point 1: 4'33" by John Cage
** i think that this is music if one attempts to answer point 2 (adequate definition of music) and/or if one accepts the idea that it is music because the creator says that it is music (much in the way that duchamp's readymades are art because he has put them in a gallery and given them that appellation). not a value judgement, just a thought.
this whole thread gets into a little of an e-mail correspondence that miko and i had about whether the term composer needs to be revamped. i think it does as it is used to describe many different activities that may or may not really describe "composition/composer" in a traditional sense. an analog would be the idea that an artist may work in many different media that can be identified: sculptor, painter, collage artist, assemblage artist, draughtsman, watercolorist, etc. the term "artist" is used as an umbrella term with finer subsets - - though this is obviously not as "clean" as it could be. i wish that there was a cleaner and more succinct way to delineate between what caliban does compositionally and what i do compositionally (for example).
just a thought.
sl