On Music
My version of the "Fripporisms" (Barryisms)--essentially all the Dynaxioms that have "music" in them.
1884. An album of music created with AI is no more interesting than an album that uses a wah-wah pedal on every track.
1866. Playing music can be interpreted as a hedonistic interpretation of Now, and is both a kind of temporary "inebriation" and a sobering pursuit of aesthetic experience. It's not self-absorption but rather an absorbing look at the true Self.
1861. Reading is about sound--the music of language. Even meaningless lyrics can be meaningful if they simply support the sound.
1859. All developments in music are extensions, not replacements.
1848. The primary requirement of pop music is that it does the dumbest thing for the optimal evolutionary payoff. It's not always about the music. Aesthetics/decoration is just a bonus. I like the bonuses.
1802. Music as a human Universal can’t fully flourish under nationalist ideologies. Talent knows no boundaries.
1797. As a musician, it is important to have musical ability and musical sensibility. The former is strictly objective and the latter can be creatively objective and subjective. (1999)
1796. When we spend time playing music we also utilize time more mindfully.
1794. It is most important to have good ideas in music, but also important to have interesting and compelling surface elements, as they are good ideas in and of themselves. (1999)
1793. Uncertainty is like the continuous chord inversion: You lose a sense of where the roots are, but they are always close by.
1784. Streaming music is the best anti-clutter art. It is an art experience without an art object.
1783. In music, the idea that we didn't need to be concerned with grammar gave us rock 'n' roll, but eventually, even that formed its own "grammar".
1780. Words should speak to you. One has to ask, "Is there anything in them that hasn't been said before?" Singing someone else's words is different than singing your own. I've noticed this when writing music to any kinds of words: The meaning of the words can sometimes disappear, or are overcome by the power of the foreground activity--the spoken word. Reading a passage from someone else's book and a passage from your own can be almost the same activity, but the process of thought, expression of thought through the spoken word, writing down the thoughts, then singing them, can obscure the initial thought process. In music, very often words are there simply as placeholders for words that are singable: There is no thought process whatsoever for the writer, but can emerge for the reader/listener. This is when they begin to speak and begin to say something.
1778. Once you've taken note of something, it's easier to recognize. Emulation in art and music works on this principle and is hugely powerful in the development of a signature vision or style. Most of the time we don't recall where we've seen or heard something, yet subtly influences what we do--sometimes for our entire lives.
1739. Code-switching began in the 1950s when R&B musicians had to play music in church on Sunday morning after having played in honky-tonks on Saturday night. They found they couldn't code switch. It was a good thing they didn't.
1735. Art is NOT decoration; It has spiritual dimensions, even if secular in its expression. Rock music in the 60s had this quality even if the characteristic of the music was dark. The physical aspects of the art do not matter, and the connection between how the work evolves and resolves into a final work are not the individual marks made with the hands of Gods, but rather is a record of intent to the artist, i.e. the remembered feeling while making the art, contemporaneous with events taking place in the world at that moment. Even if no one sees the art or hears the music, the record is made at spiritual or ethereal levels. This is where social media goes wrong: "Sharing" is nothing more than the delay of the ego to confront feelings of loneliness. To not feel lonely means there has been spiritual growth and awakening. The epidemic is not loneliness per se, but rather the avoidance of time alone. Art as a spiritual practice is an abnegation of loneliness.
1711. When fewer use manual tools and materials to make art in the digital age, how do ideas take shape without the use of the body? In music, I can compose with the real materials (theories), but composition is much more. This is where the intellect must come into play. This is where we have to think about where the soul is, then ultimately let soul take over to that it can emerge. But we can't get to the head and heart without using the mind and body.
1698. Artists need to be agnostic or indifferent about tools in order serve the ideas. Sometimes certain tools interfere with them--like CGI does in film and Auto-Tune in music.
1693. Somebody should always be playing some kind of traditional music so that culture doesn't become just pastiche. (1999)
1682. If you write music in an open key, then you can avoid the major-happy/minor-sad associations. It actually makes you sad for reasons other than labels or types.
1681. Sometimes it's useful in music performance to use metaphors from another instrument, e.g. "I'm a pretty good typist on the piano"; "I'm a good pianist on the keyboard"; "I'm a good pianist on the guitar"; "I'm a bad drummer on the piano." Metaphors allow you to temporarily locate similarities between one or more disciplines and use them to get a new perspective on an activity that has become too imprisoned by its own nature.
1672. Books give you vocabularies that you wouldn't necessarily get from other sources. Since they take longer to write, there's more thought to word choice than an article written and edited in a few days, or even within an hour. Also, article writers that have read more books have different vocabularies. If you want a small vocabulary, read only social media posts, or just watch video, in which people only access vocabularies that rely on remembering them in the current moment. "Plain-spoken" means a vocabulary has been reduced to a bare minimum, which may have the effect of maximizing group cohesion, and perhaps algorithms running on social networks. The lyrics in pop music do essentially the same thing, but they aren't poetry per se. The medium is the message (lexicon).
1670. On music education: Knowing where to place your fingers on the instrument is not the same as knowing the chord changes to a piece of music. The rote learning of music is really more about creating a sequence or routine of patterns and placing them on a local map--whereas a more universal knowledge of the overall system is the pattern. In jazz, musicians typically know the 'operating system' of music; Individual pieces of music are just 'software'.
1669. A musical idea is a potential plan for (its) performance(s).
1667. When I was first learning music in the mid-70s I played along with the radio and records. Now young musicians play along with the internet. In the future, they will play along with the ——. (3/2019)
1647. There is a natural path between music and the visual arts. When musicians get older they have two options: write classical music that no one listens to, or make art that more people might look at.
1624. What I like about music more than art is that you can "rearrange" it, something you cannot do with a painting.
1622. A piece of art or music is a touchstone for a future context. In essence, it awaits unknown connections and circumstances that might occur in the future--with meanings that the original artist might not have realized. (Always consider the effect the future will have on your work).
1621. Music is no longer an industry because there is no industry that understands it. (Or perhaps it was never meant to be an industry, and merely became that way in the Industrial Age).
1620. Music is ready to use--unlike AI, which has myriad contingencies as well as required technologies that haven't been invented yet--perhaps not even thought of. Yet music can be made out of almost nothing.
1619. AI music is a way to completely remove anthropocentric essentialism. Just because a human wrote the code doesn't mean any of the humanity is in the results. It has no soul.
1609. Neither optimism nor pessimism has a basis in religion, but optimism is a natural side effect of a properly cultivated sense of spirituality--or recognition that spiritual contemplation is a shield against the incursion of negative thoughts. I've always thought music was a quick way to access this "shield", perhaps more so than art. It has to do with being in the flow of clock time and being able to shape it.
1604. An algorithmic strategy for visual art (and music) is "confuse the foreground and background" or "add ambiguity", but would it know what that means? AI doesn't know what "meaning" is, whereas humans always have at least a vague sense of it.
