David Cope: Biography

David Cope was born in San Francisco, California on May 17, 1941. Following early study on piano (including an extensive performance career) and violoncello, he completed degrees in composition at Arizona State University and the University of Southern California studying with George Perle, Halsey Stevens, Ingolf Dahl and Grant Fletcher. His over seventy published compositions have received thousands of performances throughout the U.S. and abroad, including those by the Vermont, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cabrillo Festival, and Santa Cruz Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous university orchestras and wind ensembles. Twenty-one of Cope's works appear on recordings including Variations (piano and wind orchestra; Cornell University), Re-Birth (concert band), Concert (piano and orchestra, Mary Jane Cope, soloist) and Threshold and Visions (orchestra). Complete albums of his music have appeared on Folkways (2), Opus One and Discant Records and include a wide diversity of works from large ensembles to soloists with electronic and computer-generated tape.

Steven Mamula writes about Cope's work in a definitive article in the American Record Guide (May, 1982): "David Cope is unquestionably one of this generation's most ambitious, prolific and multifarious composers. His music in a large measure is marked by tension, achieved through sharply dissonant, sustained tonal clusters, sporadic and impulsive phrasing, and wide skips in the linear movement. His textures are transparent, though not always sparse, and rhythms seem to fall at extremes: either subtle and almost not pulsating, or fiercely aggressive with frequent juxtapositions of both. David Cope's Concert For Piano and Orchestra (1980) exemplifies much of this essence. The work contains several passages that are a multilayering of single note drones played in succession by individual instruments. A crescendo builds as each instrument enters, creating an anxiety that approaches the teeth-grinding level. Much as in serial music, repose is achieved here not by succeeding dissonance with consonance, but rather by succeeding dissonance with lesser degrees of dissonance. The piano serves a minimal but judicious role, delivering angular, single line statements marked with huge leaps, and brief, repeated arpeggiations in the upper register that together produce a striking antithesis to the orchestral fabric. During the work's latter half, a furious, single note figure erupts at the piano's bottom end, which churns in syncopation soon imitated by numerous percussion instruments, followed by powerful crescendos in brass lines. "For the past three years Cope has also been involved with creating a massive work (two hours) for single performer. The composer became interested in finding a place that he loved and that fascinated him, exploring its history, lore, religions, etc., and then creating a piece from that intimacy. Canyon de Chelley in Arizona has been such a place for him. He began by studying all published material on the Canyon's archaeological roots and art history (Anasazi art, petroglyphs primarily), as well as learning as much of the Navajo language as possible, then went to live for a time in the Canyon, exploring it thoroughly and continuously sketching musical ideas from the mountain of research. Also, during this time he built many instruments (not as a craftsman but as a composer, i.e., instruments not beautiful or masterful, since some contained only one note). Some were made with materials such as prayer stones and sheepbone mallets, though very few artifacts were removed and all with permission. Cope declares '...slowly but surely a piece is emerging, one so personal and intensely real that 'performance' hardly describes the results.' The title of his cosmically ambitious work is THE WAY." Cope has received numerous awards including two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, fifteen ASCAP standard Panel Awards, Composers' Forum (New York City) recital award, Houston Composers Symposium Award and numerous university grants. He has been guest composer/lecturer at over thirty universities. His New Directions in Music now appears in its seventh edition with positive reviews so numerous they have become prohibitive to reprint. Techniques of the Contemporary Composer, containing over 300 original musical examples composed specifically for the book, and New Music Notation, continue to be used as standard reference tools. His books Computers and Musical Style, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, The Algorithmic Composer and Virtual Music. describe the computer program Experiments in Musical Intelligence which he created in 1981. The program functions by inheriting a composer's style and then composing new music in that style. Experiments in Musical Intelligence's music is available on four Centaur Records CDs (CRC 2184, CRC 2329, CRC 2452, CRC 2619 listed in Centaur's contemporary music category). The first, called "Bach by Design," includes 5 Bach inventions, a Bach fugue and chorale, a Mozart Sonata and overture, a Chopin Mazurka, a Brahms Intermezzo, a Joplin Rag, a Bartók "mikrokosmos", a Prokofiev sonata and a work in the style of its creator, David Cope. All works are performed by the program via a Yamaha Disklavier. The second CD, called "Classical Music Composed by Computer," features human performances of works in the styles of Bach, Chopin, Mozart, Joplin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Cope. The third CD, called Virtual Mozart, contains a symphony and concerto in the style of Mozart. The fourth CD, called Virtual Bach, contains a keyboard concerto, cello suite, and a concerto grosso in the style of Bach. To read about Experiments in Musical Intelligence go to the Experiments in Musical Intelligence page. To purchase and/or listen to Experiments in Musical Intelligence music go to the Spectrum Press page. About Computers and Musical Style: "Cope's book presents a computer program with great potential for the careful study and precise analysis of musical styles. It should, therefore, be of real interest to both music theorists and music historians." -Leonard Meyer, author of Style and Music "Cope's work may be the first to bring to the broader community of scholars a host of issues that have been hotly discussed by biotechnology and artificial intelligence researchers in recent years.�.�.�. It is an original and important undertaking that deserves the attention of all who share this interest." Eleanor Selfridge-Field Journal of the American Musicological Society "Cope's new book is a fascinating account of his work in automatic composition. Drawing on his knowledge of computer science and linguistics as well as of music theory, he has created a computer program capable of simulating diverse musical styles. The potential is great not only for composition but for musicological style analysis." -Fred Lerdahl, co-author of A Generative Theory of Tonal Music About Experiments in Musical Intelligence: "In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computer patterns of notes? Despite the fact that Cope's vision of human creativity is radically different from my own, I admire enormously what he has achieved. Indeed, this lovingly written book about a deeply held vision of musical creativity should, I think, earn its place as one of the most significant adventures of the late twentieth century." - Douglas Hofstadter, author of G�del, Escher, Bach and Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies About Virtual Music: "'Virtual Music' is not to be missed. It is engrossing, illuminating, and some would say outrageous. David Cope's computer program, Emmy, composes music that's difficult to distinguish from real music. But perhaps it is 'real' music? And perhaps Emmy is "really" creative? Several critics insist that it isn't. Douglas Hofstadter, for instance, challenges Cope in an essay in the book called "Staring Emmy Straight in the Eye -- And Doing My Best Not to Flinch." Their debate is essential reading for anyone interested in musical creativity, or in the relation between creativity and computers. You don't need to be a computer-buff, or an expert musician either, to be fascinated by it. Whether you'll be seduced or merely infuriated is for you to find out." --Margaret A. Boden, Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex, Author of "The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms" "If only Beethoven or Chopin could explain their methods as clearly as David Cope. So when Cope's program writes a delightful turn of musical phrase, who is the artist: the composer being emulated, Cope's software, or David Cope himself? Cope offers keen philosophical insights into this question, one that will become increasingly compelling over time. He also provides us with brilliant and unique insights into the intricate structure of humankind's most universal artform." --Raymond Kurzweil, inventor and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines Experiments in Musical Intelligence works for larger ensembles include Horizons for orchestra in the style of David Cope, two operas with librettos consisting of letters by their respective composers: Mozart and Mahler, a symphony and piano concerto in the style of Mozart, a seventh Brandenburg Concerto in the style of Bach, and many more. A video called Bach Lives...at David Cope's House describes many of the methods the Experiments in Musical Intelligence program uses to replicate new examples of music and includes live performances of works for fortepiano, flute, organ, and choir.