The Computer: A Composer’s Collaborator

The author expreśses his preferences for ‘comprehensive’ computer-assisted composition programs, for an experimental attitude, and for using specific computer capabilities such as the production of random events and of multiple variants of the same work. He briefly discusses the aesthetics behind MP1, his computer program for musical composition, and then presents some basic features of the program. A discussion of how MP1 may facilitate a non-traditional approach to composition is illustrated with examples from “Cuniculi”, a piece for five tubas.