Open Music

The Melbourne Festival of Organ and Harpsichord (MIFOH) and its successors ran from 1971 to 2010 under various other names. MIFOH is used as shorthand term covering the whole period including the names: Melbourne Autumn Festival of Organ and Harpsichord, Melbourne Autumn Festival and finally Spring Autumn Early Music Festival. It hosted ~1000 different performers at all stages of their careers. It fulfilled for many a complete arc from enabling students to perform and attend master classes with major international figures in a collegiate mode to becoming the pre- eminent Australian early music festival.
The present thesis is both an examination of this largely lost legacy to musical Melbourne and Australia, and also a work of eScholarship on the substantial physical and digital music lost prior to this work. It covers the requirements for the creation of a digital archive to house the material recovered from magnetic media from the 1970’s onwards, and the recovery of analog media. There are substantial Intellectual Property barriers to assembling such large collections of original historic performances, if they are to become accessible through an Open Music Repository. This task is complicated by almost all now being classified as Orphan Works. The evolution of MIFOH matched the evolution of the absorption and professionalization of early music in Melbourne, and to further a critical mass of performers who went on to teach new generations.
Organ and Harpsichord, choral and modern composition, and early music all benefited. MIFOH and its successors contributed forty years of performance and teaching to Melbourne and left a major legacy to many people. It is surprising that such a large body of work had slipped almost out of visibility. This research has delivered an overall perspective and the supporting materials to enable this long running substantial Festival to be seen in a clearer light (Wigan 2017). It covers the contributions it made, and also addresses the repository and analog to digital recovery aspects now required to fully realise its musical legacy for the community at large. The substantial Appendices provide a basis for future scholars and interested parties that simply did not exist previously. Social network explorations are now possible. Large scale digital recovery - already ~83Gb - from original recording media is now possible, to create a major Music Repository. This will require the issues identified on music metadata, Intellectual Property, clearance and access requirements to be integrated into a fresh and living repository archive for musical works.

Music interactivity is a sub-field of human-computer interaction studies. Interactive situations have different degree of structural openness and musical “ludicity” or playfulness. Discussing music seems inherently impossible since it is essentially a non-verbal activity. Music can produce an understanding (or at least prepare for an understanding) of creativity that is of an order neither verbal nor written. A human listener might perceive beauty to be of this kind in a particular music. But can machine-generated music be considered creative and if so, wherein lies the creativity? What are the conceptual limits of notions such as instrument, computer and machine? A work of interactive music might be more pertinently described by the processes involved than by one or several instanciations. While humans spontaneously deal with multiple process descriptions (verbal, visual, kinetic…) and are very good at synthesising, the computer is limited to handling processes describable in a formal language such as computer code. But if the code can be considered a score, does it not make a musician out of the computer? As tools for creative stimulus, composers have created musical systems employing artificial intelligence in different forms since the dawn of computer music. A large part of music interactivity research concerns interface design, which involves ergonomics and traditional instrument maker concepts. I will show examples of how I work with interactivity in my compositions, from straight-forward applications as composition tools to more complex artistic work.

This paper describes FDSDB_XXth_CT, an algorithmic composition library, for PWGL and Open Music , devoted to some of XXth Century composition techniques. It can
be freely downloaded at the following web page: https://sites.google.com/site/fdsdbmascagni/code. After a general review, necessarily not exhaustive, about the
type of libraries at disposal for PWGL and Open Music, we move on to describe the process of realization that has led to the creation of the library, consequential to
composition and analysis practice, and resulting by a work extended over the years, and still in progress. Afterwards the library structure is described in summary, and
contemplated composition techniques are listed, afferent to Dodecaphony, Serial and Post-serial period, Pitch-Class Set Theory and other processes for developing
pitches and durations. Finally some tutorial patches are showed, followed by a concise conclusion about aims and use of the library.

This chapter examines computer assisted analysis and composition (CAAC) techniquesin relation to the composition of my piece TreeTorika for chamber orchestra. I describemethods for analysing the musical features of a recording of a speech by Mao Zedong,in order to extract compositional material such as global form, melody, harmony andrhythm, and for developing rhythmic material. The first part focuses on large scalesegmentation, melody transcription, quantification and quantization. Automatic tran-scription of the voice was discarded in favour of an aural method using tools in Amadeusand Max/MSP. The data was processed in OpenMusic to optimise the accuracy and read-ability of the notation. The harmonic context was derived from the transcribed melodyand from AudioSculpt partial tracking and chord-sequence analyses. The second partof this chapter describes one aspect of computer assisted composition, that is the useof the rhythm constraint library in OpenMusic to develop polyrhythmic ...

This document in four sections, which acts to support the submitted composition portfolio, will seek to illustrate the search for a balance of information and control between composer and performer, with Umberto Eco’s definition of openness in art as a starting point. It follows the pieces in the portfolio from conception to performance. It explains where the music comes from, how it is communicated to the performer and finally, how it is communicated to the listener. This portfolio seeks to use openness not only to advance the tradition of western art music, but also to encourage heightened levels of communication during musical performance. The following document will discuss the ways in which the pieces in the portfolio are relevant both to the continuation and evolution of western art music and to contemporary thought. It will be shown that these concepts are present not only in the scores themselves, but are fundamental to the structure of the musical performance itself.

The literature review is divided into three sections, the first of which is devoted to questions of musical content. A context will be established through a discussion of the writings of Jonathan D. Kramer, and the works of composers from both the New York and Spectralist Schools. The next section will discuss notation as a means of communication between composer and performer. Musical examples will include scores with varying methods of notation (with varying amounts and types of information) from Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Mathias Spahlinger and Helmut Lachenmann. The final section of the literature review will discuss the ways in which musicians communicate during a performance. A context will be drawn from the music of the socialist string ensemble the Persimfans, the post-1970s works of Christian Wolff, the late anarchist ‘number pieces’ of John Cage, as well as reductionist improvisers. This section will include a discussion of the ways in which the pieces in the attached portfolio achieve a very high level of complexity through performer independence, group communication and simple, anti-virtuosic parts.

The literature review will be followed by an overview of recurring themes in the portfolio and an in-depth discussion of each piece, including context and contribution to knowledge. The document will close with a section devoted to plans for future research and a bibliography.