May 2015 – brettworks

Brett’s Sound Picks: Alva Noto’s “Xerrox”

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Thomas Brett

Two pieces from Alva Noto’s Xerrox that I like:

The first piece, “Xerrox 2ndevol”, has three layers at work: a soundscape of buzzing, a drone-chord that oscillates between a root note and its relative up a fifth, and a bubble lead tone that bounces among a few pitches, creating suspense.

The second piece, “Xerrox Radieuse”, is formed out of a slowly pulsating synthetic chord wash in a three count, underneath which are three sub bass tones–three pulses long on the first two, six on the third–daring you to follow the meter. The music is enveloping and majestic. As its textures build they create the feeling of a giant safety net, scooping you up.

Brett’s Sound Picks: Nosaj Thing’s “Medic”

Posted on May 19, 2015 by Thomas Brett

Nosaj Thing’s “Medic” is two minutes of a falling four note melody that catches you off guard melo-harmonically and rhythmically–a low register becomes a higher one, a quarter note becomes a quarter note triplet, a slow tempo is revealed as a fast 4/4–reminding you of music’s power to surprise. Here is an excerpt:

On Diagrammatic Thinking

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Thomas Brett

Here are some concepts that have helped me in my work:

1. Keep going straight until you have to turn.

2. Find the points of overlap among your projects.

3. Notice the resonances outwards from your initial idea.

4. Make things in series.

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

Posted on May 12, 2015 by Thomas Brett

1. An article about a new way to play old recordings without touching them with a stylus.

“The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates–with great accuracy–the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.”

2. An article about modern protest music in the UK and elsewhere.

“…music is just as political as it ever has been–it’s just that now, it explores politics through artists’ own lived experiences, rather than by replicating the staid traditions of the past.”

3. An article about using global warming data to create music for string quartet.

“Each instrument represents a specific part of the Northern Hemisphere. The cello matches the temperature of the equatorial zone. The viola tracks the mid latitudes. The two violins separately follow temperatures in the high latitudes and in the arctic.”

On How Composers Listen To Their Own Work

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Thomas Brett

Having recently finished a project and waiting for it to be mastered, I found myself spending a few minutes each day listening to the pieces. I did this listening while doing other things like making toast or tidying up the apartment, and more often than not I listened from another room, letting the sounds move down the hallway and bend around corners so I could take them in from a distance. Why was I listening and what was I trying to notice?

A first reason for listening was to get to know the music. The pieces had been done relatively quickly—quickly enough that prior to finishing the music I had never quite gotten to know it. Over the past few years, my composing has been partly based upon improvisation. (Isn’t all composing at some point improvisation?) This means that I end up reaching for things in one-time performances without fully knowing what it is that I’m reaching for. I just play—trying to make something that seems balanced and enchanting in the moment, or at least not immediately annoying. Later, when I’m editing, I’ll listen to the pieces repeatedly, but since I’ll be focused on the minutiae of fixing little annoying errors, I won’t hear how the pieces flow and won’t understand what it was that I had originally been reaching for. It’s only once the pieces are done (little errors now minimized) that I can begin listening while doing other things and get to know the music in a general way. Now I can hear the performance almost as an outsider would—as if observing it from a distance. This explains why I’ll listen from another room.

I was also listening for something more amorphous: how the music makes me feel, its overall mood, and how it sustains and paces my feeling for the duration of its sounding. Let me re-phrase that: music probably doesn’t make us feel anything—we arrive at feelings with the help of the music. Listening, in other words, is an encounter between the hearer and the sounding. Listening from another room while doing other things is an encounter that helps me gauge how the music inflects those other things I’m doing, as if the sounds are scents, or casting shadows. In a way, I was trying to assess if this music could be actually useful. For instance, could I, or someone else, make toast or fall asleep to this music? I’m happy to report that the answer to both these questions is yes!

A third thing I was listening for was durability: how do these pieces hold up over repeated listenings? How do they wear as I get to know them better? Do some pieces become more annoying, more cloying, the more I listen to them? Do some pieces get better or simply hold their value? Here’s an example: there was one piece in the series—originally the ninth piece, now the fifth—that had always struck me as slightly better than the others. Even though all the pieces were created the same way, each one based upon brief musical improvisations, this particular piece had a weight to it. If it wasn’t better, it at least sounded more assured, almost as if it were a model for the others to aspire to. Maybe I got lucky with it, or maybe, since it was originally the ninth piece in a series of twenty, I had begun to hit my stride with it? In any case, repeated listening did two things: it confirmed my initial positive impression of this model piece, and it confirmed the durability if not of the piece, then at least of that initial positive impression. This was an important realization insofar as there are times when a music seems to change over time simply because my tastes have changed. Funny how that works.

