The Luxury of Necessity
This paper was originally written as an address to a conference of the National Association of Schools of Music on "The Music Consumer". Posing a series of questions which point to fundamental issues underlyin the LOGO music project, the paper goes on to describe some of the specific projects with which students have been working in an effort to probe these issues. Emphasis is placed on "modes of representation" as a significant realm of enquiry: just how does an individual represent a tune to himself, what are the differences between formal and informal modes of representation ??at features and relations of a melody does a representation capture, what does it leave out? What is the influence of such modes of "perception", how do they effect strategies of problem solving, notions of "same" and "different" or even influence musical "taste"? Finally, there are some hints at what might constitute "sufficiently powerful representations" of musical design with examples from both simple and complex pieces of music as well as a probe into what might distinguish "simple" from "complex" musical designs.