1594. Music expresses the otherwise invisible.
1590. People appreciate skill in art, more so than in music, which is why I still think skill in either art or music is optional, as long as it has some degree of 'cool'. 20th century paintings are extraordinary, but so is a performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. We desire the contemporary because we live in a rapidly-changing society biased towards things of the time.
1884. An album of music created with AI is no more interesting than an album that uses a wah-wah pedal on every track.
1866. Playing music can be interpreted as a hedonistic interpretation of Now, and is both a kind of temporary "inebriation" and a sobering pursuit of aesthetic experience. It's not self-absorption but rather an absorbing look at the true Self.
1861. Reading is about sound--the music of language. Even meaningless lyrics can be meaningful if they simply support the sound.
1859. All developments in music are extensions, not replacements.
1848. The primary requirement of pop music is that it does the dumbest thing for the optimal evolutionary payoff. It's not always about the music. Aesthetics/decoration is just a bonus. I like the bonuses.
1802. Music as a human Universal can’t fully flourish under nationalist ideologies. Talent knows no boundaries.
1797. As a musician, it is important to have musical ability and musical sensibility. The former is strictly objective and the latter can be creatively objective and subjective. (1999)
1796. When we spend time playing music we also utilize time more mindfully.
1794. It is most important to have good ideas in music, but also important to have interesting and compelling surface elements, as they are good ideas in and of themselves. (1999)
1793. Uncertainty is like the continuous chord inversion: You lose a sense of where the roots are, but they are always close by.
1784. Streaming music is the best anti-clutter art. It is an art experience without an art object.
1783. In music, the idea that we didn't need to be concerned with grammar gave us rock 'n' roll, but eventually, even that formed its own "grammar".
1780. Words should speak to you. One has to ask, "Is there anything in them that hasn't been said before?" Singing someone else's words is different than singing your own. I've noticed this when writing music to any kinds of words: The meaning of the words can sometimes disappear, or are overcome by the power of the foreground activity--the spoken word. Reading a passage from someone else's book and a passage from your own can be almost the same activity, but the process of thought, expression of thought through the spoken word, writing down the thoughts, then singing them, can obscure the initial thought process. In music, very often words are there simply as placeholders for words that are singable: There is no thought process whatsoever for the writer, but can emerge for the reader/listener. This is when they begin to speak and begin to say something.
1778. Once you've taken note of something, it's easier to recognize. Emulation in art and music works on this principle and is hugely powerful in the development of a signature vision or style. Most of the time we don't recall where we've seen or heard something, yet subtly influences what we do--sometimes for our entire lives.
1739. Code-switching began in the 1950s when R&B musicians had to play music in church on Sunday morning after having played in honky-tonks on Saturday night. They found they couldn't code switch. It was a good thing they didn't.
1735. Art is NOT decoration; It has spiritual dimensions, even if secular in its expression. Rock music in the 60s had this quality even if the characteristic of the music was dark. The physical aspects of the art do not matter, and the connection between how the work evolves and resolves into a final work are not the individual marks made with the hands of Gods, but rather is a record of intent to the artist, i.e. the remembered feeling while making the art, contemporaneous with events taking place in the world at that moment. Even if no one sees the art or hears the music, the record is made at spiritual or ethereal levels. This is where social media goes wrong: "Sharing" is nothing more than the delay of the ego to confront feelings of loneliness. To not feel lonely means there has been spiritual growth and awakening. The epidemic is not loneliness per se, but rather the avoidance of time alone. Art as a spiritual practice is an abnegation of loneliness.
1711. When fewer use manual tools and materials to make art in the digital age, how do ideas take shape without the use of the body? In music, I can compose with the real materials (theories), but composition is much more. This is where the intellect must come into play. This is where we have to think about where the soul is, then ultimately let soul take over to that it can emerge. But we can't get to the head and heart without using the mind and body.
1698. Artists need to be agnostic or indifferent about tools in order serve the ideas. Sometimes certain tools interfere with them--like CGI does in film and Auto-Tune in music.
1693. Somebody should always be playing some kind of traditional music so that culture doesn't become just pastiche. (1999)
1682. If you write music in an open key, then you can avoid the major-happy/minor-sad associations. It actually makes you sad for reasons other than labels or types.
1681. Sometimes it's useful in music performance to use metaphors from another instrument, e.g. "I'm a pretty good typist on the piano"; "I'm a good pianist on the keyboard"; "I'm a good pianist on the guitar"; "I'm a bad drummer on the piano." Metaphors allow you to temporarily locate similarities between one or more disciplines and use them to get a new perspective on an activity that has become too imprisoned by its own nature.
1672. Books give you vocabularies that you wouldn't necessarily get from other sources. Since they take longer to write, there's more thought to word choice than an article written and edited in a few days, or even within an hour. Also, article writers that have read more books have different vocabularies. If you want a small vocabulary, read only social media posts, or just watch video, in which people only access vocabularies that rely on remembering them in the current moment. "Plain-spoken" means a vocabulary has been reduced to a bare minimum, which may have the effect of maximizing group cohesion, and perhaps algorithms running on social networks. The lyrics in pop music do essentially the same thing, but they aren't poetry per se. The medium is the message (lexicon).
1670. On music education: Knowing where to place your fingers on the instrument is not the same as knowing the chord changes to a piece of music. The rote learning of music is really more about creating a sequence or routine of patterns and placing them on a local map--whereas a more universal knowledge of the overall system is the pattern. In jazz, musicians typically know the 'operating system' of music; Individual pieces of music are just 'software'.
1669. A musical idea is a potential plan for (its) performance(s).
1667. When I was first learning music in the mid-70s I played along with the radio and records. Now young musicians play along with the internet. In the future, they will play along with the ——. (3/2019)
1647. There is a natural path between music and the visual arts. When musicians get older they have two options: write classical music that no one listens to, or make art that more people might look at.
1624. What I like about music more than art is that you can "rearrange" it, something you cannot do with a painting.
1622. A piece of art or music is a touchstone for a future context. In essence, it awaits unknown connections and circumstances that might occur in the future--with meanings that the original artist might not have realized. (Always consider the effect the future will have on your work).
1621. Music is no longer an industry because there is no industry that understands it. (Or perhaps it was never meant to be an industry, and merely became that way in the Industrial Age).
1620. Music is ready to use--unlike AI, which has myriad contingencies as well as required technologies that haven't been invented yet--perhaps not even thought of. Yet music can be made out of almost nothing.
1619. AI music is a way to completely remove anthropocentric essentialism. Just because a human wrote the code doesn't mean any of the humanity is in the results. It has no soul.
1609. Neither optimism nor pessimism has a basis in religion, but optimism is a natural side effect of a properly cultivated sense of spirituality--or recognition that spiritual contemplation is a shield against the incursion of negative thoughts. I've always thought music was a quick way to access this "shield", perhaps more so than art. It has to do with being in the flow of clock time and being able to shape it.
1604. An algorithmic strategy for visual art (and music) is "confuse the foreground and background" or "add ambiguity", but would it know what that means? AI doesn't know what "meaning" is, whereas humans always have at least a vague sense of it.
