Keywords: Alive At Many Levels At Once

August 24, 2023

Keywords: Alive At Many Levels At Once

Making music alive on many levels at once is the point of both producing music and a necessary tool for suspending the listener’a disbelief in music’s fiction. Music alive on many levels at once hinges on presence, variation, interaction, responsiveness, suggestion, hidden depths, and arranging multiple elements to function as a whole in easy synergy. Coined by architect Christopher Alexander, the phrase illustrates its dynamics with a beach scene—wind blowing across the sea, marshes, dunes, sand, and insects to form “an entire system of patterns.” In a similar way, music alive at many levels at once moves like nature does: interconnected and vital with interpenetrating energies.

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Thomas Brett

2 responses to “Keywords: Alive At Many Levels At Once”

Keyword: Omnimusicality – brettworks

January 16, 2024 at 6:06 am

[…] Omnimusicality describes the competencies, skillsets, fluencies, and workflows of the electronic music producer who engages music from many angles and by many means. The producer is omnimusical in being simultaneously a composer, performer, sound designer, editor, and engineer who writes parts, designs sounds, programs MIDI and automates its parameters, sculpts audio, invents timbres, finger-drums beats, shapes arrangements, crafts mixes, and builds tensegrity through the interaction of many sonics within a musical system. Omnimusicality is a kind of virtuosity, whereby the producer plays the DAW and its softwares–playing a musical system as a composite instrument, knowing how the elements of the system are joined in a cybernetic circuit. Omnimusicality is creatively polyrhythmic: to be omnimusical is to practice production by attuning to sound, one micro-aspect at a time, finding a balance between control and out of control in the Quest to create a dynamic music alive at many levels at once. […]

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Keywords: Always In Transition – brettworks

May 20, 2024 at 9:13 am

[…] transition is music’s way of having its way, every facet shifting and evolving to produce a sound alive at many levels at once. Played or programmed, improvised or finessed, solo or together, music compels when each of its […]

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Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.