The first few pieces which ended up in my first book were written almost twenty years ago, during my initial years of full-time teaching. The job kept me so busy, there was no time left for writing music. Writing snippets for teaching purposes isn’t quite the same as composing. One evening after grading yet another stack of papers, I swept everything aside and just started writing. I remember leaving the office well after midnight, and I had to teach a class early the next day, but I had written an actual piece of music for the first time in a long time. That was the fugue in D Major, in 7/8. It felt so good to write, I made time later to write a Prelude, and then wrote two more sets, in F, in 5/8 and D Minor, in 11/16. I wasn’t thinking about a book of 24 at that time; that idea came about a decade later. I used the initial progression of keys and meters from those three sets to structure the rest of the project. Of course nobody asked me to do any of it. I tend to write out of a simple need to do it.

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Sure, millions of people appreciate Bach’s music, but far fewer are going to dedicate themselves to the hard work it takes to be able to write something similar. Those who have studied enough to really know what they are doing, who might be capable of writing good Preludes and Fugues, are reluctant to take up the challenge for fear of looking ridiculous, mostly because Bach set the bar so high, but there are a lot of excuses not to do it. It’s obviously easier for us to understand a high level message than it is to try to express our own ideas at that same level. To do the latter we have to work hard, and there are no guarantees we’ll succeed.

We might imagine a spectrum, with illiteracy on one end, and authorship on the other, starting out shallow and one-dimensional and becoming multi-dimensional at the deep end. That reflects our experience of learning. I remember as a child, the experience of learning a new word, when all of a sudden I would hear that word being spoken everywhere. I found that fascinating. Obviously nothing changed around me, what changed was my understanding. With each small miracle, what I heard became richer, and I could also express my own ideas more clearly. A similar thing happens in music. If you’re a musical illiterate, you can still comprehend tonal music on some level, but when you learn to hear intervals and chords, your universe will expand — guaranteed! Of course, it’s not just about the material or vocabulary, but about all the techniques and procedures involved in how the music gets put together to tell a story. That’s a limitless universe.

Those who study counterpoint in depth should be able to put into a composition of their own what they have understood from their studies. For a composer, that’s the ultimate test. If Bach’s music represents a language, I’m still speaking a limited dialect, but I’m not done learning, not by a long shot. There is always more to learn.

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There is no formula for that. Sometimes it comes from improvising. Other times I might hear something in a dream, wake up and write it down, or hear something as I’m doing something else, and transcribe that, then work with it. All counterpoint is derivative, in the best sense of being connected to everything that has already been written. I can usually trace what I write to specific pieces by Bach.

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The middle passage of what became the prelude in E in the second book of 24 Prelude and Fugues.

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I could point out where this or that pattern comes from, but that would spoil all the fun! But well, since you’ve asked, the opening figure of that piece is a rising arpeggio which steps up to the sixth. That figure can be found in a lot of music, but in this case it comes from BWV933, the pickup to bar 5 and the following beat. I wanted to expand on the feeling those 8 notes gave me, a glimpse of something that happens fleetingly there that I used as a springboard.

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It’s been very inconsistent. There have been stretches of years where either my time and energy was taken up by other work by necessity, or I consciously chose to focus on other things and wrote nothing. In recent years, I started setting aside one day a week to write. More recently I’ve set aside that time for study (something I’ve done far too little of), with the aim of improving my writing. I would no doubt be a much better composer if I spent more time with it!

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I’ve written music in coffee shops or sitting in trains, but for keyboard music, I find it’s best to work at an instrument, because how the notes feel under the hands (and feet, for organ music) is such an important part of the music. My first book of 24 Prelude and Fugues I wrote most of the music away from the keyboard, which in retrospect was not the best idea, and partly why I revised the book and published a second edition.

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I took undergraduate ear-training and sight-singing classes like any other music student in the U.S., had good teachers who taught good strategies, so I learned how to do these things reasonably well. I wouldn’t say transcription is easy. It’s definitely an acquired skill. Having taught these things myself to many students, it’s also clear that everyone is wired a little differently. For example, if a chorale is played a few times out of sight and the task is to analyse the harmony by ear, it’s more natural for me to just write out all the parts rather than write down a series of chord symbols or functions. That makes sense for someone who writes contrapuntal music.