1594. Music expresses the otherwise invisible.
1590. People appreciate skill in art, more so than in music, which is why I still think skill in either art or music is optional, as long as it has some degree of 'cool'. 20th century paintings are extraordinary, but so is a performance of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. We desire the contemporary because we live in a rapidly-changing society biased towards things of the time.
1587. Interesting: Jazz is often used in restaurants for a celebratory vibe, when the music is essentially more cerebratory and introspective. Lots of music genres are ultimately appropriated as a part of the interior decor.
1586. Creativity is not necessarily driven by technology. If a new technology has supplied the idea, then you actually need an artistic idea. I almost always try to use some type of generative constraint or 'recipe' for my work, even if it is a pun or metaphor. It's what I love about contemporary art. I've always thought pop and rock is contemporary music, that is not so concerned with skill and technique or technology, but rather the economy of means by which to communicate ideas.
1584. Music education, if pursued for the purpose of enhancing musical intelligence, is a feckless exercise. Only through the study of music for the sake of itself will musicality be a by-product. The downside of music education is that it can over-intellectualize the art form. In the absence of proper (or adequate) training, music education is just shop talk on social media. Learning music in a social context (learning music "on the street", and now "on the net") is a good thing, but it can spread incorrect information around.
1583. To realize the purpose of music, remove it entirely and study the effects. If we couldn't play recordings, or make them, we'd find a way to make music, or you would at least notice musical patterns in nature.
1580. Cognition itself is essentially linear, although we are 'primed' in different ways, i.e. we have a base of 'pre-understanding' that sets the stage for our impulses and actions. Liking a piece of music has a lot to do with this priming effect, which also includes our general preferences arising from family traditions, political leanings, and things as prosaic as preferences for certain foods. Those can lubricate fluency in life, as all the factors that inhibit it are already reconciled. Loyalties and affinities can make even the clunkiest prose feel as smooth as silk, as we blindly believe it regardless of grammar, correct spelling, or proper syntax. Meaning, like creativity, is malleable, but not to the extent that Truth cannot ultimately prevail, at which time one's beliefs are either validated or rejected. You may have liked or disliked something for the wrong reasons, or how you were primed.
1574. Creativity has always been redefined and reimagined through technology, but the more recent definitions simply involve the automation of it (through effects and filters for example), and perhaps the design and coding of tools to that end. This is consistent with the gradual move away from the hand-made, or in music, the manually-played, because it isn't convenient enough or takes to long to generate a good result. Now anyone can do these things in minutes. But why?
1573. Be careful that creativity doesn't become the same as pointless materialism. The next painting might become the equivalent of the next nice car you'd want to buy--perhaps even motivated by the possible attention on social media. Ask all the whys before you do something, and consider whether the motivation is either one's ego desires and/or the external forces from media manipulation. [This is why I think creating frameworks for creativity is more satisfying than just making another one of something without it being generative in some way, or derived from a generative process that anyone can use. It would be more rewarding, for example, to see how people use the elements you created. An example in music are lyrics, melody, and chord changes. (Remix can fit into this approach), but the derivative work is based on digital audio samples, rather than the human elements infused with the generative frameworks].
1564. African drumming is good to include in a film score, as it is story-telling through the music alone, even if not the same story. Drumming and film are both 'technologies' in the sense that they use sequences of 'frames' to form narratives.
1529. Music is a mostly secular expression of the spiritual.
1528. Electronic instruments and electronic music are a faster way of getting a final draft of a composition. The problem is that it's not resolved when the power isn't on. How would you play a piece of electronic music without electricity? It would essentially be like a drawing or a painting.
1527. If a young songwriter wrote her first hit song on a smartphone, could/should it be displayed in a museum? Does the playability of an instrument determine its ability to be an artifact? Jimi Hendrix's guitars still exist as artifacts, and the songs he wrote on them can still be played on them. If a recording studio was the 'instrument' and the recording studio no longer exists, what can the music be played on? Is playing a recording the same as playing the instruments that were initially recorded?
1526. Music doesn't (always) need its wheel reinvented.
1525. We must continue to nurture jazz, and not let it fade. It was the first style of music that had a synergy between the body and mind, and you could access any point on the axis to make something new, without reflexively creating sub-genres in the service of fashion.
1524. As a young musician, I always prefaced my remarks with "I learned music on the street", which meant playing along with the radio and records. Now "on the street" is "on social media", which is consistent with its original metaphor: The Information Superhighway. (4/2018)
1521. All sound, musical or otherwise, that is intentionally constructed by humans, shares the same sequential logic, whether it involves theory or not. If it sounds wrong, then it is. It works the same way in visual art, but things that look 'wr0ng' might work as abstractions, whereas in music you can't get away with things that are out-of-tune or out-of-time. EDM is easy because those two things are less of an issue. The only creativity then is how things are strung together. Almost everyone can tell if something is harmonically wrong--they just don't know why. Theory has the answer, so it's worthwhile learning it or becoming aware of how it works. We know that operating systems exist, and that is how computers work, but we don't know why or don't care. But that doesn't mean that systems aren't crucial to how the world works.
1520. AI music poses an interesting question for composers: how do we influence machine-learning with new music, or rather what music do we write or curate to put into the OpenAI for music? The music 'student' now is OpenAI.
1514. Jazz was an elegant solution to the control of the use of Free Will. God isn't the musician.
1506. There is no invention left in music. That's actually a good thing; we have everything we need to be creative.
1505. Jazz is sometimes viewed as elitist, but it is still essentially a form of roots music.
1504. I learned music by playing along with the radio and records. Now people learn by talking about it on social media. Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. (3/2018)
1502. In many ways, vision is informed by language; knowing more about what to look for gives you greater 'insight'. Sometimes insight comes directly from metaphor as a way to frame something in such a way to see it differently, and makes it easier to communicate. Art and music are 'frames' in this context.
1498. Both prosody and rhythmic displacement enhance or interfere with meaning. In speech, it is a strict requirement for comprehension; in music, it is a tool of creativity. Prose can sometimes have a musical quality, but the phrases are too long to map to specific rhythms. In the past few decades we have moved towards Beats rather than rhythms, with longer prose-like phrases loosely-draped over them. Rhythm's connection with the body is through the hands and feet, capable of producing marching rhythms (primarily in 2/4 or 4/4), as a way for humans to 'flock' or 'entrain'. This is what makes music so interesting as a bottom-up phenomenon, emerging from the body, extending out for group cohesion. While electronically-produced beats and rhythms have become evolutionarily established at this point, they have also broken the connection to the body, and are produced top-down from the intellect. The two may become synergistic, but it hasn't happened yet because pop music always has some element of fashion, which creates a sense that we have to be primarily concerned with what's new--or what should be new.
