Forum week 2

This topic for this weeks forum was Originality in Music, presented by Stephen Whittington. The forum started with some quotes from Stephen ie. "I want to be original like everyone else" and "If you steal from one person it's plagerism, if you steal from many it is called research." These two quotes set the scene nicely which was to pose the question of just what is originality? This was a question I assumed I knew the answer to, that was of course until the end of the forum at which stage I was asking myself all sorts of questions.

The bulk of the forum consisted of Stephen Whittington presenting examples of musical examples and anecdotes to the forum. As each example was presented, there was no advice or indication from Stephen as to whether these examples were definately original or not. The main point of these examples were to get the forum thinking, and querying notions of originality.

Listed below are some of the examples from the forum which in my opinion posed the greatest questions:

• Christian Marclay: A composer the takes pre-existing materials and arranges it in many ways.
• John Zorn: He writes examples on filing cards, when he has enough cards he shuffles the cards and deals them out and pieces them together to form a work.
• David Cope: He uses a computer to compose his works. In one example he analysed the style of Mozart, fed these parameters into the computer along with a number of pieces by Mozart. The computer then produced a number of "original" pieces based on the guidelines programmed into it. (Stephen Whittington then played one of these compositions)

These examples posed questions, can reworking others original material make a new 'original work'? Does original works have to be written by something living? Does using someone elses style/rules of composition constitute originality? On this last note the example given of Erik Sati is an interresting point. Sati's works, prior to learning composition formally, were considered to be great and original. After training and formally learning the 'rules of composition his music wasn't quite as successful.

To conclude I quote H.V. Spanner (1952) who stated in his article 'What is Originality' in The Musical Times, that "It is indeed impossible to define originality."

Spanner H. V. 1952, <page">http://www.jstor.org/view/00274666/ap030583/03a00050/0?currentResult=00274666%2bap030583%2b03a00050%2b0%2c03&searchUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jstor.org%2Fsearch%2FBasicResults%3Fhp%3D25%26si%3D1%26Query%3D%2522what%2Bis%2Boriginality%2522%26wc%3Don>page 311 Accessed 12/03/07