BY JONATHAN LEVITT
The Music of GM Jon
After many decades in the chess world, many people know me as a chess Grandmaster and few know me as someone connected with music. Since the start of 2025 I have developed some fresh skills and produced over 50 new songs on my Suno page. These songs are all created on my computer, collaborating with an AI program called Suno. There are no singers or musicians involved. I go by the name ‘GM Jon’.
In the short time I have been involved in creating music I have already come across incredible prejudice against AI music, especially from those with musical skills themselves. It is already the case that machines have played a big role in the music we consume, and they have done so for some years now. AI has made enormous strides in recent months and the direction of travel is clear. Soon, if not already, real musicians will not be able to compete on equal terms.
Chess players came to terms with the superiority of the machine 30 years ago when the great Kasparov lost a match to one. Human chess is still a thing, and so it will be with music. The future will no doubt see the best work being done with man/machine collaboration. Why not start now?
For those that question the morality of AI music, claiming that they steal or borrow the ideas of human musicians, I ask one question. Why is it ok for other humans to do that, but not for machines? As far as I am concerned, what matters is the quality of the music, not how it is produced, and if great music can be produced with the help of technology and bring pleasure to billions of people, then I am all in favour. I would regard it as ‘immoral’ – or at the very least misguided – to try to prevent that happening.
This article is written to introduce you to my music, done in collaboration with AI. The AI does a lot of the creative work, but the human contribution involves dozens, sometimes hundreds, of decisions, prodding and pushing the AI in certain directions.
A good, gentle one to start with is this song based on an 1874 poem by Oscar Wilde:
https://suno.com/s/ngTk9Gudhr9rxZuB
Wilde was just 20 when he wrote those lines. And I was just 61 when I produced the music…Now, at 62, I am far more experienced.
There are many other songs based on the poems of long dead poets. They actually need to be quite long-dead, since that way one does not have copyright issues when using their words.
Here is a song based on the very famous poem, ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling, written in 1895:
https://suno.com/s/J27wCnyehRRlLW1t
I have found Kipling poems seem to convert rather nicely into songs. Here is another, written in 1911 and about the dangers of technology (a concern even then!):
https://suno.com/s/jUpJBqzTQnCyNvN5
William Blake also wrote very powerful lyrics. Here is one about the City of London first published in 1794:
https://suno.com/s/C7CgGdZbAD52UaMi
There are many more delightful songs based on poems by Alexander Pope, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson and Sir Henry Newbolt.
Another way of getting round copyright issues is to cooperate with a living poet, and work in collaboration, or at least with their permission. Thus, I am very happy to work with living people too, if they want to work with me. I have now produced the music for five songs by the ‘Professor of Rap’, Tudor Rickards. Tudor is not young (born in 1941) but still writes some very creative material and he has been a pleasure to work with.
Here are a couple of examples of our collaboration. Firstly a song about losing your car in a giant carpark:
https://suno.com/s/EsO667p7MJUOsEyz
And here is one with Tudor’s latest speciality. Rap:
https://suno.com/s/tkM3k1gZhwRAwcZi
Some of the songs involve collected quotes by famous individuals, which I have chosen, ordered and configured to create a song. So far, I have done this for Einstein, Nietzsche and Groucho Marx.
Here, as an example, the writing of Nietzsche is turned into music:
https://suno.com/s/lWLfih1bYBXXGdb2
Of course, these great words by Nietzsche were not written as lyrics, or even poetry, There is no rhyme. This limits considerably what is possible musically, but the goal is to produce something that is still pleasant to listen to, as a way of hearing the deep meaning that comes with writing of Nietzsche.
Some of my songs (9 so far) have my own lyrics. Of course I work with what interests me – among other things, humour, politics, chess, dogs, satire. It sometimes feels like hard work coming up with lyrics for a song and it is not at all easy to do it well. I can only marvel at the apparent ease with which the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan seemed to do it, time and time again.
My first published song, where I produced the music too was ‘Culture Clash’, a political and satirical song about one (not very sophisticated) man struggling to come to terms with people of a different culture entering his space.
:https://suno.com/s/RDd9sx5Xvu3u9EEg
Another song I wrote included whole jokes by nine different comedians as part of the lyrics. I wrote some of the words, including a chorus and ‘bridging comments’ between the jokes, making it rhyme to some degree and helping with turning it into a song:
https://suno.com/s/2qvhKUDA5s6ZJqN9
My last selection for this article, where I both wrote the lyrics and produced the music is this one where, inspired by Tudor Rickards’ efforts, I try my own hand at rap:
https://suno.com/s/TFileh1LSweUtxA2
I am working towards creating you-tube videos for these songs and getting them on spotify and other platforms. Currently, there are only a handful on you-tube. Here is one based on the famous poem ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake dating from 1794. The start is a little intense…Please bear with it until the music kicks in after about half a minute:
If you have enjoyed the above selection of songs, you can explore more of the songs yourself by following this link to my Suno profile page:
https://suno.com/@jonathanlevitt
You will find a few of the songs are pegged to the profile page. If you click on ‘see more’ across from ‘songs’, images to click on for all 50 plus songs appear. There are also playlists you can try, with songs categorised in various ways. I do hope you enjoy them and feedback, positive or negative, is very welcome.
Jonathan Levitt is a retired chess Grandmaster who played for the very strong England chess team that beat Russia in Reykjavik 1990. He is an Oxford maths graduate and lives in Suffolk with his wife Maria, making a living betting on live cricket. He is also an author. Jonathan’s most recent book, Contemplating Comedy (The Conrad Press, 2020), is an exploration of the psychology and philosophy of humour, packed full of examples.