John Supko teaches music composition to undergraduate students. Photo credit: Megan Morr

Durham, NC - Assistant professor of composition John Supko defies the anachronistic image of a classical composer. Visit the 29-year-old in his studio, on the lower level of Duke's Biddle Building, and you're likely to find a Mozart score lying open on his grand piano. But Supko, a pianist, does most of his composing at a different sort of keyboard altogether: a laptop computer.

"It's sort of a crazy thing to be a composer in 2009. Whenever I'm on a plane and someone asks me what I do, I never know what to say. People don't know how to react when I say ‘composer.' I should be wearing frilly sleeves and writing with a quill pen," Supko says.

Supko generates many of his new musical ideas not with a quill pen, but with a computer-assisted composition program called Max/MSP.

"I'll specify parameters, so for instance I'll say here's a chord of four or five notes, and then the computer decides the rhythm, the placement, the ordering, and the register of each note," Supko explains.

"I'm really interested in the creative potential of randomness. A computer doesn't have any preconceived notions about material, it doesn't have any taste, it doesn't have any hang-ups about style. It just does exactly what I ask it to do," says Supko.

Supko then combs meticulously through the pile of unexpected, overlooked musical possibilities the computer generates, a process he likens to "dumpster diving," and panning for gold.

"Most of the time it's just sludge that comes down the river, but occasionally there's a gold nugget here and there. When it's interesting, when it fascinates me, the next step is to find a way to incorporate that material in a larger context."

Computer-assisted composition is just one of the techniques Supko uses to introduce serendipity into his music. He also dives into a "personal dumpster" that includes advertising language, popular music, and electronically generated sound.

"The sounds that surround us become the musical wallpaper of our existence. The question is, how can you somehow do something to it to tweak it, to make it sublime?"

While hearing his works performed live is a "priority," Supko sees studio recordings and the Internet as the most pragmatic ways to reach 21^st-century audiences.

"A concert environment is not the best place to listen to music. It's a roll of the dice whether you're going to be in the mood to hear what's on the program that night or not," he says.

Supko cites Brian Eno and John Cage as his musical ancestors, but also French composer Erik Satie, whose best-known work, Trois Gymnopédies (1888), has been compared to Cubism. Identifying Satie's "musical DNA" persistent traits such as harmonic ambiguity, mosaic construction, and incorporation of both "high" and "low brow" materials was the subject of Supko's Princeton PhD dissertation.

"I'm interested in Satie because he was the first person to ask the question: How can I make music more than it was previously thought to be? Satie wasn't interested in the (traditional), rhetorical way of writing music through motivic development, and I'm not either. But that was the only way writing music was ever presented to me, so in that sense I appreciate Satie's perspective and I find it inspiring," says Supko.

Teaching Duke undergrads that there is more than one way to be a composer is central to Supko's course, "Music 153: Introduction to Computer-Assisted Composition."

"I only have one music major in my class, and it's wonderful. The students are really adventurous, really motivated," Supko says.

The students, many of whom never wrote music before, are posting their compositions on a class blog: http://st-enos-chapel.blogspot.com/

Ultimately, Supko hopes people will dispense with unhelpful notions about what composers do, and what new music is or should be.

"It will be really great when we can talk about music without having to say ‘popular music' or ‘serious music.' I don't think there's anything about classical music that makes it more serious than Thelonious Monk or Radiohead," says Supko.