The Bernard Herrmann Composer Kit is out. It costs about five hundred US dollars and allows people who call themselves composers to assemble pieces using sampled Herrmann signatures and present the results as their own writing. It’s striking to watch the arc of this progression, from plug-ins to ChatGPT, from assistance to substitution. I can’t help wondering where this trajectory lands fifty years from now, and what we will still mean by authorship when it gets there.