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Being able to write down what you hear is a skill every composer should obviously have. Memory is a funny thing. Science tells us that we change our memories by recalling them, something like Heisenberg’s principle. My memory probably will rarely be totally accurate in the sense of being able to recall all details, but it’s not bad. I think it’s also clear in general that music strengthens memory.

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Transcription has to be practised to keep it in shape, and I admit I don’t do it that often. The normal test situation would be to listen at least four times, so there are opportunities to focus on individual voices. That would be no problem. The chorales vary quite a bit in length and complexity. For chorales I know well it wouldn’t be a fair test. Whether with enough practise I would be able at some point to transcribe all parts of an unknown chorale on a single listening, I honestly don’t know. Probably for a short one it would be doable. You’ve certainly got me thinking about testing myself!

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I started ”composing” on acoustic guitar at around 15 or 16, before I understood much of anything other than rhythm, playing by ear. I took my first real piano lessons at 18, organ lessons at 19. So, a late start.

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In my late 20’s I was commissioned by the BACH string quartet of Champaign-Urbana to write a score for the silent film, The Phantom of the Opera (1925, with Lon Chaney). It was 90 minutes of music, scored for string quartet and synthesizer, written in about two weeks, rehearsed over a couple of days and performed once, live with the film. It’s sort of a miracle that we were able to pull it off! All extremely exciting and to this day a very fond memory. Writing music for films isn’t really my thing though.

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I started out in music as a drummer, and studied percussion for a decade, beginning at age 12. When I first started discovering Bach at 18 or so, the music seemed to me the best and most advanced harmonically and melodically, similar to jazz in many respects, which I also felt was the most interesting music of our time. I had the idea that the only thing Bach’s music ”needed” to be ”updated” and become more ”modern” was to incorporate odd meters. I didn’t start testing that theory until I was in my 30’s. Teaching gave me the confidence and kick I needed to try it out. The fugue in D, in 7/8, was my first experiment with the idea.

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I mean something that would clearly distinguish a new work from all the old works. Bach didn’t write any music in 7/8, so a piece written in 7/8 can be easily identified, becoming automatically ”modern”. Although, Bach certainly did phrase things in fives and sevens sometimes. My idea was to push those asymmetries further. I found out later that ”fugues” in 5/8 and 7/4 had already been written in 1805 by Anton Reicha (Opus 36). A friend pointed this out to me after I had already finished my first book of Preludes and Fugues. Reicha’s music has very little to do with Bach-style counterpoint, but it’s remarkable that such experiments took place just 55 years after Bach’s passing.

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They are sort of parallel worlds. Jazz incorporates a lot of deliberate dissonance that isn’t expected to resolve, whereas baroque dissonance handling and voice leading are much more careful and exacting. In jazz, enharmonic spellings don’t matter, it’s just whatever works, whereas in counterpoint the spellings must always be correct. Both have shorthand notations for improvised harmony, but Jazz places improvisation clearly at the forefront, whereas improvisation plays a much more restricted role in the baroque style. This could go on and on, those are some key things that come to mind.

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There are those for whom unusual meters aren’t a problem, and others who struggle with them. Of course, I don’t find it to be a problem. For others, it may not feel as natural, but it’s certainly something that can be learned. I’ve worked with composition students to help them get a better sense of unusual meters in their own work. All asymmetrical meters subdivide into groups of 2 (or 4) and 3, which is also true of conventional meters, except that they use only one or the other. So getting comfortable with the unusual meters is just a matter of internalising stress patterns at the level of the subdivision. It can take a while to get the hang of it, but it’s really not that hard.

