On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:57 AM, David Santamauro <david.santamauro@gmail.com> wrote:

Fair enough. but I think that our impression that the music from Haydn through Brahms (even beyond) seems constrained and non-diverse (and to a large degree I agree), has everything to do with the fact that we are viewing it from an entirely different historical perspective. Macro views hide micro changes. So even within the western classical tradition, the diversity as observed by contemporaries is not something so easily dismissed.

Not that I want to be accused of comparing Skrillex to Mozart, but I thinking that the views of contemporaries can be quite easily dismissed once you've lived through an era like the last couple of decades in which various subdivisions of techno/EDM are all religious matters to their true believers. I'm not sure that the western classical scene operated in the same way, but it seems entirely likely to me. The fact that its practitioners were massively more skilled at composition doesn't change that.

Nicely put ... but my comment was a response to: "If you want to play hobby music in the style of other artists some software tools make it easy to do so, but you never will find your individual style."

I think the OP's point is that the constraints imposed by software tools are sufficiently severe enough that it is difficult to break out of the stylistic traps they set up. We could (usefully, perhaps) debate whether this is true, and how those constraints compare to the compositional strictures of the western canon, but it seems to me that the basic point is at least debatable and might (just might) even be true.