For our midterm, Professor Paxton asked us to come up with several questions we had pertaining to the course material. He said that they should be questions that we would really have to think about; questions that did not have a simple answer, or an answer that one could simply look up the answer to online. Here were his favorite ones:
Was the advancement of technology largely responsible for most of the music created in the experimental genre, or would it still have been made nonetheless?
What prompts us as humans to delve into something so extreme and out of the ordinary?
What exactly creates an unsettling or even disturbing effect in the mind when listened to?
Was the technology available at the time [when early electroacoustic compositions were created] sufficient to create the full vision of the composer? Given the technology we have today, would they redo their old pieces?
How far can abstraction be taken until it might be considered meaningless?
When is documentation necessary during the creative process?
What effect does [non-tonal] art music have on the brain compared to tonal music?
Can people enjoy the strange, avant-garde, or atonal music as much as they enjoy melodic music, or is this kind of music not meant to be enjoyed in a traditional sense?