Author: Don

Tune of the day #79

A brief history of classic Yes. Drummer Tatsuya Yoshida organized the zeuhl bands Ruins and Koenjihyakkei and has probably worked with every prog rock musician of note in Japan. Guitarist Kido Natsuki has been part of Bondage Fruit (a very interesting instrumental band, despite the questionable name) and Umezu Kazutoki Kiki Band. I don’t know anything about Nasuno Mitsuru; he might be worth investigating.

But is it art?

Archival photograph of a Victorian era chess automaton in use

Dr. Boli on A.I. art:

Here Dr. Boli’s long memory gives him a different point of view from that of the average Internet blitherer. Dr. Boli’s own blithering is informed by a better acquaintance with the past two centuries or so, and in this case he remembers that we have faced exactly this question before. It took us more than a century to answer it, and it was never answered definitively. But the consensus of opinion has been that, yes, a machine can produce art, when that machine is a camera.

To anyone who has lived through both revolutions, the resemblance is hard to miss.

Previously, making a picture had been a skill learned with long and laborious practice. Then along came the machine, and the skill was irrelevant. Why learn to draw when the machine can make perfect images for you? There was much grumbling about whether such laziness ought even to be allowed, and much hand-wringing about the future of Art.

With no alteration at all, the paragraph above can be made to apply to the coming of photography in the early nineteenth century or the coming of artificial intelligence two centuries later.

Continue reading “But is it art?”

Tune of the day #78

Many years ago I thought I might be able to economically enlarge my classical music collection by checking out records from the Wichita public library and taping them. Nope. While the selection was good, most sounded as if they had been cleaned with steel wool. However, a few of the more obscure ones were listenable. These included Raymond Lewenthal’s first Alkan album and this one.

Godowsky is probably best known for his 53 Chopin paraphrases, in which he took the demanding Chopin etudes and found ingenious ways of making them even harder. He also wrote more approachable music, such as his “Java Suite,” which includes this impression of the gamelan.

Doris Pines, the 1947 Christmas Ball Beauty Queen of Julliard, recorded only two albums, one devoted to Godowsky and the other to Agathe Backer-Grøndahl and Cécile Chaminade. Both are overdue for rescue on CD.

Tune of the day #77

If you had asked me half a lifetime ago who my favorite guitarist was, I would have said Steve Morse. I’ve heard a lot of music since then and I can no longer pick just one, but I still have more music by Morse in my collection than by any other single artist, except possibly for Jeff Beck.1 Of course, I never heard the Dixie Dregs on the radio, except once as backing music in a cheesy commercial for a wet t-shirt club — for which I will never forgive that radio station.

Machine-made art

Gilbert and George disagree

Intrigued by J Greely’s work with pinups, I’ve been experimenting with AI art generators. Rather than struggle with SwarmUI, I tried some of the many free online toys. The results were interesting enough to warrant further exploration, and I eventually ended up at NightCafé. I’ve been seeing what the various models can do and what their limitations are.

As far as capabilities go, they can imitate almost any style to some degree. AI “photographs” are convincing as long as you don’t count the fingers, and sometimes the models get those right, too — one more reason not to believe anything you see online.

Renaissance angels playing Dixieland

Continue reading “Machine-made art”

Today’s quotes

Roger Kimball:

I sometimes wonder whether the “sign of peace” routine wasn’t contrived by some hardened enemy of the Church.

On Frank Meyer:

In his last illness, Meyer struggled with the momentous decision of whether to convert to Catholicism. Bill [Buckley] was a tireless emissary between Meyer and various confidantes. Bill reports that Meyer, from his bed of woe, complained that “the only remaining intellectual obstacle to his conversion was the collectivist implication lurking in the formulation ‘the communion of saints’ in the Apostles’ Creed.”

Laus Deo

A portrait of a typical “rebel, monster and rule-breaker”:

There was no dazzling youthful breakthrough followed by decades of self-indulgent coasting. Haydn published his first truly revolutionary string quartets at the age of forty-two and is generally held to have written his best music in the two decades before his death at the age of seventy-seven. There was no oppressed wife patiently enabling the Great Man. (Haydn’s estranged wife derided his music and low social standing, though he supported her financially until her death.) His reputation was not the product of posthumous mythmaking. (It was fully formed within his lifetime.) Haydn upheld the social order, credited his gifts to God, and was widely described as a modest and compassionate man. He made generous provision for his servants in his will.