the system.

Russolo - Noise music

The new instruments designed and built by Russolo -  intonarumori:

And you can hear how they probably sounded. Futurists also used noise machines in combination with other instruments: Macchina Tipografica

film music - learning from the masters

It pays to study the music of the past (only ca. 40 years but that counts as distant past in this era):

Bulgarian choral music

Interesting harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic practice growing out of traditional Bulgarian folk Music. Both video and audio sections (for example listen to excerpts from POLEGNALA E TUDORA PILENTSE PEE or VESELI TRANSKI PESNI the later includes an instrumental section). Also some videos:

Maryanne Amacher

Interesting talk about her sound art and how technology and listening shaped her work:

Percussion Music

• Luigi Nono's composition for percussion and live electronics:
• Edgar Varese Ionisation. And an article about the piece: Jean-François Charles - Organization of Scattered Timbral Qualities: A Look at Edgard Varèse's Ionisation.
• Graham Fitkin Hook.

Paul Lansky

American composer Paul Lansky has been involved with electronic music since the 70s. His piece Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion uses a processing technique called linear predictive coding (LPC) to transform a recorded voice. He is using a single reading of the poem to generate 6 'versions' of the poem. Three of those are available on his website (compare, for instance,  'Her Reflection' with 'Her Song').  Notjustmoreidelchatter is another voice based piece. You can read more about Lansky, with detailed examination of several of his compositions.