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The way I experienced music in my youth was primarily through rhythm, as I mentioned. Later when I took ear training courses, my teachers showed me how to transcribe melodies using shorthand notation for the rhythm, which made perfect sense to me. Later, when I started teaching aural skills myself, I used that same rhythmic shorthand in the reverse sense, to compose melodies for the students to transcribe. So for me the connection between a rhythmic pattern and a melody is an easy one since I’ve practised it a lot. I consider focusing on the rhythm first to be an excellent way to begin, but of course I’m a bit biased. The unusual meters are fascinating because they suggest stress patterns and accents which don’t appear in conventional meters, and that leads to new perspectives on melody.

Take 17/16, for example. That isn’t a meter I had worked with at all before deciding to use it. There are a lot of ways to subdivide it, which in turn suggest different kinds of melodies. The Prelude in E in the first book is subdivided 5+5+7 where the stress pattern of each 5 is 3+2 and 7 is 4+3. The longer values automatically have more stress, so just the rhythm alone starts to suggest a melody. The fugue is 8+9 which breaks down into 4+4+3+3+3, which seems like a rhythm in 4/4 with triplet quarter notes in the second half of the bar, but it’s not; it’s one sixteenth note longer. That gives the music something different, an edge, which I find attractive. I try things that seem a bit strange on purpose, because I like figuring out how to make odd things feel more natural. My approach to non-12 tunings has been similar.

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A good subject implies functional harmonic structures and counterpoint against itself, so those things get worked out in the initial stages. It’s normal for an inexperienced composer to use techniques in a systematic sort of way, planning everything out logically. The ideal is to get to a place where there is no formula, where different material suggests different ways of working with itself, where the process of composing becomes following the idea where it leads, using whatever technique is right for the idea. Usually some things in a development are planned, and some are unexpected, but the unexpected things become part of the plan. Improvisation certainly plays a role, but that is really another topic.

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I can improvise convincingly enough, but don’t do it much, and usually wouldn’t want anyone listening. I’m more interested in composition, and better at that. There are people who can improvise incredibly well, and they tend to form their careers around that. It’s a basic difference of disposition and musical goals.

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I meant anything from formal models to melodic transformations and sequential patterns, etc. Books on counterpoint often approach composition in a very formulaic way, for obvious reasons. In a classroom setting, it’s typical to assign projects having strict guidelines, so that there can be well-defined requirements and expectations. Composing in the real world obviously isn’t like that. The goal of classroom teaching is for each student to become competent with basic techniques like imitation, sequence, cadences, etc., understanding how those things can be used in good taste, to ultimately be creative with them.

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Give up. No, I’m kidding. It really depends what you mean by ”beginner”. I sometimes get contacted by people who want to write fugues, but they have no keyboard skills, have never taken ear training, only know basic music theory, etc., so obviously they are not going to be able to write a fugue. I normally offer to help them study music theory (which is prerequisite to counterpoint) and usually they drop it after a couple of weeks. To be able to write counterpoint well takes a long time. Just to get to the point of being a ”beginner” means you have studied harmony, ear training, history, keyboard skills, for at least a year (two or more is much better), and after that, you have also learned all the basic techniques of counterpoint. Fugue is definitely not the first thing anyone learns when studying counterpoint. It’s the ”final project”.

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Writing a piece of music is a kind of storytelling. Figuring out what needs to be planned is a big part of the process. Once some material is there, it’s a matter of deciding when and how things should happen. The form should be logical, but more importantly it needs to be dramatically effective, and not so strict or predetermined as to be a hinderance. That’s often not an easy puzzle to solve. The best compositions have a sense of inevitability about them, and that usually doesn’t come about by happenstance. The tone and the timing of every detail matter, and that requires careful planning. But there is also an important element of trust, of giving up control, to be guided by inspiration. That’s the art of composition.

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It’s never the same, so there is no one answer here, but generally speaking, I don’t tend to hear pieces entirely formed or completely voiced, and the first draft is rarely the same as the final work, though such things do happen occasionally.