1495. Computers have obviously informed music, but it is doubtful that computer or social networking has had a significant impact on creativity at the compositional or performance levels, unlike electronic musical instruments that weren't (necessarily) tethered to social media. Musicians can share sound files back and forth in the creative process, but ever since the advent of music social networking, nothing of real substance has come out of it, comparable to other periods in pop music history. It hasn't made people more social or collaborative, at least by the standards of pre-internet songwriting, with the primary reason being that our brains are naturally wired for physical spaces. Our experience of the world is spatiotemporal; there are 'place' cells mapped in the hippocampus, and are associated with memory. (I know this is true because listening to music or other sounds while moving, encodes the memory of the place when played again. Audio books will do this, whereas paper books, even though they invoke place in the imagination, don't get replayed in the brain when read again.) Virtual environments are like books read while traveling; it doesn't imprint your memory of the place where you were reading it. If stationary, a virtual experience probably will not invoke place memory. It will be interesting to see the effects of VR and VR audio on 'brain places.'
1493. Often when musicians are playing their instruments well, it is because that part of the brain is not tuned into the mechanical aspects and is in a larger flow happening in a larger context. In terms of the interaction of humans and robots, it is the human that will be most affected. Perhaps that's why we tend to depict robots as less robotic because we are afraid of becoming like them.
1460. Improvisation is extended composition. Composition is the controlled current of sound and music.
1459. Music is both indigenous and universal.
1450. Music can narrow the gap between art and science.
1449. A musician should always want to compose. It's a good way to explore the 'operating system' of music.
1444. In EDM, you can write a minute's worth of music in seconds--even less if it's generative or algorithmic.
1419. At some point, you have to go back to old grammars in order to discover new slangs. You can tell when musical slangs become grammars (or traditions) when they get absorbed, such as a music lesson involving the mechanical performance of ascending and descending blues scales for use as a remixable sample. After doing that a few times you really want a new slang.
1405. There are two basic ways to add cohesion to creativity: 1) create the work, then serialize; and, 2) create similar pieces in an existing series. This also works in music where you can compose first, then add to a collection (album) or define the framework for the album and fill it in accordingly.
1400. You should put enough density into a piece of music to allow for alternating points of attention--noticing two or more centers of attention or expectations. (7/2017)
1390. When we talk about music having 'spiritual' qualities, it is the element of serendipity that defines it. Jazz can have the capacity for 'spirituality' simply because of its improvisatory nature, which can, to some degree, remove the over-analytical mind. No one on a bandstand is stopping during the middle of a solo and saying "I like that idea, let's stop and record it" or "Wait what was that thing you did...?" Recordings of these types of moments can't be in a multi-take/multi-tracked environment because even if there was magic in every take, combining or compositing them puts the mind back in analysis mode, not 'spirit' mode.
1389. On independent copying: In music, it's copyright infringement; in physics, the replication of a theoretical result is a breakthrough.
1388. Old genres of music always come back if there is enough interest by younger generations. Some may have just discovered Weather Report and Return to Forever, and some older generations as well. What was interesting once can be interesting again.
1363. A truism of the universe: if it rhymes someone has already thought of it. Simple rhymes are one of the most primitive aspects of language, as they are inherently musical.
1360. In music, a better listener is usually a better player.
1357. I am agnostic about music training. If the ideas are resolved, it is largely irrelevant that a musician knows music theory. A music producer sometimes has to have that philosophy. In visual art, the artist is also the artisan (producer) and very often the philosopher.
1351. Music (or indeterminate sound that possesses a musical pattern) is always potentially present if we are mindful of hearing it.
1347. "Music is a waste of time". Think how patently absurd that is. Music performance allows one to be intimately involved with the passing of time, although listening to music is untethered to time.
1342. To use language is to have the capability for music, although the converse is not necessarily true. But writing from both perspectives can result in something richer. If writing prose is being inside all the time, going outside to do something else enriches the inner experience. For many creative people, leaving the workspace and returning to it, somehow re-activates it. Incubation usually doesn't happen while working because you're concentrating on the work. But it can occur in different domains. This is why it's useful to do more than one thing: you can go outside and inside, which allows incubation on two levels.
1329. Ambient music is really what we discovered could represent what it sounded like in our heads. Ambient music is the default mode network of sound. It's a different kind of noise, that has some variation, but never enough to make it Music or noise.
1328. Music is really all spiritual regardless if it is associated with organized religion or organized anything, including the genre. I think music performance is a kind of 'bulkhead', isolating and shutting off the neocortex. At least since the Enlightenment, the arts have been a product of the cortex. African cultures are the opposite, but will probably change as they modernize.
1309. The human hands (and feet) evolved to play musical instruments, which are essential tools for playing on sonic perception.
1305. No one needs to say "I'm passionate about music". Before the meme 'passion' you just did it without announcements.
1296. It is much easier to be expressive (or 'interesting') in music if you completely break the rules.
1294. In music, it's difficult to remove its cognitive power. When you play a piece of music for the first time, the patterns or recurring elements will replay in your brain. There's no way to rewire this through composition itself, i.e. forcing a cultural or philosophical position through a lyric, except if the lyric repeats as a pattern somewhere in the music, or even in the title....
1293. As a composer, you (attempt to) write the music you admire, whether you are conscious of it or not. Everything is a copy at some level.
1275. Blues is a music for not thinking, or for stopping anxiety-provoking thought. As background music, blues naturally interferes with thinking. As a blues musician would use music as anodyne, the listener should as well. It's not a background music at all.
1263. There had been a general abandonment of traditional music education in favor of a DIY ethic, beginning in about 1980, when pop supergroups were splintering off into solo acts. It continues to evolve in interesting ways in parallel with technology. In the haste to move on to whatever is new, we are discarding what has been enriching to us thus far. Nostalgia can revive it somewhat in younger generations, but the original essences are lost, as no one has a direct memory of them, and consequently get subsumed into whatever the new technology is.
1247. Musical instruments are some of the most generative objects in the world. People want to play them because they can harness complexity through the limited options inherent in the form of the instrument, as well as in sound itself. Computers and recording studios are now 'instruments' but it is too difficult to control the number of options. Simple instruments are the best solution because you can achieve even more richness and complexity by using groups of them.
1208. Placing music into complex artificial systems that have delays, is both a problem and an interesting idea. Reverberation defines the dimensions of a place but can interfere with rhythmic coherence. The size of the room will naturally dictate the note durations that are feasible, but in artificial ambient worlds, both the music and venue are never co-dependent. That is one of the characteristics of electronic music that is superior to traditional acoustic music.
1206. The sounds in nature are probably made with specific intentions; we hear them as random noise or sometimes as music, but the creatures that make them are doing it for purely instinctual reasons, or at least that's how we perceive them.
