bullshit-graffiti

The Contemporary Classical Composer’s Bullshit Generator

This is too viral not to be posted… Last week Dominic Irving, a UK-based composer and pianist, posted a Perl Script on his website. This ingenious piece of code generates some prose that one could possibly copy-and-paste into one’s statement, application, program notes, etc. This is first class academic BS. Here are a few examples, just in case Irving’s server gets too much traffic and crashes:

My work has been seminal in the development of ‘apparently-percussive modernistic-music’, a highly intellectual, and rather tonal genre. Unlike traditional arts, I aim to develop collaborations, including a highly percussive motif that senses all notions of anti-unaccompanied composers. It is plainly obvious that the act of rejecting chaotic fanfares causes one to become coherent (and sometimes even postmodern), which is why I deny this approach, preferring instead to simply oppose chromatically. My goal, in essence, is to juxtapose musical semitones. Working binarily means that my focus is always percussively-based, and never orchestral.

Or:

The most important tip I can give anyone is this: Never compose musical cadences; rather, endeavour to cultivate your acoustically-pre-conceived sources. It is of paramount importance that melodic, theoretical approach-phrases must never be allowed to become technical, or coherently complex. All composers should recreate a variety of pitches, and (if this transforms poly-theatrical works), proceed to challenge traditionally until the best result is achieved. It must be remembered that improvising imitations, especially if they are ambiguous (or even bitonal), should be avoided. My latest piece begins with a rather developmental ‘sketch-fanfare’, before absolutely transforming the existing contrasting material into a more structuredly-spectral state, a process I term ‘aleatorically-choreographic-recontextualising’.

Or even:

One of my most melodic influences is the concept of challenging passive movements, which deconstructs my vision and causes my tone-row to become somewhat Wagnerian. The most important tip I can give anyone is this: Never compose aesthetic non-linearities; rather, endeavour to inform your artistically-extended oppositions. The fact that cadences tend to (at least in their critical state), choreographically contextualise, even in the presence of a strong ensemble, is, you will agree, patently absurd. The pursuit of flowing study-illusions to superimpose the mostly-progressive paradigm is a key focus of my monophonic study. I build upon the so-called ‘unities of experimental processes’, and transform them into what I term ‘modernistic-post-unified oscillation-resonances’, which I see as a distinct improvement.

Can we hope for a Sibelius plugin to go with?

Update 10/31/2012: For very understandable professional reasons, Dominic had to take the script down. No one wants one’s name associated with the word bullshit on Google. I will leave the generated examples above, unless this post causes too much harm to his web presence, in which case, I will have to take it down too. Thank you for understanding. -Thomas Deneuville.