brettworks

What you’re doing is important:
maybe to you, maybe to others, maybe today, or one day.

Music’s claim on our attention comes from its sense of urgency.

The economic worth of a piece of music
is a wildly inaccurate measure of its aesthetic value.
Art is a gift, so what do you want to make
knowing that it may pay nothing?

Minimalism increases what we notice.

As with exercise, pace yourself:
work during the day, preferably in the morning.

Receive widely, create narrowly.

You’re in dialogue with other musicians and you choose who they are.

Beware of the virtuosity trap:
a listener wants to know not what you can do, but how you think.

Instead of looking for an angle, a niche, or a unique voice,
build a relationship with materials.

Practice is recursive: keep revisiting the work you’ve already done: reinterpret it, reframe it, remix it, resample it.

Think not in terms of atomized parts, but in terms of gestures.
A line, a musical section, an arrangement, an entire track, the workflow of a single session—
all this derives from one gesture.

Figuring out how to scale an idea is as important as the idea itself.