Originally Posted by mercury-hg

i think ~1/3 threads in the music forum wind up as arguments about semantics. maybe everyone can agree to something like this:

composition and performance are two seperate, though often connected, elements of music. a composer is necessarily concerned with all 3 facets of music: pitch, rhythm, and timbre (the quality or texture of sound). if any one is missing, a shitty or incomplete piece is the result. for example, if a composer arranged a piece for 20 oboes, he'd be ignoring timbre because lots of oboes = pure pain. rhythm and pitch are more obvious. now take a performer. a traditional instrumentalist (trumpet, piano, guitar, etc) also must be aware of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. overlook any of these and you've got a poor performance. in the gray area of electronic music, i'd argue that it's entirely possible to ignore 1 or more of the 3 musical elements i mentioned. sampling, the only possible musical thing an electronic composer might do is adjust tempos. however, writing an electronic song from scratch can be just as complex as writing for traditional instruments. performance, well thats another story. on turntables, rhythm and timbre (marginally) are the only things going on. pitch is predetermined. i could agree that turntables are a novel percussive instrument, but neither have the full-fledged complexity of a wind, reed, or string instrument. (an array of differently tuned drums excepted from that generalization)