Contemporary Russian piano composers and Agentic AI

The title of this post makes no sense until I explain that it names the two arenas I have been spending my time in over the past month, taking a vacation from MindBlog posts.  (I have missed sharing what I find interesting in such posts with my imaginary audience.  My brain needs to imagine being seen, regardless of whether or not that is the case. Even though the analytics show hundreds of clicks or engagements, who knows how many of those are bots or humans?  I seldom receive feedback or comment. Anyway,  you might take this post as being an 84 year old's 2006 style Blogger version of a 14-29 year old generation Z  person posting clips of encounters in daily life on tik tok, X, instagram, etc.)

Much of my recent attention has been diverted to obtaining PDFs of music scores written by contemporary Russian piano composers who continue the styles of their late 19th and early 20 century Russian predecessors. 

The youtube video below presents the piano piece 'Reflection' by Gennady Lukinykh, and is one example of the sort of music I have been finding and then playing for enjoyment on my Steinway B.  According to Google, Gennady Lukinykh (b. 1965) is a composer, jazz pianist, arranger, member of the Russian Musical Union, winner of the Golden diploma VII Slavic music forum Golden knight, and the laureate of International and All-Russian competitions. 
 

 

If you click on this video and listen to it,  you will observe the video move through a series of clips of the piano sheet music score matching the audio being heard.  

I decided to grab (with cntrl-shift-4) the portion of the youtube browser window containing these sheet music clips as each appeared,  and then assemble them into a PDF of the sheet music that could then be displayed on my 13" M2 iPad Pro by the ForScore app which is widely used by performing instrumentalists. 

I wondered if the steps of grabbing the sheet music clips and concatenating them into a PDF of the resulting score might be more rapidly carried out by designing a "skill' in Claude Cowork.  

To make a long story short, the answer was a no (on grabbing the sheet music clips. I had to do that manually) and a yes (on reaching into a folder (named SheetMusicFromYouTube)  containing the sequenced 9 sheet shots (in .png format) from the 'Reflection' piece above, converting each to PDF format, and then assembling these PDFs into a final document after requesting input of the desired title.

So, I'm now using this Claude cowork skill, called "sheet-music-PDF-assembler" to generate further scores to enjoy playing through.  I'm going to perform a few of these pieces for the next ~bi-monthly gathering of retired Univ. of Texas piano faculty members and Austin piano teachers.  

What our brains are doing as we experience musical pleasure.

I've been playing more Schubert lately, drawn by his genius for inserting melodic sections within his piano works (sonatas, impromptus, fantasies, etc.) that give me sheer pleasure when I play them. (When I am beginning to wake in the morning, the passages play in my head and I can visualize both my fingers on the keys and the musical score. As I continue to wake, this all slips away.) 

These experiences made me perk up when I saw the article by Zatorre and collaborators in the Jan. 2026 issue of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Here is their abstract (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from me. It has some nice graphics.): 

The enjoyment of music involves a complex interplay between brain perceptual areas and the reward network. While previous studies have shown that musical liking is related to an enhancement of synchronization between the right temporal and frontal brain regions via theta frequency band oscillations, the underlying mechanisms of this interaction remain elusive. Specifically, a causal relationship between theta oscillations and musical pleasure has yet to be shown. In the present study, we address this question by using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS). Twenty-four participants underwent three different sessions where they received tACS over the right auditory cortex before listening to and rating a set of melodies selected to vary in familiarity and complexity. In the target session, participants received theta stimulation, while in the other two sessions, they received beta and sham stimulation, serving as controls. We recorded brain activity using EEG during task performance to confirm the effects of tACS on oscillatory activity. Results revealed that compared with sham, theta, but not beta, stimulation resulted in higher liking ratings specifically for unfamiliar music with low complexity. In addition, we found increased theta connectivity between the right temporal and frontal electrodes for these stimuli when they were most liked after theta stimulation but not after beta stimulation. These findings support a causal and frequency-specific relationship between music hedonic judgments and theta oscillatory mechanisms that synchronize the right temporal and frontal areas. These mechanisms play a crucial role in different cognitive processes supported by frontotemporal loops, such as auditory working memory and predictive processing, which are fundamental to music reward processing.