Conversations – Page 2 – Dr. Kevin McBrien

Beethoven or Bot? – Evaluating an AI’s Completion of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony

Although most of the hubbub surrounding Beethoven’s 250th birthday has subsided, a few bits of the celebration have lingered into 2021 as concert halls worldwide open up once again. However, one recent Beethoven item has raised many eyebrows in the music world. Back in September, the news broke that a team of computer specialists and music scholars had “completed” Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony using AI technology and scant scraps that Beethoven left behind upon his death in 1827. Dubbed “Beethoven X: The AI Project,” it was also announced that a recording of the results—played by a live orchestra—would be released the following month. Like many, I was skeptical. This just seemed like another lame excuse for more Beethoven deification, one that would take the focus away from issues that are currently more pressing, like promoting diversity and equity in classical music.

Still, I was curious what the results would sound like. So, I recently met over Zoom with my friend Tanner Cassidy—a PhD candidate in music theory at UC Santa Barbara—to listen to it and share our impressions. (There may have been a smidge of alcohol involved as well… *wink*) Below are excerpts from our discussion, which have been edited for length and clarity. What did we think? Does a computer have the potential to live up to Beethoven or is this something best left in the trash bin? Let’s find out…

Kevin McBrien (KM): So about a year or two ago, this German telecommunications company [Telekom]—with AI specialists and music scholars—was like, “Hey, let’s take these incomplete sketches of Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony and feed it into an AI program and see what happens.” And this is the resulting piece that came out of it. There was this musicologist—Barry Cooper—who reconstructed the first movement in the 80s and that’s been recorded and released as kind of a hypothetical Beethoven 10. And this one, apparently, is just the third and fourth movements.

The musicologist Barry Cooper realized the first movement of Beethoven’s Tenth in the 80s, which was subsequently recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.

Tanner Cassidy (TC): So there’s no second movement that exists?

KM: I guess not, or there’s not enough to go off of.

TC: I actually have some experience with AI-generated music. An undergrad friend of mine was writing bebop-based algorithmic composition, where he fed it Charlie Parker licks, and then he had me play what the computer spit out, which was just nonsense. AI has really struggled with rhythm, so I’m really curious to see what rhythm sounds like. [KM edit: Similarly, Google acknowledged J.S. Bach’s birthday in 2019 with a Doodle that, with the help of AI, generated a Bach-style harmonization around a two-bar melody you fed it.]

KM: Yeah, I heard a snippet of it on an NPR story, and it’s weird. So, I’m also curious to listen to the whole thing.

TC: Well, I’ll mute my audio, and then we can listen to this.

[We listen to the third movement.]

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The Arching Path: A Conversation with Christopher Cerrone

Christopher Cerrone is part of a tectonic shift in the new music landscape. Recently named one of The Washington Post‘s “21 Composers and performers who sound like tomorrow,” the Brooklyn-based composer has collaborated with a veritable who’s-who of classical ensembles, ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Third Coast Percussion. He’s an integral member of the Sleeping Giant collective—a modern-day “Les Six” of sorts—alongside Timo Andres, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Andrew Norman, all notable composers in their own right. Cerrone has also received numerous accolades in recent years, which includes nominations for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize (for his opera Invisible Cities) and a 2020 Grammy Award (for The Pieces That Fall to Earth). And this just scratches the surface…

Christopher Cerrone
(Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff)

Cerrone’s music is tricky to pin down—in the best possible ways. It’s accessible, but also incredibly rich and thought-provoking. (Not that these things have to be mutually exclusive!) It revels in ear-catching colors and displays an insatiable curiosity for unique sound combinations. (Several of his compositions feature electronic accompaniment, giving them a delicious, digital “sheen.”) It exudes a deep literary sensibility, as well as a fascination with place, memory, sound, and silence. Simply put, it’s amazing stuff.

The affinity for place and memory is particularly evident in Cerrone’s latest album, The Arching Path (available now from In a Circle Records). This release highlights four piano-centric chamber pieces, three of which are inspired by travel—The Arching Path and Double Happiness stem from the composer’s trips to Italy, while Hoyt-Schermerhorn was conceived after many late-night commutes on the New York subway. The centerpiece of the album is I will learn to love a person, an inward-focused song cycle that sets the Twitter-esque poetry of American author Tao Lin. It’s an incredible album overall and definitely one worth checking out. (You can order it on Bandcamp or wherever digital music is sold. It is also available for streaming.)

Chris and I chatting from our respective Zoom “boxes.” (Screenshot used with permission)

A few weeks ago, I had the great privilege to sit down with Chris—albeit virtually, over Zoom—and talk about his new album. Our 45-minute conversation was fascinating and wide-ranging, covering topics from creativity during the pandemic to janky family violins.

Below are excerpts from our discussion, which have been edited for length and clarity:

Kevin McBrien (KM): How have you fared this past year with COVID and lockdown? What has kept you going through this very weird and very strange time?

Christopher Cerrone (CC): It’s extremely strange! I think I have responded to it by just throwing myself into work. I think I’m in a privileged position in a number of ways. Since I’m a composer, we can work in a sense. Of course, not everything is realized on the timeline we’d originally envisioned, but overall, none of my projects—and again, this is a matter of just pure luck—have been fully canceled. Obviously, there’s an enormous psychological toll that it’s taken on everyone, and that’s, I think, universal. But a lot of projects wound up working out really well. I had a percussion quartet with piano [Don’t Look Down, written for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion] that wound up getting a really amazing document over a live stream. I think it would be callous to say that I’ve “benefited” from the pandemic—no one has—but I feel just very, very lucky that everything has worked out the way it has.

Cerrone’s Don’t Look Down, which was composed and premiered during the COVD pandemic.

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