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Sketching out a form helps, but I find that writing according to a strict plan tends to give less convincing results. It’s sometimes easy to have the whole piece roughly in mind, as in — here’s a beginning, all these things will happen in the middle, and the end —, but in the specific sense it’s impossible, because the whole piece isn’t there yet. A piece requires the act of composing in order to exist as anything more than an idea, even if it’s sketched out, the concept can change once it’s no longer just a thought. One of the most difficult things for me is to maintain a clear sense of tempo and pacing. I sometimes end up reading through (or playing through) what I’ve written an absurd number of times in order to be able to either position something within the right flow of ideas or to continue the idea with the right pacing. I’m sure writers have to sometimes do similar things with words. It sounds like a bit of a platitude, but a piece should end when all that needs to happen has happened. It’s a judgement call.

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It varies, but I like to work quickly. For the second book, the original idea was for a set of easy pieces in 14 keys, and I set out a challenge for myself, to spend no more than one day on each piece. With a few exceptions I was able to do that. Some time was usually spent afterward touching things up, which usually I didn’t consider substantial enough to note on the date of composition. I normally write that on the first page, including all the days I spent on the piece. It may seem a little ridiculous to do that, as if anyone would care that I spent whatever specific day or days on this piece; it’s just a record intended for myself, so I can keep track of what I’m doing. The first book of Prelude and Fugues was different, in that I didn’t work with any specific time frame, but some of those pieces were also written within a day.

When I’m working on something and I take a break, usually to go outside for a walk or a bike ride, I am definitely composing in my head. Some tricky problems have been solved on those outings. The mind does funny things though, sometimes solving problems at odd moments, even during sleep.

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As little as we understand about the subconscious, it supposedly is controlling most if not all of what we do, so whatever I might think about it is probably wrong. If dreams are a playground for the subconscious, there are times I’ve dreamed entire compositions that are better than anything I’ve ever written in my waking life. I hear all the parts clearly and it sounds perfect. When I wake up, it’s all gone, and I’m just left with the feeling I had in the dream. I’m lucky if I can get that feeling into some music through conscious effort. From that point of view its role seems clear: to access authentic feelings.

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Our brains are naturally wired to be able to interpret sounds as signals for survival, but figuring out how to make pitched sounds in rhythm appears to have been a part of every culture from the beginning of time, so it’s an essential part of our humanity, part of our natural consciousness. When listening, we recognise patterns, repetition and variation, which tease out emotions, memories, expectation and surprise. Music is a sort of invisible dance of proportional movement in time and space, weaving together many threads at once. That’s an elegant complexity, which is attractive to us, and it’s mysterious, a narrative containing secret information, a sort of code our brains naturally want to crack, and we can figure it out on various levels. For example, we figured out that pitch has a logarithmic binary structure; in other words, pitch-space is defined by the number 2. We also figured out how to derive a 12-tone scale from powers of 3. It may seem arbitrary, but it isn’t. The same pattern is directly reflected in our bodies. We have 12 ribs, 7 of which connect with the sternum and 5 of which “float”, and the group of 5 is separated into 3 and 2 — look at a piano keyboard and think about that — it’s not arbitrary and not an accident, it’s a recurring natural pattern. And those relationships and patterns go much deeper. Making music is also athletic, requiring extremely fine and detailed motor control, which makes us more aware, more sensitive physically. It excites practically the whole brain, with emphasis on the good parts. That’s a state of receptivity to potentially higher consciousness. And it’s free, and legal.

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I think it’s a reasonable description. As I mentioned, there are certainly similarities between spoken language and music, in terms of learning and comprehension. When someone writes a story or a novel, it’s usually not too tough to figure out what they might be trying to say, since the emotional orientation of the material is connected to language and meaning, so interpretation involves parsing specific ideas. Instrumental music is much more abstract, so in terms of its content there isn’t much hope for putting your finger on what it might be communicating. Obviously, music just doesn’t work that way. But culturally inherited traditions, style and historical context do say something about the music, how it relates to dance and folk traditions, and how it relates to a certain vocabulary and ways of expressing movement that come from the past, from different regions of the planet, and so on.

In our ”modern” era, serious composition wasn’t supposed to include singable melodies, though during my lifetime that narrow way of thinking has mostly died out. It still exists, especially in Europe. As a result, today, when new music contains memorable melodies and triadic harmonies, that is a way of making a clear statement, and all those connections with the past are a way to parse what a piece of tonal music is getting at.

