Song title: Doctorin’ The Tardis
Book: The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way

Guido:

“There was a huge change in the early 60s which found an echo in the punk/new wave era of the late 70s but I couldnt discern any new impetus after that (maybe I am just becoming old)”

Well, you’d know better than I how age is affecting you, but one thing that’s struck me is how in the 60s, 70s and 80s some of the most experimental and original stuff was in the charts. The record companies were leading with the real ground-breakers (in many cases), whereas now the combination of video-killed-the-radio-star and lazy play-it-safe major labels means that the charts are full of almost 100% pap. Types of music that I like (which is basically everything but trance), but the shittest, tamest examples from each genre.

Shorter me – there is still plenty of new, new-sounding music out there, but the industry is structured to prevent yo hearing it. I think of it as a classic case of homogenisation caused by overreaching for a poorly-understood global market. Instead of, y’know… doing some marketing.

There has been a lot of argument about this over the years, so much so that databases (eg. the phone book) were not originally copyrightable and Australia introduced new legislation to protect database collators such as Yellow Pages.

What confuses people on this issue is that a *performance* is separately copyrightable, so that the Righteous Brothers (for example) can protect their performance (and recording) of Unchained Melody.

Samplers don’t so much lift the music as the performance (in fact, they often steal such small portions that even the melody is lost) and that’s what gets them into trouble with copyright law.

Bass lines are similar (or at least many are) and in the 1980′s the KDF used this “loophole” to steal a bass line as the main riff for their Tardis/Dr. Who song (can’t remember the title, but they wrote a great little book about it)

But this is what most of the people subscribing to concert series like. I remember when I had the time and the money to subscribe to concert series, that when avant-guard pieces were played by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra it was greeted with unenthusiastic muted applause. I think that the MSO as other orchestra have tried to offer contemporary music series with limited success.

In regards to popular/rock music there must have been some point in the early 80′s when originality stopped. There was a huge change in the early 60′s which found an echo in the punk/new wave era of the late 70′s but I couldn’t discern any new impetus after that (maybe I am just becoming old). Lots of recycling and lots of sampling. You get bands like Jet which sound almost exactly like the 70′s bands I grew up with.

There was a band in the 80′s called ‘pop will eat itself’. Maybe that is the case.

What FDB said is most correct. I was listening to a CD in a car the other day and did a bit of mental deconstructing of the various riffs that made up a tune. The riffs by themselves variations of quite common ones found in a lot of rock songs. But with a bit of rhythmic variation, a few melodic twists and careful placement in the song, it did not sound derivative.

And sampling can be very creative. “Paul’s Boutique” by the Beastie Boys is just stunning. It can be a lazy producer’s way out but in the right hands there is a lot of art in combining beats and sounds to provide a backing for a new tune.

Only the most trivial of artists ever think theyre inventing something new.

Not bad, Laura. I had to check that it wasn’t a Wilde aphorism.

Original music can help strengthen the impression that the music comes from the heart. When the singer’s voice rasps or cracks, the roughness is a sign that they are overcome with emotion.

People seem to be able to form intense emotional bonds with others who they have never met. I still remember when Princess Dianna died. People who’d only ever read about her in magazines and seen her on TV broke down and cried. Imagine what would happen if she was discovered in some small central American country and it turned out she’d staged her death for the media.

This may, or may not, explain why for the rest of his life Sculthorpe appears to have returned repeatedly, if not obsessively, to a few small fragments of melody.

I’m not sure what the point of Mills experiment was. All music has limitations, sure; it’s limited by musical scale, by the amount of instruments involved, and so on. But there’s no real reason why a melody can’t go on and on forever, like an endlessly extended Wagnerian leitmotif, being repeated, and meditated on, and enriched. As in, for instance, the Tristan and Isolde overture.

The man’s a writer. Did he invent all those words?

That said, Lewis’s basic complaint (that supposed musical creativity actually consists of rearranging lots of individual pre-existing parts) can be answered by the argument that a musical composition, like many other composite entities in culture and nature, possesses emergent properties (i.e. it’s more than the sum of the parts) and that there is genuine creativity involved in putting the parts together in a way which optimises those emergent properties.

On the other hand, John Stuart Mill is said to have fallen into a deep and prolonged depression after determining mathematically that the number of melodies which can possibly be composed is not infinite. The question is whether we’ve exhausted all the melodic possibilities yet.