source file: m1379.txt
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 10:24:36 -0500 (CDT)

Subject: Originality

From: Paul Hahn <Paul-Hahn@library.wustl.edu>

On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, Johnny Reinhard wrote:
>                                                          Forms do need to
> be original.  More than ever, staying in established convention is
> sounding square.

I have reservations about this.  I think sometimes there's _too_ much
pressure to be original, which can lead people to abandon or reinvent
things prematurely.  Schoenberg gave up on tonality a century ago, and
yet in the past century a huge number of styles have developed that are
totally unlike anything Schoenberg could have ever heard, but tonal.
(I really need to find that Bernstein sonnet!)  So what if every
possible chord has already been followed by every other possible chord?
I don't see writers complaining that they can't write in English anymore
because "it's already been done" (I'm talking English and American
writers, of course).  Well, not many. 8-)>

>                   If it sounds like something else it is derivative, good
> for the immediate short term but inadequate for the long term. IMHO.

Does it have to sound unlike anything else in all ways possible?  What
if it sounds like something else in most ways, but there's one
particular way in which it is distinctive?  Or two?  Half and half?
Where is the line?  If you can plant one flag and claim a continent, you
run out of room to explore pretty quickly.

--pH <manynote@lib-rary.wustl.edu> http://library.wustl.edu/~manynote
    O
   /\        "You just ran nine racks but you won't give me a spot?"
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