Pieces of TUNING digest 805

>The copy that arrived here truncated with Eric's initial posting.
>This means that we all missed another exciting Brian rant. Actually,
>we also missed Steve Curtin's comments on what's meant by "experimental"
>music - which is what I was interested in. Anyone know what went wrong?

Actually it was more of a historical perspective- here it is again. My
apologies if it's a repeat for some people. I studied composition and
computer music at Illinois from 1984-1986.

>Exactly what is an experimental composer?
>Which hypothesis does the experimental composer
>conduct an experiment to test? What is the
>experimental control?

One composer who described his work as "experimental" and who may have been
one of the first to think of his music as such is Lejaren Hiller, author of
the "Illiac Suite" and later "HPSCHD", a collaboration with John Cage that
featured many different superimposed N tones per octave tunings. To this
day the studios at the University of Illnois Champaign-Urbana are referred
to as the "Experimental Music Studios". Hiller's background was in
Chemistry, and for a time he had a joint appointment there in Chemistry and
Music. For Hiller his experiment was if he could compose a piece of music
using the computer. Aesthetic issues about whether the music was
appreciated by the audience were sometimes considered to be outside the
bounds of the experiment.

regards,

Steve Curtin
Ensoniq Corp




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