A final reason I was listening was to let go of the music. While I’m working on a project and listening to it over and over, its sounds loom large in my mind’s ear and I often hear bits of the pieces on repeat in my head when I’m least expecting it, as if I’ve created my own earworms. I began this project one year ago, then left it for a time, then came back to it. During that time, the pieces were in the foreground of my attention. But now I need to shift them to the background. I’m done with this music and the fundamental reason I’m spending a few minutes each day listening to the pieces from another room while doing other things is to say goodbye to them.

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Thomas Brett

1. An article about the voice work of loopers.

“Loopers are voice actors whose work begins after the show or film is shot and edited. Their job is to record what people in the background of a scene could be saying. Their dialogue is never really heard at full volume — and it’s mostly ad-libbed…Loopers add texture and dimension to a scene — filling in those blank spaces between dialogue. For 37 seconds of TV screen time, there could be six layers of looping — and there are many more for a major motion picture.”

2. An article about what ancient Greek music may have sounded like.

“Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs.”

3. An article about Rhythm Necklace, an app for creating multi-layered polyrhythms. The app was inspired by Godfried Toussaint’s book The Geometry of Musical Rhythm.

“Rhythm necklaces have been used in fields like radio astronomy and nuclear physics to visualize repeating patterns…NYU computer scientist Godfried Toussaint uses them extensively in his book The Geometry of Musical Rhythm, which shows how music from disparate cultures is built around surprisingly similar geometric patterns.”

Notes On Alessandro Baricco’s “The Barbarians: An Essay On The Mutation Of Culture”

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Thomas Brett

“I had grown up with a different head, an old-fashioned one, and that sea of possibilities and different tasks seemed to me like something cooked up for people other than myself.” – Alessandro Baricco

Last year I noticed a book for sale at, of all places, the checkout counter of the food emporium Eataly. The book was The Barbarians: An Essay On the Mutation of Culture by the Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco. I made a note to check it and finally did so last month. The Barbarians is a timely, playful, and compelling essay about what could be described as a global shift in consciousness regarding high and low culture, the flow of information, knowledge, and how we think. Through a series of brief case studies on wine, soccer, books, Google, and even music, Baricco suggests that we are becoming “mutants: with a changed orientation to the world–one whose sensibility is more attuned to surfaces than depths, simplicity rather than complexity, and simultaneity rather than singularity. In a way, the book is like a field manual that describes not just technological trends, but also the emergent cultural spaces defined by them in which more and more of us find ourselves. Here and there Baricco uses the metaphor of a half-human, half-amphibian mutant that has grown gills in order to breath underwater. That’s us.

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Baricco’s first case study is wine. He describes the global impact of American winemaking and the numerical wine rating system. Once upon a time, not that long ago, wine was the domain of the Europeans–particularly the French and the Italians. Then in California there developed “Hollywood” wine–Baricco’s term for what was essentially “an effective gutting of a refined, complex cultural tradition.” Hollywood wine is an example of a gesture that is preserved but whose meaning and depth have been diluted. Part of this was due to a technological revolution (air-conditioned wine ageing facilities) that erased “the privileges of the caste that resigned supreme in the art.” This was a new world co-opting of an old world tradition, re-making winemaking in a simpler, modern language of taste. “This wine” says Baricco, “negates one of the principles of the aesthetics we embrace: the idea that to attain the high nobility of true valor, one must travel a tortuous path of patience and learning.” The Barbarians’ Hollywood wine tastes good (enough), opening up what was formerly an elite tradition to the regular person, and ultimately, helped affordable wine drinking go global.

From wine, Baricco moves to contemporary soccer, whose style of play derives from the Dutch “total soccer” begun in the 1970s which he describes as “a single event in which everyone is constantly participating.” Where soccer once had individual “genius” artists who could command the pitch and direct the attention of other players, the game is now characterized by a “middlingness” or “a smooth, unjointed structure able to hold together a greater number of actions.” Baricco contends that middlingness is in fact an envoy that “allows ideas and actions to circulate faster through the system; genius, deep within the noblest of individuals, breaks up this rhythm.”

