Music for One Musician

This is awesome:

(Even more fun:)

I once spent a roadtrip from Alaska to Connecticut listening to a 13-hour history of American avant-garde music in the 20th Century that left me pre-disposed to things like this. The show (aside from its odd introduction featuring Beethoven's 5th, an explosion, and a clip from Suzanne Vega's "99.9 Fahrenheit degrees") started out pretty strong-- earlier episodes featured Copeland, Ives, and Cage, and the genuinely cool, if very video-game sounding, 1940s-era player-piano experiments of Conlon Nancarrow (one of the first to write music that only machines could play).

The middle portion of the program, though, which contained many hours of Schoenberg-inspired atonal serialism, which was a slog. (It seemed to challenge even co-host "MTT"'s near limitless capacity for reverence.) If the goal was to make music that was both "not beautiful" and "impossible to remember," as the show's writers claimed it to have been, it worked. (To give you a sense of where composers from the era were coming from, a leading academic published an article in a 1958 edition of High Fidelity called, bluntly, "Who Cares If You Listen?" Answer: Not him.)

On the heels of that, arriving at the era of the minimalists --- and hearing Steve Reich's work in particular --- was like having color suddenly flood back into a world that had faded into black-and-white. I was hooked---and have been ever since. Few weeks go by now that I don't listen to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, or Six Pianos.

The online tone matrix lets you generate sounds that have at least a passing resemblance to some of the minimalists' "additive" music, and that probably explains a good part of its appeal for me. Very cool.

Still, it's hard to compete with the real thing.