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As per Dr Kate Compton:

A Bach Faucet is a situation where a generative system makes an endless supply of some content at or above the quality of some culturally-valued original, but the endless supply of it makes it no longer rare, and thus less valuable

She links a 15 year old article in the Guardian that recounts how Composer and Computer Scientist David Cope built “a little analytical engine” to generate thousands of original Bach chorales. With time, Cope built a successive tool (which he named Emily) to understand and ultimately emulate “the works of 36 composers.”

Cope will ask Emily a musical question, feeding in a phrase. Emily will respond with her own understanding of what happens next. Cope either accepts or declines the formula, much in the way he would if he was composing “conventionally”.

I can’t find any clear evidence of it after a short search but these releases were apparently met with dismay from the industry:

Critics convinced themselves that they heard no authentic humanity in it, no depth of feeling, Cope was characterised as a composer without a heart; his recent memoir is called Tin Man.

As noted in an Offscreen review of a 2021 documentary about Cope, he “takes pleasure but also tremendous inspiration and motivation in the public’s criticisms.”

“I want the negative reaction,” Cope professes, “I feed off of it. I keep going because of it. It’s mine and mine alone, and I love it.”

Cope mischievously and semi-ironically calls it “blasphemous music.”

And in an interview with Ryan Blitstein in the Pacific Standard, also from 2010, his emphatic position aligns with the pithy adage “good artists copy, great artists steal”:

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

Cope felt pretty strongly about the tools he had created:

He can’t imagine the possibility of going back to writing with just his own intuition and a pen and paper. “The programs are just extensions of me. And why would I want to spend six months or a year to get to a solution that I can find in a morning? I have spent nearly 60 years of my life composing, half of it in traditional ways and half of it using technology. To go back would be like trying to dig a hole with your fingers after the shovel has been made, or walking to Phoenix when you can use a car.”

Another mention of a shovel caught my eye in the Pacific Standard piece:

“All the computer is is just an extension of me,” Cope says. “They’re nothing but wonderfully organized shovels. I wouldn’t give credit to the shovel for digging the hole. Would you?”

David Cope died at age 83 earlier this year.

“People tell me they don’t hear soul in the music,” he says. “When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from listening to music are something we produce, it’s not there in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us, the music is just the trigger.”