As for personal emotions, if I don’t have any response to something I’ve written, I consider it a failure and I start over; I have to feel something. Music is storytelling with feelings and connections with the past, and in that way it has a lot in common with religion, and its use in religion makes exactly those connections. Every new piece of music is a dialog with the whole history of music. All music connects with dance, and with the inner life of every listener, with the imagination.

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The ”how” of it I’m not sure I can say anything about, but the connections seem to have to do with how our hearts beat, how we move our bodies, how we experience time in intervals, and so on. It’s common knowledge that certain musical gestures, patterns, intervals, melodic contours, tempi, all tend to be recognised across cultures as representing the same categories of emotions; studies have confirmed that. We also naturally connect music with a time and place, and that results in strong personal feelings.

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As I mentioned, for me composing is a simple need, and I think all creative personalities are probably similar in that respect. So for composers or artists, poets, inventors, whoever it may be — what happens could be described as some sort of chain of events most likely stemming from specific interests or experiences, but that doesn’t answer the question of where it all comes from. You end up tracing it back to something in the past, to the point where the question becomes the same as asking about the origin of life as we know it, or the universe, or anything and everything. We can philosophise all day about that! We don’t know, and science can’t explain it either, and never will. So everything leads back to the ultimate mystery: God. This is why I write S.D.G. my scores, not to mimic Bach because he wrote it, but because it’s what I honestly believe. Music is a gift for everyone. Each of us can do something with it as a way to give back, no matter how weak or flawed an offering that may be.

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Different styles of music can require different aesthetic criteria, but whenever a well-established style exists, like baroque counterpoint, objective evaluations can be made by someone who has learned the style in enough detail. So, in that sense, yes.

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When I play for pleasure, it’s usually at the organ, on a console I built at home. I often begin there with hymns (chorales). I made a similar ”virtual” cembalo, which is my more work-a-day setup. I do focus on Bach, but many other composers from Bach’s era wrote excellent music which is instructive for composition, and that’s mostly what I’m after when I play music: to learn. For that reason, I don’t get much out of playing my own music, though I usually enjoy hearing it. Composers like Sweelinck are wonderful for the sheer pleasure of meantone tuning (and Froberger was an absolute master!), although earlier styles of composition don’t interest me as much, there are certainly many forerunners of Bach worth the effort to get to know, like Kuhnau, who wrote beautiful keyboard partitas, or Pachelbel, who wrote terrific organ music. Lesser-known composers like Friedrich Zachow or Johann Krieger (who’s fantastic Clavierübung from 1680 in some ways prefigures Die Kunst der Fuga), or the better-known group from north Germany like Buxtehude and Böhm — the baroque era was so rich! Bach’s contemporaries of course, Johann Mattheson comes to mind. Bach’s students are also fascinating. My interest wanes to about nothing around Mozart’s era. I’m fond of later piano music, but I’m not a pianist so I can’t really enjoy the greats like Chopin or Brahms as a player, though I certainly appreciate their work. Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto was one of the reasons I chose music as a career, but I don’t play or write that type of music myself; my path has turned out differently. Lately I’ve been getting a lot out of playing the Preludes and Fugues of Stéphane Delplace — three books (!) and also a magnificent book for organ. In my opinion he writes the very best contrapuntal music of our time.

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It’s too bad we won’t ever know! My guess is that he might find many of the questions sort of bizarre, maybe even funny, because being ”a composer” at that time was such a different thing than we think of today. Back then there was a more commonly shared musical worldview. Nobody only focused on writing music at the exclusion of the rest of musical life. They were all active performers first, most often organists who became conductors, ensemble and choir directors. They inherited a culture everyone basically accepted (what we now call the ”common practice”). Composing wasn’t a career option open to just anyone back then, and not something people chose to do, rather it was more like something that chose them, like a mix between the family business and a religious calling. Composing was Bach’s job, but not only that, it defined his lineage, his whole extended family, for generations. He learned to write by copying scores directly, arranging ensemble music for keyboard and organ, rewriting works of other composers. The baroque forms (especially the dance forms) were all basically self-evident, with plenty of examples to work from, and it was standard practice to copy works by hand and make changes in the process. Composers of the day shared their work with each other, copied and rearranged each other’s work. Many passages in Bach’s music can be traced back to the various Italian composers whose works he studied and arranged. Even late in his life, Bach took works from colleagues and reworked them for his own purposes without even giving credit (Stölzel’s arias come to mind). A question like ”where do you get your ideas?” seems a bit funny in that context!

