@jasen - Thanks for the kind words.
@civilisation 3
Thank you for making my points in your own words (and not knowing it of course)... The saxophonist that will provide the solo SHOULD receive a credit somewhere on your CD - Sax solo by So&SO, which would be your acknowledgment that HE wrote/improvised that part and it was not your music. It was his melodies following the harmonies/rhythms that you provided. I can't believe you're considering NOT giving credit to that player - actually, I can... But that is not what I said. I am not referring to a short section of a whole piece (like where that sax solo would fit), but to this endless cloned aural diarrhoea that has become indistinguishable from soundtrack to soundtrack, and from composer's website to composer's website these days, because the basic musical building blocks have been the same; downloaded, and then cut and pasted from one part of the computer screen to the other... Hmmm, great artistry...
MIDI a drum roll? Of course not; you'd get it from the library presets, BUT, I said that you'd have to be able to MIDI, OR notate the music in order to be considered yours. If you can't notate a drum roll, we have even less to talk about than I thought. There's more: Is it a snare drum roll? Is it a tympani drum roll? In this case you must specify pitch. Soft, medium, or hard sticks? Does it start or end on an accented note? Etc. etc. Basically the more you define, the more the music is yours, the less you define, the more it is NOT your music and it is a COLLABORATION based on some ground rules and ideas that you provide, but still a collaboration. I mean WAKE UP people!!!! Would you consider me the writer of a script if I hired someone ELSE and instructed him - "I want a seduction scene here, it takes place in a bedroom of a hotel, between Paul and Mary (see I'm giving the names of the characters...), they're in their early-20s, and they're university class-mates, and she succumbs at the end of it. Now YOU sit down, and write the 2-pages-long dialogue..." Would this be considered my work because I provided the idea and the setting?....... Or I could give the same instructions to two actors. That would be called IMPROVISATION on their part, and I would not get credit for writing the scene. In music, we really have con-fused everything these days...
Also, how many times do I have to say that I differentiate between the absolutely generic presets that VSL provides, and the index-finger-symphonic-chord or index-finger-section-chord/rhythm that cripples/incompetents-targeting software companies provide? You yourself say that software like Animato furnishes you with ideas you would not have thought of. Well, where do I say something different? I bet that if in the future there is software that can write the piece for you (but for which you will be providing "important" aspects like the key of the composition, tempi, notation-font, title...), you would buy it, and proudly put your name as the composer at the top. I am talking about you after all and if you look closely at what you say, you don't contradict anything but my classification of you (and similar others) with the term 'musical cripples'. I stand by that nomenclature and there's not ONE composer I respect that ever worked in the manner you describe. - No, I don't respect Cage as a composer, and as far as the aleatoric passages in some Lutoslawcki, Penderecki, and Ligeti works are concerned: a) They specifically wanted "random" in those sections, but they could notate one version of those passages (i.e. they had the knowledge), and b) those passages form secondary musical material (in most cases), not the basis of the main composition. In Threnody for example random forms the main idea, but that was the most accomplished way to notate the score to get those desired results.
And where is the reductio ad absurdum you furnish me with proven? And what do you mean when you say that what I say is only my opinion?.. As opposed to whose?... Of course I speak for myself - maybe you don't - and my opinions and aphorisms are out there in the open for acceptance or criticism. However, as you proved in that other thread, you don't know how to argue, you're just a reactionary, and an IGNORANT one at that when a) you called the melodies of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Bizet, etc. "paltry" (your word) compared to the melodies you admire (but no examples were given for comparison), b) when you elevated the musicianship of a street performer above that of Bruckner (and I'm sure over everybody else in the history of western music before 1950), c) when you referred to musicians such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, as my 'straw' men, etc. There are other instances in which you displayed the "breadth" of your musical horizon, but what you said in this last post of yours speaks volumes anyway, so I won't say more.
Because of this thread, and where I see musical creation heading, I decided to sport that motto of mine as my signature from now on, maybe some people will wake up to themselves...