I love this as a pedagogical tool. Composers and hackers have a lot more in common than many folks realize, so to teach the basics of composing in a familiar language makes a lot of sense.
That said, where do we go from here? Many of the challenges in writing contemporary music are in fact notational challenges. We have a system of music notation that developed largely alongside the musical styles of the baroque and early classical eras, which tends to emphasize discrete pitches and a "divisional" model of time. (That is, the only allowable note lengths are those that can be expressed roughly as multiples of powers of 2.)
This book seems like a great way to get your toes wet, but what is the geek or nerd to do when their compositional ideas begin to butt up against what is possible within western notation and, indeed, pyknon?
haliax is right, although I don't cover Csound much.
If you want to compose for instruments, you may want to learn more about what contemporary classical composers are doing (or have done) [1] to address the notational challenges.
On the other hand, if you want to have completely freedom, computer generated music [2] can give you that, specially if you use something like Csound, Supercollider [3], Chuck [4], or PD [5].
+1 for ChucK. Learned that this past year in school. Was my first time programming, definitely wasn't as difficult as I always envisioned it being... (:
I think that that's what the chapter on primitives -- introducing csound is for. Also, I think that experimenting with musical conventions and the like is really interesting. If you want to talk about this sort of thing further, my email's in my profile.
That said, where do we go from here? Many of the challenges in writing contemporary music are in fact notational challenges. We have a system of music notation that developed largely alongside the musical styles of the baroque and early classical eras, which tends to emphasize discrete pitches and a "divisional" model of time. (That is, the only allowable note lengths are those that can be expressed roughly as multiples of powers of 2.)
This book seems like a great way to get your toes wet, but what is the geek or nerd to do when their compositional ideas begin to butt up against what is possible within western notation and, indeed, pyknon?