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There are some people in our own time who grow up with instruments in their hands, who learn to play music before they talk or walk. There is an amazing Dutch organist named Sietze de Vries who fits that description, who can improvise contrapuntal music at the organ astoundingly well — I’ve seen him do it live — and he describes what he does in terms of language. He says he is simply speaking in a language he understands intuitively the same way most people understand their mother tongue, and that makes perfect sense. He also has an aversion to written music. Many jazz musicians start out with a similar relationship to music.

I think we can be pretty sure Bach’s early days were something like that, that his experience of music was something self-evident, something that didn’t require a whole lot of conscious effort, like a first language. Obviously what sets successful musicians apart after that are things like opportunity, education, focus, discipline, tenacity, etc. Many unbelievably talented players end up going nowhere because they lack some or all of those things. Bach certainly had all of them, and more. I imagine he could easily hear everything in his head, without effort, because I believe music was his first language. But he clearly had to learn his craft. Considering his early works, it’s clear that he improved by leaps and bounds. In his own words, he didn’t attribute his success to talent; he attributed it to hard work, stating that anyone who worked as hard would do as well. Some read that as a sort of false humility, but I think he meant it literally. And that gives us all hope!

We have to assume from common sense that there were differences between his improvising and his composing. The story goes that he was asked to improvise a six voice fugue on the spot, and is reported to have done so using a short theme of his own, and only later he sat down and worked out the King’s theme in six parts, because writing a fugue in six voices on a long chromatic subject written by someone else is, well, not exactly easy.

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Counterpoint deals with how musical patterns fit together at an elemental level, and the human brain is wired for pattern recognition, so the more clever and elegant the patterns, the more pleasing it can be. But counterpoint alone isn’t nearly enough. Music which bears repeat listening requires much more than counterpoint. That’s the hardest thing about writing music. I can’t claim to have mastered the problem yet, but I do understand the problem pretty well by now. I’m in the process of writing a book about this for my students, which I suppose might also be worth publishing some day.

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I was fortunate to learn computer programming at a young age, which seems commonplace now, but it was rare in the 1980’s. Later in life I made programming part of my livelihood, and I use computers quite a lot now. When the younger me chose music as a career, that motivation came from acoustic instruments, not from synthesizers. I had in fact consciously avoided having anything to do with computer music, because I noticed that the people who do that tended to be separated from the tradition of Western art music. My goal was the opposite. As a young person, I imagined writing for orchestra. My path has turned out a bit differently from that, but my love of acoustic instruments remains. So I see the computer as a tool for writing acoustic music, not computer music. Although I prefer to write music by hand with a pencil, and then put that into notation software, depending on the project I do sometimes compose directly into the software. I also put together my scores using software I wrote for that purpose, so the computer certainly plays an important role in the notation and publishing process.

The computer also works as a substitute for acoustic instruments, since it can reproduce the sounds of real organs, harpsichords, and pianos which I can then play using MIDI, without disturbing the neighbours. I also wrote MIDI Tapper, a piece of software based on Stephen Malinowski’s ‘conductor’ idea (also called Tapper), which lets me perform and record my music much faster than conventional means. MIDI Tapper also includes some tools I’ve written for harmonic analysis of MIDI data based on a complete analysis of Bach’s chorales, though I don’t use those tools for composing.

I also spent many years focusing on microtonal music, an area where technology is extremely useful, so I developed software and hardware for that. That started as a doctoral proposal in the late 90’s, and was worked out during my early years of teaching, when I came up with an expanded microtonal version of Western music theory including instruments. Tonal Plexus keyboards allow unlimited transposable Just Intonation, and the Tuning Box (TBX1, TBX2/b) makes it possible to play microtonal music on standard General MIDI keyboards. Some other ideas, like microtonal wind controllers, exist only as prototypes, but have been demonstrated at conferences. The latest development is the FLASH synthesizer — the world’s smallest MIDI synthesizer, which is 16-part microtonal. All these things obviously wouldn’t exist without computers.

