emily howell

Have a listen to the new star on the classical music sky: Emily Howell

Sounds impressive? However, Emily Howell is not real, but virtual. David Cope, a music professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz is her craetor. She is nothing less than a computer program, which (after almost 40 years) is now able to create original compositions of contemporary classical music. Read more here.

But Howell is, her critics say, dumbly re-arranging phrases from the work of earlier human composers into a new pattern which is only theoretically original (...) "From the heart – may it go to the heart," wrote Beethoven on the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis. From the byte to the brain can never be equivalent to that (Mark Lawson in the Guardian).

I'm relieved.