I have just received an email inviting me to buy Steinberg’s latest offer to, ‘compose with the emotional power of a world class cellist’.
Cellists, world class or otherwise, do not necessarily compose music at all…but even if they do, sampling and looping what they have done does not amount to composing music yourself - it is at best a form of musical collage.
The offer goes on to claim to, 'evoke emotions, spark creativity, and accelerate your composition process’.
It does the opposite - it sidelines the composition process altogether, and is presumably aimed at people who cannot distinguish between the creative process and playing with lego.
So you’re saying if someone uses a sampled instrument to compose some music, that composition is artistically invalid because it wasn’t created using a real instrument?
I am saying that someone who uses pre-composed lines of music is co-composing.
Using the single notes of a sampled instrument to compose or preview your own original compositions isn’t the same as cutting/looping/editing bits of music pre-composed by someone else even if you subsequently add to it: that is sound collage.
A novelist uses individual words to compose sentences. No-one would write a novel using random starter sentences written by someone else. If they did that person would be a co-writer.
I am only surprised that the people who provide starter lines for others to use seem happy enough to take no credit or copyright for co-composing the finished product.
In the case of a legally sold sound library with its own copyright, but which doesn’t mention the names of the performers or composers, it must be assumed that the library’s creator made agreements with the contributors or creators, so they were likely compensated for their work.
As the buyer, I have the right to use it. At best, I can specify that the melodies or other parts of the pieces were created using the library’s content.
I see it this way: if I compose a melody by cutting, pasting, and arranging the loops offered in this library, which can produce a realistic sound because it originates from a real performance, ultimately it’s not very different from a melody written on paper and given to a musician who is paid to perform it during a recording.
However, the musician will be credited for their performance, which is not the case for the collage. Nevertheless, if the library mentions the names of the participants and creators, it would only be fair of the user to do so, but this does not detract from the creative process of the library user or the resulting artwork.
Melody (Groves Dictionary of Music): A series of musical notes arranged in succession, in a particular rhythmic pattern, to form a recognisable unit.
To say, ‘if I compose a melody by cutting, pasting, and arranging loops’, is therefore a category error because a loop has already been composed and already contains melody and/or harmony and/or percussion and/or sound effects.
A note is the equivalent of a word and a melody is the equivalent of a sentence.
No writer would claim that by cutting and pasting random sentences written by someone else from a database they are in any meaningful sense writing (composing) new sentences.
A writer starts with individual words and a composer starts with individual notes. Bowdlerised plagiarism is still plagiarism and unoriginal, even if the originator is OK about it.
Incorporating traditional folk melodies (or any other music) into an orchestral score requires significant skill in composition, analysis, harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and arrangement.
Copying and pasting loops does not. Ten-year-olds with a rudimentary DAW and no musical knowledge or skill at all, can do it: it is the artistic equivalent of painting by numbers and does not make them Ravel or Holst or Vaughan Williams.
No child painting by numbers in their colouring book would ever be compared to Van Gogh or Picasso.
You may find more like minded “composers” over at vi-control.
In this community, most of us prefer to be more inclusive, tolerant and respectful of different relationships and approaches to music making and the resulting wide variety of music makers.
John Cage described himself as a composer and is described that way by everyone else. His aleatory compositions incorporated elements of chance in allowing performers to choose which bits to play and in what order.
Cage had written all the bits for the performers to choose from himself and was acknowledged as the composer: the performers were anonymous and interchangeable – the opposite of how loops are used today where the producers of the loops are anonymous and interchangeable and the end user is regarded as the composer.
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As I said, if I had seen the term ‘music making’ in the cello loop promotion I wouldn’t have commented because I don’t use that term and was just about to ask for a definition of the distinction between music making and composition myself.
I was only quoting and responding to Nico5 who used it. It is a bit unfair to ask someone who does not use a term to define it. Maybe ask Nico5?
I didn’t mention John Cage until someone else did, and I haven’t mentioned aesthetics at all.
The I-Ching is a book of divination used to interpret the meaning of random events. It was written about 3000 years ago so we can be reasonably sure that John Cage didn’t write it.
He composed by tossing three coins six times and used the I-Ching to interpret the outcome to choose which bits should be taken from charts that he had constructed containing pitches, durations, silences, dynamics etc. and sound-aggregations of all of these. This became his randomly generated composition, which was inevitably different every time.
It is fantastically more elaborate than that brief summary and far too boring to go into here, but suffice to say it is nothing like how loops are made or used.
Incidentally, the Chinese never used the I-Ching like this.
Martin, you seem to dislike loops and the people who use them. Honestly, you don’t have to be interested in them.
Just move on and continue doing what interests you, and let others do what interests them. That way, everyone is happy.
Leave philosophical concerns about good and evil to the preachers and just make the music that interests you. If loops aren’t part of that, there’s no problem with that.
I don’t know if you realize it, but you’re saving a lot of money by not investing in this type of library. On the other hand, don’t judge those who are interested by bringing up plagiarism.
Everyone finds their own way to use them, and no one has the right to judge that. If there were plagiarism, the people involved would speak up.
For folks unfamiliar with the piece it consists of 3 silent movements with a total length of 4 minutes and 33 seconds. However it always takes longer than that to perform because of the time between movements. Cage was partially inspired to create it after a session in a sensory deprivation tank. He’d expected to experience silence, but ended up hearing a roaring sound. When he later asked about this sound he was told it was the sound of his blood flowing in his ears.
4’33” premiered in Woodstock NY (the town not the festival location) and caused a big stir. One local was quoted after the performance ended, “Good people of Woodstock, lets drive these people out of town” - a pretty tough review (The Roaring Silence by David Revill).
And just ‘cause I have it, this is where John Cage briefly lived in San Francisco (the recessed house). The building no longer exists. He also lived next door to John & Yoko in NYC and introduced them to a macrobiotic diet.