1198. We shouldn't confuse the medium with the metaphor. Music is inherently not like painting. Philosophy doesn't make a sound, (but punk was really loud). We should also not confuse or combine the input and output of instruments, especially where there is a potential for latency and delays, i.e. 'playing' a computer, which has inherent latencies at the software and hardware levels. Music relies on the capacity for instruments to create experiences that can be understood as being musical. To put music in the middle of complex artificial systems with alternate interfaces and controllers places it in the same mental model with a computer that primarily processes text and code and creates outputs to a screen and through speakers. Alternate controllers are less responsive to simple binary interaction with an instrument because they have to go through digital conversions. There must be transmission loss in that process. Music that exists only as a philosophical position has to run itself through language--another transmission loss. The arts can't exist as singular entities without using borrowed metaphors; everything exists in its potential to be reshaped by time and technology, and all the ideas that it can present. An interesting experiment is to use an art form in the purest sense, then think of ways to extend it. An obvious example is using numerology in music, such as tetrachords, pentatonic and whole-tone scales, to access the ideas that 4, 5, and 6 can suggest visually. But doing so doesn't change the sound of the music, or the appearance of things made with that metaphor; it creates something completely different, sometimes to the extent that it abandons the basic elements that made it possible. One can make visual music, but music history must be kept in the equation.
1182. Music is my forte, and I could solo all day on the lyxian mode in every key but is it artistically relevant? What music would require in terms of technical ability is somewhat of a gamble: should a musician spend all their time practicing for a composition that never materializes? The best approach is to play well enough for the duration of the musical idea, and to maintain that level of performance for the sake of composition. The Etude as a form was a way to reconcile the two. The corollary in visual art is the Study, which can also become a finished work.
1176. Hearing is one of the first senses to develop in the womb, but vision eventually dominates cognition (so much so that we need photography to offload some of that information). Alas, we don't do the same for sound, as it is mostly static and unchanging (noise). Even cities can be sonically boring. Music is a way to make noise eventful. (7/18/2016)
1175. Ideally, creative work should be 'global' or not have any boundaries or 'checkpoints' between them. But artists are limited by how easily they can travel around between the disciplines. Home for me is music.
1154. Muzak (including any music played as background in places) actually now defines a place. It is a piece of furniture, or any object that if missing would create a void. No music in a Starbucks would be almost as unnerving as some of the music played in them.
1152. Music is not inherently about the idealization of beauty (or the pop variants of the word, e.g. 'cool'). We might want it to be, but it does not defend itself against other interpretations of music and/or beauty, or for that matter 'cool').
1145. Recitation of words evinces music out of merely typed words, or even words read silently.
1144. Technology always changes pop music: stereo, FM, MTV, YouTube, Social Media. Boomer artists seem to have stopped at MTV. Millennial artists will stop at _______. (6/2016)
1127. The new 'World Music' is music not played on any instruments that now exist. Music will be created on these new instruments, that won't originate from any one region or people. In Neil Postman's book 'Technopoly' (1992), he made the interesting point that people that use computers as their instrument are not 'computerers', in the same way that there are writers or composers. But obviously that's changed, as the tools are now more accepted as being virtual. What goes missing are the frequency bands inherent in traditional musical instruments. There is probably a measurable difference between a recording of a real violin and a sample of it played through a speaker.
1098. The best music isn't all about the music, but it's nice if it is.
1095. In the future, we might say, "So someone wrote music for airports?", which will cause a metaphor to spark something, not necessarily to make more music for airports, but to make them more 'musical', which activates all the elements that connect the spatial and temporal. Music, place, and architecture are naturally synergistic, regardless of whether anyone is creating a synergistic experience. (4/2016)
1085. The music you loved at age 30 (defined by music you played repeatedly) is the music you'll be endeared to at age 60.
1073. Is it even ethical to let machines make music? If musicians had mind-clones would they be your collaborator or your competition? Could it sue you for stealing its ideas? (3/2016)
1049. When synths first started to be used as a primary instrument of a band, they were considered 'machines' and now we don't realize that over forty years later, we have almost completely made the transformation. The 'Singularity' has already happened in music. (1/2016)
1048. Music forces you to appreciate patterns (pattern consonance), or the lack of them (intentional pattern dissonance).
1042. Art gives us more ways to be clever. It was briefly tried with music, but ultimately was not successful.
1038. What I like about writing and playing music is that it keeps you off-line, at least while you're engaged with it. The internet, unlike the recording studio hasn't yet become an 'instrument.'
1033. You can't separate music from place, even if the place is within your head.
1031. Listening to music is also listening to ideas.
1026. The best way to learn something new is to find out (in the easiest way possible) what something is capable of doing, then immediately do something with it. When you see what music can do and how it works, you immediately want to make music. Another way is to copy or emulate, then follow that path--like tracing an image. Rote learning can sometimes be like going around the world in the horse latitudes, and not seeing or doing much of anything.
1023. Music is really mimicking what happens in the art world, but with a long lag time. (1997)
1009. Place shapes what music might be possible. Rock music would not have been possible without the suburban basement rehearsal room. Perhaps this is why in cities of millions of people, we are forced to have atomized musical experiences with headphones as there is no way to be publicly loud. Cities may force us inside our heads.
1006. 'Future music' is really a kind of new 'world music', that is not necessarily tied to equal temperament. (10/2015)
1002. If you were to distill the essence of language, you'd come up with something resembling poetry or music.
0974. Using design as a metaphor in music, sometimes it's better to "ask good questions" rather than work on answers where a question has not been posed. This translates to asking the subtractive question: What don't we want to do?
0971. Pre-internet, music was judged on whether it sounded like it could be played on the radio. Currently there's no one platform or medium that sets a Standard. Even the platforms and media are constantly shifting and you can't find stability. (7/2015)
0965. Music doesn't have the problem of being silent when it is written. Therefore, music is more connected with language than writing, as it automatically speaks for itself. Moreover, the rhythms inherent in speech move it more towards music than language. Once you add a musical element to language, it separates itself from the text symbols, and how the brain interprets them. (See Language of Synesthesia)
0958. An instrument is a container of music. The body is an instrument, as well as container for soul.
0951. In music, things occur. In art, they both occur and remain visible.
0949. The internet hasn't made music better by simply democratizing it, or breaking down the whole system so the pieces could be put back together in a different way. It hasn't yet been put back together in a way that resembled the good aspects of the old system. If you break the old vase, the new vase still has to look and function like a vase.
0926. Music theory as we have known it has tarnished. Younger generations prefer loose structures--things that are more parametric that have biology metaphors (like Frank Gehry and his affinity for the piscine), and glitchy music with no meter. Some older books I've perused on music and linguistics have become somewhat irrelevant--alas because we seem to care less about those reptilian connections in our brain, now supplanted by the cortex, big data, algorithms, and cybernetics. There's nothing wrong with that, as contemporary art is often all about making it 'wrong.'
0923. Some speech is in natural triple meter; for example the phrase, "oranges are sweeter than apples in May" naturally falls in 3/4 or 6/8 as spoken (at least as one uninterrupted phrase with even durations.) People are innately musical when they speak, and never realize the melodic and rhythmic nature of language. Music and language are natural extensions of each other.
