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, Virtual Music, and Computer Models of Musical Creativity, 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.Ê.Ê.Ê. 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
