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Sometime during the ’90s I decided to set Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind to music. I did. This is not that piece.
What this piece is, is music I wrote while searching for Minsky’s The Society of Mind. You see, during the early to mid-’90s you couldn’t just hop on over to your nearest computery device and order every book that had ever existed and have it delivered in two days for free while watching the latest episode of some TV show or something. You had to work to find books.
Let’s back up a little. I had read an interview with Minsky, of Artificial Intelligence fame, where he talked about his book and how no one had read it. I decided to not only read it but set it to music. Hurrah for me! Unfortunately the book was not so easy to come by. So while searching I decided to write some music about the search. That is this piece.
Minsky had mentioned his enthusiasm for Bach so I took various bits of Bach, altered them in various ways I can no longer remember the specifics of, and put them all together. The result is something that sounds Baroque but very wrong. A kind of experimental Baroque, one might say.
There is also text that accompanies the piece that is made up of quotes from that interview with Minsky.
Copyright 2017 David Bellows