Like Hollywood wine and the modern style of soccer play, Google is also a creature of the Barbarians and here Baricco is at his most probing as he circles around the question of meaning as it is constructed and found online. On the Internet, he says,”an idea is not a circumscribed object, but a trajectory, a sequence of passages, a composition of diverse materials.” Meaning is not something we work for, but rather something easily accessible, fluid. It’s “as though Meaning, which for centuries was linked to an ideal of permanence, solid and complete, had gone out in search of a new habitat, dissolving into a form that is mostly movement, extended structure, journey. Asking oneself what a thing is means asking oneself what road it has traveled outside of itself.” In the searchable world of Google, the ideas and knowledge formations that matter are the ones “able to enter into sequence with all the other areas of knowledge.”

Baricco’s discussion of meaning leads him to consider what constitutes experience today. He contrasts old and new (or Barbarian) conceptions of experience. The old idea of experience is as “a high point in everyday life–where the perception of reality crystallizes into milestones, memories, stories.” Experience in this sense is a vertical “journey into the depths” that “stemmed from the ability to get close to things, one at a time, and to develop an intimacy with them that might open up their most hidden recesses.” The new idea of experience is a journey along the surfaces of things to “generate rather than gather momentum” in order to get somewhere else. (Think about the Googled link.) Experiencing things “becomes passing through them for the time necessary to draw enough impetus from them to end up somewhere else.” The goal, says Baricco, “is now movement itself.”

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The Barbarians also considers the history of European classical music as one of its case studies. Baricco suggests that classical music’s development lead, on the one hand, to an ongoing simplification of its language. Baricco:

“You could say that, between Bach and Beethoven, composers worked tirelessly at cleverly simplifying the world of music they’d inherited from their forebears. They diminished the sounds, harmonies, and forms. And at the same time they accelerated down the road of a spectacularity no one before them had ever dreamed of. If you listen to a madrigal by Monteverdi and then, immediately afterward, the chorale finale of Beethoven’s Fifth, it will become immediately clear on which side stands the shopkeeper, the uncivilized, the barbarian. And yet…in that voluntary reduction of possibilities…those men found the narrow strait through which they would discover a new world…”

On the other hand, it could be argued that classical music also sonically constructed the notion of spirituality. Going back to the sixteenth century, Baricco observes that musics of the 1500s and 1600s are sometimes attributed “the same qualities we have learned to recognize in the likes of Beethoven and Verdi…But in reality, it’s an optical illusion…The map of sentiment, such as we have inherited it, had yet to be invented at the time.” It was only later that the musical language from Bach and Haydn to Beethoven and Mozart (among many others) set the parameters for apprehending the spiritual, for apprehending the soul through sound–not just for the nineteenth century bourgeoisie, but into our time too. It was classical music that linked spirituality and soul to the music’s steep learning curve. Understanding classical music, Baricco reminds us, demands “hard work–time, erudition, patience, diligence, willpower.” Over time, this process of study has “been refined into a veritable discipline, highly complex and of difficult access.” Only when you consider how many hours it takes to become what Theodore Adorno once called a “discerning listener” says Baricco, “do you realize how consistently every other way of approaching the supreme masterpiece has been demonized.” In short, classical music teaches us that “without profundity, there is no soul.”

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By the time we have moved through the case studies on wine, soccer, Google, and music, Baricco pans out to provide some general descriptions of the barbarians through a few defining characteristics. First, barbarians “invented the horizontal man” who travels the surface of things rather than “plumbing the depths.” Second, the horizontal person is a “kind of sensor pursuing meaning wherever it lives on the surface, following it everywhere.” Meaning is “distributed across the surface of things, or surfing the waves of experience, of a network of systems of passage.” These systems of passage in turn “generate acceleration.” A third characteristic of barbarians is their view of the past as “a junkyard of ruins” that “rises back to the surface over time and enters into a network with the shards of the present.”

There’s a lot to like in this imaginative and thoughtful book. The Barbarians is packed with unusual and probing insights about the presence of contemporary culture. And though he doesn’t say it outright, Baricco’s broader point is that the barbarians are us–each of us, wittingly or not, involved with the “systematic dismantling of the entire intellectual armory we inherited from nineteenth-century Romantic, bourgeois culture.” But Baricco’s essay isn’t nostalgic for our pre-Barbaric era. Instead it urges us onwards by mapping our time of global simultaneity, interconnectedness, and digital energy flows to which we are fast adapting. “We are mutants, all of us, some more evolved than others.”