0919. Music has adapted to the 21st century, much like a tree trunk that wrapped itself around a chain-link fence.
0917. There are two poles in music: cold mechanical performance at one end and cold intellectual thought at the other. A typical music lesson moves in the direction of point 'A'. The goal is to shorten the time to the middle ground between the perfect performance and the frustration with the inability to do it to that degree. Music shouldn't be about this, but objectives vary based upon where you orient yourself as a musician. At this point we've been successful at all points on the axis: with Lang Lang on one end and the heady vaporous sound designs from electronic composers at the other. Which is better? This got played out at the Grammys with Lang Lang banging his way to the foreground to no avail. This made me think about how the traditional music education has gotten demoted. Paul McCartney looked almost anonymous strumming his guitar. At another level this is an interesting experiment. At the Grammys we (are supposed to) celebrate community, but actually expect a consummation of celebrity.
0903. Perhaps it is better that words are lost, as in the phrase "I am at a loss for words". Visual art (and music without words) gives language a means of escape.
0902. Music is a strange thing as it can evoke places (spatial dimensions), yet is a temporal art form.
0883. The simulacrum of music is now the musical reality. (2/2015)
0878. The idea that art is easy pervaded the 1960s (which in one sense was a zeitgeist), but it steered musicians away from its rigors and made it more of a visual art. The musician now has to embrace that method, while at the same time preserve its history.
0876. Practice only if the musical idea requires it. Practicing for the sake of itself may lead to certain kinds of ideas. Sometimes studying away from instruments creates an awareness that allows you to be receptive to different kinds of ideas, some of which may require a more rigorous approach. The trouble with ideas generated from practice is that they tend to be too mechanical....
0872. The new reality for musicians is that they are the performer and surveillant, and recorded as 'evidence', i.e. everything exists to support some kind of argument or position that might arise in the future. We need to just let life flow by instead of trying to bottle every drop.
0845. Sound was meant to be free but music made a 'cage' for it.
0844. The best way to reconnect with real time is through the playing of music.
0825. Perhaps the reason music is less interesting is that people have abandoned it for other things, and as a result there's no veneration of craft. Music might be in a "sour grapes" phase. (10/2014)
0805. For the ideal music of the future, you have to take yesterday's tomorrows and transform them into today's tomorrow, and mix in some of future yesterdays.
0796. The album format in music is still useful in terms of providing a focus for the activity. Series work the same way in visual art.
0795. All music that has words is essentially 'conceptual' in that it is about something, or about an idea. Conceptual art gets marginalized, but it has a lot in common with pop music.
0784. Music is still interesting enough to inspire someone want to learn it (but time is running out). (7/2014)
0773. Music, unlike art, could still thrive without objects. The body is naturally a drum, but art is dependent on whether a surface and implement are available.
0763. High-fidelity is overrated. All great music starts with plain fidelity of craft and fidelity of emotion.
0755. There is a distinct difference between the making of art or composing music and the consumption of it. Making art takes you to places where you feel you have conquered it in some way, but usually you find that you never arrived, and want to keep traveling.
0753. Anyone can be a photographer; this wasn't always true. Anyone can play music; this was always true.
0742. When the songs are good, all the individual players can be veritable virtuosi. Typically when there's one appointed instrumentalist in a band, the songs are usually bad or mediocre, especially if they are writing the songs. Music composition is a distinct art that requires 100% concentration, not 100% ostentation. (4/2008)
0739. Lots of futuristic thinking throws the baby out with the bathwater. The art world always had the word 'Neo' in its lexicon that it could use to save the baby. The music world had a different way of saving the baby--by sampling it.
0725. Visual artists may not realize that their work represents music that hasn't been created yet.
0724. The music world is different from the art world; musicians can't just decide to do abstract and pop art as easily as visual artists.
0703. Music is one of the adhesives that bonds experience and memory.
0670. Music can be deceptive: it can trick you into feelings that are not the true feelings of the composer. (11/1997)
0669. Data that represents real-time temporal states (audio/visual) are in a 'liquid' state, detached from the space-time continuum that requires organic experience in real-time. If you want to slow down, experience music in real-time by playing it, observe the environment around you more closely, photograph your environment, and really look at art rather than zooming past it. Playing music requires merging into a real flow of time, sometimes notched into regular meters and durations.
0638. The medium is the message also applies to musical instruments: a saxophone can create messages unlike other instruments.
0631(05). Understanding the creative process usually comes in hindsight, and only matures after many years or decades. Sometimes making another version of an artwork or piece of music helps you to understand it better, or to fully put it to rest.
0624(05). Hearing had evolved to eventually require music.
0623. To a large degree, the power of music is to compel you to listen to something repeatedly over many years or decades. Only a small number of musicians accomplish this.
0606. It's easier to get away with something that looks bad or wrong than it is with something that sounds out-of-tune or out-of-time or otherwise sounds wrong. It's more difficult to be sly with irony in music. Abstract Expressionism sometimes gets conflated with the freedom in jazz, when in fact jazz improvisation can have all kinds of rules and constraints. Jackson Pollock paintings had the primary constraint of avoiding representation, but jazz can't avoid melody, even if dissonant.
0603. Lots of 17 year-olds wanted to be rock stars. I was more interested in the music.
0598. What Napster did to music is what social media is doing to art: producing more of it for free, and in the process making it more disposable and unserious.
0594. In the 1980s, we began to take our eyes off the music and on to the musician, then in the 1990s on to the celebrity.
0578. Master jazz musicians know how to control the tiny space between listening and playing.
0560. An artist can be influenced by art or music history--even without knowing the history. This might also explain how two nearly identical works are created, even when they were created independently. Creation is not entirely about direct imitation but rather a gathering of influences separated by big gaps of time. Artists (or musicians) undoubtedly have impressions, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are making direct copies of them.
0555. Just as markets are driven by group-think, so are art and music. The ultimate role of the artist is to be subversive in the face of popular opinion--while at the same time not sacrificing the sense of craft and personal style. (Artists not bound to signature styles are more apt to weather paradigm shifts.)
0551. Musical instruments are extensions of ourselves. The human voice is an instrument and extension.
0549. Where would music be if the internet didn't evolve as it has? Where will music be when other technologies arise? All art forms are labile, adapting to the forces of technology.
0533. Soul is the 'slang' of music. It's a variation that everyone understands more intuitively.
0532(06). Music is a solid framework for lots of things, even if you don't want to play an instrument. Knowledge is the instrument.
0468(05). If a creative process is creative and unique, it won't necessarily become Art. In music, until something is recorded and played it is inert, except when one knows the creative process that was involved. We like musical artists for the creative processes we are familiar with, encapsulated in scores, live performances, or recordings. The processes preexist in memory, which are reactivated through performances. Sometimes all you like are the processes because the recordings or performances didn't have time to resolve completely. Masterpieces are masterpieces because that process was completed.
0464. If you want a sense of spirituality to emerge in a piece of music, you have to be willing to surrender to the moment, and apply analysis sparingly--or perfect your craft to the point where it can be made invisible. It's really a balancing act of right and left brain: the right provides the creative framework, the left its outer 'skin'.
