Peripherique

 

Very often people will comment on the edge or frame of something, rather than what they thought was the focal point.

This image by Austin Kleon is ostensibly about the creative space. But I did wonder, "I could use a table like that...", and I must say that I  didn't fully read the article. In fact, I began to shop for work tables.

This is the idea that (at least marginally) informed the "Peripherique" title, which I used for my album of last year. The album cover has an ornate frame within it that is used for other images, but its function is a physical frame within a conceptual frame.

From Pierre Boulez's: Collège de France Lectures:

"For a given work, it is vital to form a view of the whole, not looking only at details. When one fills in the details of a picture without taking in the entire image, it produces a deformed, falsified view of the work, and isolated detail can even lead to conclusions that are in conflict with the work as a whole. Once an overall appreciation has been achieved, we have to see above all, how events, even the most basic, are derived, deduced from each other, observing the deep rationality of those derivations and deductions, how they connect to generate before us all aspects of the form."  [Boulez, Pierre. Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures. United States, University of Chicago Press (455)]

Another example of this is the comment that "the snare is too loud", when you spent perhaps months or years incubating and producing a song idea.

I think in frameworks and bird's-eye views, where I draw the lot lines, then think about the floor plan. The "snare sound" is the choice of a wall tile--perhaps not perfect, which can be easily replaced, and has nothing to do with the sound (literal and figurative) structure of a building. For me, music production is about interior design, the choice of paint colors. Structural face-lifts to the exterior (facadectomies) are like re-arrangements. re-harmonizations, remixes, but you still have the original floor plans to review. All the work done after the idea is resolved is the Peripherique, the ring road around the city center.

To comment on sinks and faucets in a Frank Lloyd Wright kitchen, or even the contretemps of his personal life are equally peripheral.