Month: September 2015

1. Another essential article by John McPhee about editing and cutting material.

“The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of your prose, the integrity of the composition, the anatomy of the piece (does it get up and walk around on its own?), the extent to which you see and tell the story that exists in your material, and so forth. Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.”

2. An article about how sound has shaped the evolution of the human brain.

“The brain is really a wet, sloppy drum machine,” Horowitz says. “It’s desperately seeking rhythms. Not only rhythm, but patterns in pitch too, that have a mathematical regularity that captures the brain’s attention.”

3. An article about how classical music can be a tonic for an increasingly wired society.

“A painting, like a symphony, has design and composition. But the structure of a painting hits you at once; the structure of a symphony unfolds over time: You must give yourself over to it.”

1. An article about why and how music gives us chills.

“…the chemical that’s released during musical chills, dopamine, is one that is also acted on by things like cocaine or amphetamine or other intensely pleasurable experiences.”

2. An article about deep listening–not in a musical context but certainly applicable to one.

“Avoid preconceived notions, assumptions, judgments. If you imagine you know what someone’s going to say, you might not listen. Deep listening involves an openness to ideas, to others, and a willingness to suspend judgment.”

3. A video interview with Brian Eno.

“I use this word ‘surrender’ quite a lot and it doesn’t immediately have the right connotation, but there’s not another word for it. What I mean by surrender is a sort of active choice not to take control. So it’s an active choice to be part of the flow of something…For me the perfect analogy is surfing—which I don’t do by the way but I have watched with some interest. I don’t do anything really, I just watch documentaries about it and then make theories…What you see when you watch someone surfing is they take control momentarily—situate themselves on a wave—then surrender…We tend to dignify the control side of the spectrum more than the surrender phase.”

1. An article and a mini documentary about how two DJ-producers and a famous singer collaborated to create a pop hit.

“What you want is an earworm that you can literally listen to an hour or two in a row and not get bored of it.”

2. An interview with the musician Laraaji.

“My music began to reflect an inner sense of reality that I contacted through meditation, an inner sense of constant stillness, quiet, harmony, peace and serenity, and universal oneness. These themes found their way into my musical expression, along with, still I did jazz and bop and jam-alongs when I lived in Park Slope, New York. Coffee house jams, loft music jams. We’d go through the whole gamut of music, but my electric zither at that time was surfacing and the music that I offered into all these experiences was usually this flowing ambient textural continual kind of atmospherical space music. That was around the late ’70s.”

3. An article on the New York hardcore music scene.

“From the beginning, one of the defining oddities of NYHC was young punk kids becoming devotees of Hare Krishna. With its link to George Harrison and psychedelia and its connotations of meditative transcendence, Hare Krishna was almost the total opposite of hardcore’s crudeness and insistent negativity.”