I love posting comments to websites like yours; this is one that I’ll bookmark for future visits. I’ll be looking for some creative future content, and I’ll pass you along to friends and others!…

Your comments on recitative reminds me of Glenn Gould’s recording of some Bach piecies, it may have been the Goldberg Variations. In the recording studio he played around with different phrasings, producing many takes. When the session was done he noticed that two of the takes were very close to the same time but used strikingly different phrasings. The final ‘recording’ was alternating the phrase from each recording, back and forth, producing a work that had actually never been performed.

This isn’t the same as complementing the voice overtones with ‘the harmonic structure of the thematic music,’ but it illustrates the use of technology to produce a work of art that is totally unique. And in this case, perhaps physically impossible.

Again, thank you for your fascinating comment.

The paper started out with set theory (math) and signal and data processing (electronics & computers), and then related this to notions of signification, representation, revelation, expression. By the end of the paper I predicted that within a number of years, man would be able to produce, by electronic and computerized means, visual and sonic compositions that could (optionally) be indistinguishable from sounds created by real musical instruments and photographs of real objects or environments.

The artist would have a palette which included simulations of “reality” and other alternatives equally convincing but unrelated to any ‘real world” material we could create at that time.
For this, I got a C+ and the comment of the professor was that he didn’t know what I was talking about but he hoped that I did.

Likewise, for a music paper about the recitative in opera, I wrote about the analysis of voice electronically and re-synthesis of accompaniment according to the coincidence between voice overtones and melodic and harmonic structure of the thematic music. That one got a B+ but the same comment: “didn’t know what it had to do with the recitative in opera but hoped i did”.

OK, I was in a strange position, trying for an interdisciplinary degree in electronics and humanities, with a music major, the first in my school to get away with it (barely).

Now that all of this vision has not only come to pass, but is available at a commodity level, how much really great art and music is coming out? And if there is any, where’s the audience?

In the old days (1960’s-70-s) the motto was “Art is anything you can get away with.” How many Rembrandts will that produce?

And if you have kids you can see on TV or HD-DVD all the fruits of what could be art forms of unsurpassed quality of expression and sensitivity, but it’s all dumbed down and tweaked up. My dreams of the future come true, but turned inside out through the looking glass of today’s culture shaped more than anything else by the Gaussian bell curve (what the MOST people will watch or listen to or buy).

Congratulations to you you for trying and succeeding in making great art with reality as your inspiration and all the tools that can help express your inner appreciation of it. That’s my dream come true, artists being able to express great art using “whatever they can get away with”, the right way.