And I disagree with you about the relative merits of the two artists in question. Neither is any more or less ambitious or interesting than the other, in my opinion. Of course it’s just that: an opinion.

Your apparent obsession with Luck really interest, and baffles, me. I suppose it is a consoling thought to chalk it all up to Fortuna, like an ancient Greek. Sorry, I don’t agree that that “It’s wholly likely that your degree of mate­r­ial suc­cess has less to do with the qual­ity of your work and every­thing to do with being in the right place at the right time.” Perhaps immediate commercial or public success might be a matter of luck; look at all the stupid, worthless “viral” videos that get a million hits. But true artistic success, the kind I think you and most jazz or other artists care for, I would argue, is almost always dependent on the quality of work. Time has a way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, the great from the not-so-great, and frankly the lousy. In the immediate case of Corpolongo v Roney, surely a battle of middle weights, I would argue that Roney has produced the slightly more interesting, more ambitious music, while Corpolongo, alas, has produced nothing compelling or challenging. I don’t think we are missing greatness here, and that has nothing to do with luck.

The long-gone smiles, Heifetz in a digital frame that picks up the colors of his performance—as I receive it, it adds up to an eerie backward glance with a decidedly forward look. I love it.

As for any disconnect, or anachronistic qualities, I wouldn’t necessarily agree or disagree. I only recently discovered these films, so it’s early in the process.

When I first heard them, both of them had contemporary soundtracks added (you can find them on YouTube), though at this point it’s unclear to me whether the original authors had intended them to be accompanied by music.

My perspective is that the musical resources available at the time these were made were not well-suited to the character of the films. Of course, that’s only an opinion.

As for the “two radios,” it’s interesting that you brought that up. After working in this vein for awhile (I’ve been creating music/sounds like this for at least a decade, though I’ve seldom presented it to the public), I realized that I was in part inspired by having lived in the hinterlands as a child, when I’d try to tune-in far-away baseball games and jazz stations on my little Westinghouse transistor.

Could you talk a little about the relationship between these films and your music? Did you watch them before you created the soundtracks? Or did you match preexisting compositions to the animations?

Also, I don’t know how much you delved into their history, but was either Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) or Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924) originally accompanied by live music?

Wikipedia’s entry on Eggeling says his work “has been described as Visual Music,” which suggests that the artist may have intended Symphonie Diagonale to be watched without music. Frederick J. Kiesler’s title card reinforces this: “It is an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium.” Since music is also concerned with the organization of time intervals, the juxtaposition of film and music here seems jarring. When a film visually comes this close to music, hearing actual music at the same time is like listening simultaneously to two radios, each tuned to a different station.

But maybe that’s the effect you set out to achieve. Anyhow, fascinating stuff.

Music, thank God, is not the Super Bowl. There’s room for Evans, Twardzik, and many, many others (well-known and obscure) at the top. Quality is–or should be–the only real issue.

Yeesh.