This year I finally finished a project which has been going on sporadically for over twenty years, called The Equal-Tempered Keyboard, a collection of 32 pieces consisting of microtonal Preludes, Fugues, and Inventions in every equal division between 5 and 20 tones per octave. The music is written to be played on a standard keyboard using standard notation, but in scordatura (so no microtonal accidentals are used). Along with the music, in the book there are detailed instructions on how to set up an instrument, with tables of frequencies and so on. The most likely performance solution would be a keyboard connected to a computer. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, will play that music! I will be recording all of it myself.

My latest project, which has occupied me for the whole of this past year (2021), has been a study of Bach’s continuo arias, where I wrote imaginary obligato parts into Bach’s scores, the intent being that the new line should sound like it belongs there. That was all done at the computer, transcribing scores from the Bach Gesellschaft and sometimes the Neue Bach Ausgabe, composing directly into notation software, then using recordings of the cantatas, mostly from Gardiner, but also Herreweghe, Suzuki, and others, along with MIDI Tapper and Hauptwerk to make score read-along videos for YouTube.

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Sure. That word ”microtone” still sometimes gets misunderstood, so we might use other words like ”non-standard tunings” or ”pitches outside the expected twelve-tone scale”. This is a huge and important topic, at the heart of what music is, and what it potentially could or can be. I got into this in my 20’s, out of curiosity, after I had learned basically how our modern Western system works. After digging out a lot of theory books from the ancient Greeks to modern microtonal experimental notations, it became clear to me that the beginnings of music theory are in fact microtonal, and that pitch has not only been central in Western music history, but remains a central musical frontier today. That should be an inspiring realisation for all musicians, and it certainly was for the younger me. It also put a fine point on the personal choice I had made to compose acoustic music and avoid electronic music, since it exposed a gap between traditional instruments and modern technology which holds back Western music from its full potential. That was more or less the start, which led me to a lot of thinking over the following years. I worked as a pipe organ tuner for a while, which certainly sharpened my pitch perception, and I also did some piano tuning. At some point I had gathered enough experience and had thought long enough about it all that I started putting together theoretical and practical angles.

It seemed obvious to me that, from the beginning, Western music has presented a problem that has needed to be solved in order for its potential to be realised. Microtonal pitch space seems to be infinite. If you can’t name all those non-standard pitches and intervals, you don’t have a system. That doesn’t fit in with what we learn as trained musicians. All previous modern attempts at microtonal music have basically failed, because nobody has ever tried to actually solve that problem; instead, they tried to work around limitations, or break away from the system, both of which are understandable. Anyone can use scordatura, or non-standard accidentals, or write special instructions in the music, and so on, to get some microtones performed. Or anyone can make new instruments that don’t correspond to the Western system to play music with other pitches. That’s all fine and good and practical, but it doesn’t ultimately solve the problem.

Obviously, this is a hard problem to solve, because Western music is a highly developed cultural system, an interdependent structure of theory, notation, instruments, and performers. We might call composition the ”crown” of this system, and education its ”bedrock”. Trying to adjust only one aspect of such a complex structure isn’t enough. Progress comes only when all aspects are addressed together, systematically. Even if you manage to do that, if you choose some limited system like 31 or 72 tones, it’s still not solving the problem. A key part of the solution turns out to be research in psychoacoustics and visual perception. This is what led me to a system for all possible pitches and intervals, based on the average limits of human perception. The instruments and notation follow from that.

Sparing the details, suffice it to say that this deepest problem in music history actually has a proposed modern solution: a complete theory and notation, with instruments. Of course, it’s up to composers, performers and educators to put such a thing into practice, but the system can be readily understood and easily taught by anyone who has learned the traditional system. Very few people are aware of this, though it’s been published online for almost two decades now. A book remains unfinished; it seemed unnecessary to me after it became possible to simply share online. Nevertheless, I’ve given plenty of lectures about this in the US, UK and Europe, and have also written an article about it (Tonal Plexus: Regent for the Future of Music).

