The program for this year's Santa Cruz Baroque Festival lists the evening's featured composer as "David Cope (1941–)." And for once, the art world's odd way of identifying a living artist seems appropriate: Tonight, with the help of some computer code, Cope will premiere a new 12-movement piece from the mind of Antonio Vivaldi (1678–).
Cope is tall and trim, with thinning gray hair, a close beard, and a drawn face. He stands onstage in front of a tight arc of music stands and begins to tell his audience about the origins of his software, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Emmy for short), which wrote the counterfeit Vivaldi they are about to hear.
It all started more than 20 years ago. Cope, already an accomplished musician and programmer, sat at his piano, struggling to compose a piece. Desperate for inspiration, he imagined a computer program that could suggest a clever measure or two. So he compiled a database of his compositions and wrote some code that could detect patterns in his music and compose new riffs that follow the same rules. To his surprise, he says, the results "sounded like me."
Since then, Cope has unleashed Emmy on dozens of the great composers. Until five years ago, though, he avoided Vivaldi. Like many serious fans of classical music, he found works like The Four Seasons a bit light and repetitive. "What's the joke about Vivaldi?" he asks the audience. "He wrote one piece a thousand times," a faint voice answers.
But it turned out Vivaldi's music wasn't too simple – it was too complex. In a piece that followed a seemingly repetitive ABABAB pattern, he discovered, Vivaldi would write subtle, unpredictable variations into each recurrence of familiar material. Where the human ear focuses on obvious similarities, Emmy hears each section as a brand-new twist in the melody. Only in the past couple of years has Cope figured out how to refine his code to take the variations into account. "I fell in love with Vivaldi," he laughs.
The houselights darken, and a half-dozen musicians dressed in black take the stage with violins, a viola, a violone, and a violoncello. A woman sits down at the harpsichord; another tunes a lutelike instrument called a theorbo. The audience hushes, and the ensemble begins: A single, piercing violin races through Vivaldi-esque arpeggios while the rest of the strings measure out a deep, deliberate complement. The second movement is different – slower, sadder, carried along by mournful viola. During moments of quiet beauty or apparent emotion, it is jarring to consider what the music means to Emmy – numbers, built on patterns, built on a database of more numbers.
Some classical music geeks enjoy listening for a composer's signature tendencies and picking out the flaws in Emmy's fakes. Others see the algorithms as an insult to the composer and the music. Once, at a conference in Germany where Cope presented some virtual Bach, a professor seated beside him bellowed his disapproval, declared music dead, and jabbed an accusatory finger in Cope's face.
After about 90 minutes, the performers take their bows to noisy applause. A small circle forms around Cope.
"Some of it sounded Vivaldi-ish," one woman admits, a bit grudgingly. An elderly woman calls it "wonderful."
"Some of it sounded like Pachelbel," someone else suggests. "Well, that's interesting," says Cope, "he wasn't in the database." Seeing her confusion at this remark, Cope reveals a key ingredient of virtual Vivaldi's secret recipe: works by other composers. When Emmy created music based solely on Vivaldi's oeuvre, he explains, the results sounded authentic enough, but bland. So he threw in a few pieces by baroque contemporaries such as Tomaso Albinoni and Giuseppe Tartini. Emmy's Vivaldi then began to stretch a bit, take risks, and, ironically, produce music that sounded more like the real Vivaldi.
That presents Cope with an interesting artistic dilemma. Could Emmy improve on his own musical output if he added the work of similar composers to the database? "Probably," Cope says, laughing. "But vanity will probably prevent me from trying." Of course, Vivaldi isn't around to protest. Immortality, it seems, still has its limitations.
– Douglas McGray
Posts
>
The Vivaldi Code