0463. Sometimes lyrics are just another sound--something to fill in the 'lyric' space in a piece of music. If they weren't there, one would wonder where they were.
0460. An evangelical Christian group went on a mission to Morocco and staged Christian rock festivals as "important foreign policy". In a way, this is like the heady 1960s for Evangelicals, using music as a way to rally public opinion and winds up being plain music, and not promoting social change as intended. The Moroccan kid asked, 'What are Evangelicals?' (I doubt they understood the lyrics either, and just liked how the music sounded.) Music is always primarily about the effect of patterned sound on the mind and body. (7/2005)
0459. Louis XIV's Jason Hill: "I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better". This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. (This is how one discovers classical music as well.) You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don't see the context. When you tell people that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots at its premiere--then they listen more closely.
0458. The terms 'music composition' and 'composer' are constantly changing, but the process is essentially the same: making art that unfolds over time.
0457. A music education doesn't necessarily have to include written music. Indian classical music is taught directly by the guru to the disciple rather than by the notation method used in the West. In the modern world, the new "guru" is the latest technology. (10/2005)
0450. On politics and music: you have to be careful of public backlash when you address foreign policy issues. Sometimes when musicians make anti-war statements it can sound crass and naive. If a musician is going to stand on a soapbox, it has to be done right--which means doing all the research to substantiate the rant. (10/2005)
0439: Computer databases can shadow your preferences and create profiles of who it thinks you are, but that doesn't mean that simply because one rents musicals or listens to classical music they don't also like Screamo. We all commit the Fundamental Attribution Error, but so do algorithms.
0427. The 'seed' of Africa can be relevant to us all: it is especially relevant in music as it brings together the 'acoustic' elements of social order (the oral tradition) and the use of rhythm and beats to communicate and form unique cultures.
0393. Poetry and music keep the secret that language tries to tell.
0375(05). Music always exists, even if it doesn't involve movement of air. Music is the sound of thought. Musicians give it form.
0374(05). Music can learn a lot from art history in terms of deeper cultural meanings. One can study medieval organum and learn nothing about the world two thousand years prior to it; whereas a visit to a museum allows one to make connections from distant antiquity to modernity. Ancient artifacts such as pentatonic flutes say nothing about contemporary culture, other than being primitively 'minimal'. Comparing artistic expression from antiquity to modernity, one sees gradual increases of complexity with technological breakthroughs, that are then railed against and simplified. In all of these reductions, there was an elimination of the theoretical--that you didn't need formal training to be an artist. This is exactly where modern culture is today.
0247. Always release new music attached to a film or other visuals. It fuses the emotional aspects with the current disposition of the listener.
0228(04). Good music makes time transparent.
0210. In music and sound, space and silence pull the listener in. They are a slipstream pulling you in from where you were to where you're going. It 'punctuates' the present.
0560. An artist can be influenced by art or music history--even without knowing the history. This might also explain how two nearly identical works are created, even when they were created independently. Creation is not entirely about direct imitation but rather a gathering of influences separated by big gaps of time. Artists (or musicians) undoubtedly have impressions, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are making direct copies of them.
0555. Just as markets are driven by group-think, so are art and music. The ultimate role of the artist is to be subversive in the face of popular opinion--while at the same time not sacrificing the sense of craft and personal style. (Artists not bound to signature styles are more apt to weather paradigm shifts.)
0551. Musical instruments are extensions of ourselves. The human voice is an instrument and extension.
0549. Where would music be if the internet didn't evolve as it has? Where will music be when other technologies arise? All art forms are labile, adapting to the forces of technology.
0533. Soul is the 'slang' of music. It's a variation that everyone understands more intuitively.
0532(06). Music is a solid framework for lots of things, even if you don't want to play an instrument. Knowledge is the instrument.
0468(05). If a creative process is creative and unique, it won't necessarily become Art. In music, until something is recorded and played it is inert, except when one knows the creative process that was involved. We like musical artists for the creative processes we are familiar with, encapsulated in scores, live performances, or recordings. The processes preexist in memory, which are reactivated through performances. Sometimes all you like are the processes because the recordings or performances didn't have time to resolve completely. Masterpieces are masterpieces because that process was completed.
0464. If you want a sense of spirituality to emerge in a piece of music, you have to be willing to surrender to the moment, and apply analysis sparingly--or perfect your craft to the point where it can be made invisible. It's really a balancing act of right and left brain: the right provides the creative framework, the left its outer 'skin'.
0463. Sometimes lyrics are just another sound--something to fill in the 'lyric' space in a piece of music. If they weren't there, one would wonder where they were.
0460. An evangelical Christian group went on a mission to Morocco and staged Christian rock festivals as "important foreign policy". In a way, this is like the heady 1960s for Evangelicals, using music as a way to rally public opinion and winds up being plain music, and not promoting social change as intended. The Moroccan kid asked, 'What are Evangelicals?' (I doubt they understood the lyrics either, and just liked how the music sounded.) Music is always primarily about the effect of patterned sound on the mind and body. (7/2005)
0459. Louis XIV's Jason Hill: "I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better". This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. (This is how one discovers classical music as well.) You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don't see the context. When you tell people that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring caused riots at its premiere--then they listen more closely.
0458. The terms 'music composition' and 'composer' are constantly changing, but the process is essentially the same: making art that unfolds over time.
0457. A music education doesn't necessarily have to include written music. Indian classical music is taught directly by the guru to the disciple rather than by the notation method used in the West. In the modern world, the new "guru" is the latest technology. (10/2005)
0450. On politics and music: you have to be careful of public backlash when you address foreign policy issues. Sometimes when musicians make anti-war statements it can sound crass and naive. If a musician is going to stand on a soapbox, it has to be done right--which means doing all the research to substantiate the rant. (10/2005)
0439: Computer databases can shadow your preferences and create profiles of who it thinks you are, but that doesn't mean that simply because one rents musicals or listens to classical music they don't also like Screamo. We all commit the Fundamental Attribution Error, but so do algorithms.
0427. The 'seed' of Africa can be relevant to us all: it is especially relevant in music as it brings together the 'acoustic' elements of social order (the oral tradition) and the use of rhythm and beats to communicate and form unique cultures.
0393. Poetry and music keep the secret that language tries to tell.
0375(05). Music always exists, even if it doesn't involve movement of air. Music is the sound of thought. Musicians give it form.
0374(05). Music can learn a lot from art history in terms of deeper cultural meanings. One can study medieval organum and learn nothing about the world two thousand years prior to it; whereas a visit to a museum allows one to make connections from distant antiquity to modernity. Ancient artifacts such as pentatonic flutes say nothing about contemporary culture, other than being primitively 'minimal'. Comparing artistic expression from antiquity to modernity, one sees gradual increases of complexity with technological breakthroughs, that are then railed against and simplified. In all of these reductions, there was an elimination of the theoretical--that you didn't need formal training to be an artist. This is exactly where modern culture is today.
