> Whereas with music there are centuries-old pieces that
> are still perfectly usable and probably better than
> what a composer would produce as a replacement.
As I see it, reverence for traditional composers comes from the culture where more people read than write. Other factors too - humans bond through sharing of specific tunes, and copyright makes manuscript artificially expensive and sparse.
Good composition is engineering.
When you study grades for composition or improvisation or kodaly teaching, you are taught systems by which you can write music. And you are taught to look out for ways to find new systems for yourself.
This surprised me. Up until then my mental model was that all art was subjective. But in western music, if you're doing something weird you're in trouble. Particularly in an exam.
Once you're trained in the art, you can hammer out good pieces on demand. Sophisticated pieces take time, as with coding.
By way of example, Kodaly would write exercise problems for his students on-demand, just to demonstrate a point during a lesson. He'd sit down for two minutes and scratch out a new piece, which they'd them perform. Faster than having to find an example in something that's in your existing library. Some of these exercises have lived on. This isn't evidence of genius. Rather, he was an engineer of the John Carmack school. Someone focused on an outcome, dismissive of the "don't reinvent the wheel" crowd. He had a need, he followed a system, a neat minimal piece was born. He considered it throw-away code.
We'll never know, but Mozart Coronation Mass shows signs of aggressive corner-cutting to get a product out the door. He reuses a lot of ideas across movements, he reuses an idea from one of his operas for one of the features. And - because it's a mass - he got his structure and words for free. It's good music, but we shouldn't put it on a pedestal.
> This is backwards. Languages without (or with limited)
> type systems are very hard to read, because you have a
> lot less reliable information about what's going on.
In the hypothetical I describe, it would be the author's responsibility to make it clear with the restricted tools they have available. Code would truly be written for the reader.
Good composition is engineering.
When you study grades for composition or improvisation or kodaly teaching, you are taught systems by which you can write music. And you are taught to look out for ways to find new systems for yourself.
This surprised me. Up until then my mental model was that all art was subjective. But in western music, if you're doing something weird you're in trouble. Particularly in an exam.
Once you're trained in the art, you can hammer out good pieces on demand. Sophisticated pieces take time, as with coding.
By way of example, Kodaly would write exercise problems for his students on-demand, just to demonstrate a point during a lesson. He'd sit down for two minutes and scratch out a new piece, which they'd them perform. Faster than having to find an example in something that's in your existing library. Some of these exercises have lived on. This isn't evidence of genius. Rather, he was an engineer of the John Carmack school. Someone focused on an outcome, dismissive of the "don't reinvent the wheel" crowd. He had a need, he followed a system, a neat minimal piece was born. He considered it throw-away code.
We'll never know, but Mozart Coronation Mass shows signs of aggressive corner-cutting to get a product out the door. He reuses a lot of ideas across movements, he reuses an idea from one of his operas for one of the features. And - because it's a mass - he got his structure and words for free. It's good music, but we shouldn't put it on a pedestal.
In the hypothetical I describe, it would be the author's responsibility to make it clear with the restricted tools they have available. Code would truly be written for the reader.