I think it’s interesting that people who know about my books of Preludes and Fugues tend not to know about my work in this area, and vice versa. The ETK might be able to do something to counter that, since it brings both worlds together, showing that they are not really separate at all.

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It changed everything about my perception of music and became central to my musical worldview. Since that happened quite a long time ago for me, around the end of my student career, the way I compose developed in parallel with my understanding of music as something fundamentally microtonal. I focused on the problem intensely for about a decade. In the preface to the ETK, I try to shed some light on how all that relates to counterpoint. 12ET and 6ET are part of the collection, deliberately placing standard tuning in a microtonal context. Maybe the music can be more illuminating than my trying to talk about it.

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I’m against using computers to generate counterpoint through Artificial Intelligence or whatever algorithmic means. I used to use MIDI playback from notation programs to preview and critique what I wrote, but stopped doing that when I discovered Tapper. I prefer to treat notation software like paper, where the mouse is like a pencil, and I turn off the MIDI playback. If I need to hear something, I play it myself. After I’ve written a draft and input the notes into the software, I’ll usually use MIDI Tapper to perform it at tempo, and that does help me evaluate and improve my work.

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Experiments have been done along these lines for quite some time now, and the results remain underwhelming. I think with enough human guidance, a computer can ”learn” to solve specific problems in counterpoint. So we could give a bass line to a computer and ask it to write counterpoint against that line. Software already exists which does that. But what we see with these kinds of experiments is that the output isn’t ”reliably satisfying”. It’s sometimes sort of convincing, but usually not. Four part chorales written by computers are generally abominable, only occasionally accidentally acceptable. A competent person can do it much better, no question.

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It depends what’s being asked here. If the question is just about writing one line of counterpoint against a given line, that is a relatively simple task which can be reduced to something like a chess game, so computers should be able to compete there with humans, though it’s unlikely a computer would do it better. Certainly if imagination is called for, the human wins automatically.

The way I think most people would interpret this question is, whether computers will be able to write contrapuntal music — that is, actually compose convincing pieces of real music out of nothing — better than human beings. I think there is a clear answer there, since musical quality does not boil down to the problem-solving aspects of counterpoint. The idea assumes that all contextual aspects of all possible compositions can be defined, the way all possible moves on a chessboard can be calculated, but obviously it’s not the same kind of problem. What we know so far is that computers can ”learn” to ”understand” music as an amalgamation of patterns, and, not surprisingly, output generated by that kind of limited non-understanding sounds objectively worse than what a competent human composer can write. I think the value in such experiments lies in what we as human beings learn from how badly the computer fails. That teaches us something more about what it is that makes us human.

I do understand the interest in the challenges of writing computer programs to do these kinds of things, from the point of view of the challenge, for the fun of it, as a test, or a kind of game. But music isn’t just some sort of game with notes. AI is supposed to ”improve itself” on its own, but we don’t see that happening in real models, not by human standards of improvement. To give a machine a context to ”understand” anything it’s doing and be able to ”improve” itself is a logical spiral leading ultimately to the requirement that we reproduce the entirety of humanity in the machine, which simply isn’t possible. There are those who think it is, of course, who imagine a future of conscious computers experiencing creative inspiration and writing music like people do. That’s a nice idea for science fiction.

Whether it would be a good or bad thing — obviously I think computers won’t ever become real composers of contrapuntal music, but even if they could, they shouldn’t, because it makes no sense to remove the human soul. It’s a question of humanity. People are fond of saying that Bach’s music is technically perfect, but looking deeply into his work, we find out why that isn’t what makes his music so compelling. The human soul has a defining characteristic, namely that it is imperfect, and that’s precisely what makes it worthy, what gives purpose to its ability to understand and learn and improve, to respond through creativity, to feel emotions, desires, pain and loss, to struggle to find purpose and meaning, to reckon with death and eternity — those are the kinds of things that get put into the best music!

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