0247. Always release new music attached to a film or other visuals. It fuses the emotional aspects with the current disposition of the listener.
0228(04). Good music makes time transparent.
0210. In music and sound, space and silence pull the listener in. They are a slipstream pulling you in from where you were to where you're going. It 'punctuates' the present.
0207(05). When someone says their heart isn't in something it really means they have acquired a natural aversion to it. But if one's heart is not in music, for example, we shouldn't resort to creating music with algorithms as sour grapes. We shouldn't impose our disingenuous heart's desires on those whose heart's desires are genuine.
0192. The arts merge at the level of inspiration but diverge at the level of craft. Painting can inspire music, but they use different tools.
0175. Duke Ellington learned piano by watching piano rolls, which is similar to learning music by playing along with records. Recorded media has proven to be more important than sheet music in creating a modern 'oral tradition.'
0174. Bebop was seen as a brilliant invention and musicians were excited about its endless possibilities. But it was seen as elitist and too arty. Wynton Marsalis once said in essence, "You have to go to art--it should not have to come to you". While I agree with that idea, it seems to be a bit arrogant. Isn't sharing something an act of giving, rather than making it available?
0173. Music exists at the transect of emotion and an unfolding reality.
0172. The pop music of today will be the nostalgic soundtrack to world events in twenty years. (2003)
0171. Jazz learned from Classical music via African music.
0170. 'Collision architecture' is a great example of art that intentionally avoids aesthetics, i.e. to avoid references to anything conventional, such as a major triad in music or a right angle, or something with a 'pleasing' color scheme. It is an appreciation of ideas that emerge (metaphorically) by 'accident'. (1/2001)
0169. Even if a song tries to tell a story, the surface elements will always take precedence over the subject matter. This is why pop music has never really worked as a means of social change: it's too esoteric to have a pervasive effect, and any lasting effect dies away with the music and as the fans age.
0168. When you listen to music that has lyrics, you are really using two different areas of the brain. One of the challenges of writing good songs is to target one of these areas in a positive way, or to get both areas in sync. (John Lennon was good at this.)
0167. The true essence of music, at least from the first inventors of tonal music, is to create a semblance of spirituality or enrichment, or to enlighten the life of the listener. Not necessarily in a devotional way, but to create at least a sense of wonder about it.
0166. The power of music is not so much in the rhythm and melody, but rather in its 'outside' elements, cultural connotation and the context and era in which it is created and/or performed. When you hear a piece of music, it activates all types of knowledge. Music is the adhesive that bonds experience and memory.
0165. Each new musical genre expands the definition of music.
0164. You don't write songs; you find them.
0163. In Haydn's time, a symphonic performance was the ultimate experience of music--like a rock concert--the essence of music. People now play Haydn on clock radios and MP3 players, just as ambient filler. This is an insulting use of music as an object. Another example of simply using music is when it is used as jingo, with intentionally bad musicianship, only to hijack it for use as a fight song or other utilitarian propaganda. (A work song is different in that it is an original composition, used to rally community spirit.) (3/2003)
0162. Physical media for music have constraints built in, which informs the nature of the work. The vinyl LP (45-60 minutes), the CD (60-75 minutes), the 45 (4 minutes, with B-side). In the age of the LP, an artistic decision might be "we need 5 more minutes". When the medium is a digital sound file, there are virtually no duration constraints. How does this affect the content or ideas about content?
0161. Poetry is in the 'ear' of the beholder. The most successful lyricists understand that while music on its own can be powerful, music fused to emotionally charged images and/or words can have a more lasting impact. But more often it is the trialectic with milestone events in your life that informs music, as those events encode more indelibly in memory (i.e. being 'haunted' by memory.)
0160. Jazz sounds like art, but it's really more like a science.
0159. Finding the right tempo is the key.
0158. The great thing about jazz and blues is that you can age gracefully as an artist as well as an individual. Once a genre matures, it is the elders that uphold it.
0157. Staging a musical performance should be like making a painting. But somehow visual techniques often get left out of music composition, when very often the metaphor only enhances it.
0156. When you listen to eastern and Indian music, you hear what the blues was trying to do.
0155. The impact of a song lyric relies on its ability to stand alone as a poem, long after the music has been forgotten. The interchangeability of music and language serve to make ideas more salient.
0154. When Muzak was invented, we redefined music as having utilitarian qualities, i.e. to be used for a purpose other than enjoyment or enrichment, and only as something to fill the background or 'decorate' the space with a pre-fab, nondescript sound. This is a use of music, but not the essence of music.
0153. If a song is truly good, it can be as short as 2-1/2 to 3 minutes in length. That way you want to play it over and over. Most of the Beatles' early work was based on this principle.
0152(05). Instruments are symbols and containers for music. This is why traditional musical instruments will always persist, even as instruments become increasingly virtual. The same will apply to recordings, which will always enjoy a persistent nostalgia for physical objects, even if it is an album sleeve with art and lyrics. As long as humans have a sense of touch, they will want something they can really hold.
0151. Jazz turns melody on its side and makes it harmony.
...0150(05). A musician should always want to compose. It's a good way to explore the 'operating system' of music.
0149(05). We speak of spiritual enlightenment, but there can be an agnostic form of it in the form of self-actualization--a deep sense of knowing who you are and why you do what you do. But that can be an illusion as well, where you're in the theater of your life watching a film directed by someone or something else. This is a phenomenon that occurs naturally to a musician, where certain areas of the brain are activated and deactivated while in a musical moment. Music is a 'speaking-in-tongues', sometimes without words.
0099. Alternate music controllers tend to obviate (or at least over-virtualize) the tactile aspects of playing a traditional musical instrument. This is an insidious way to make us less interested in investing time in something that has already been made convenient.
0063(05). Music is always looking for shortcuts. Rock 'n' Roll was an attempt at a shortcut.
0058. The problem with a free culture is that there is no longer an incentive to spend lots of time on something. That could be why there is so much sameness in music: cut/paste, revise and plagiarize because it provides instant gratification. Since everything has already been made (readymade), it just needs a quick appropriation or re-appropriation.
0056. On the 1979 'Disco Demolition' in Chicago: It is interesting that people had such strong opinions about a genre that ultimately exerted a big influence on pop music. You can't really exclude any genre from the American musical pantheon, because over time it becomes embedded, and feelings of nostalgia have a way of bringing it back in--and we become endeared to it again.
0055. People will spend a vast amount of time learning programming and software, but won't take the time to learn what 'diatonic' means in music. The information that we desire must be seen as having immediate social value. (It was a different world when the term 'diatonic' was useful information, and more consilient with science and the humanities in general. When you demote any kind of learning, in music or otherwise, you also remove useful metaphors or linkages to other domains.)
0035. Everyone is capable of being a savant, but reasoning gets in the way. Music has an innate transcendental quality, that addresses the paradox of reason: Music can develop the capability for reason, but in the process can make music too analytical. The best composers were able to work around this paradox, such that it eventually sounded like the result of free spirit rather than the mind.
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