brettworks

thinking through music

Thomas Brett

  • On Writing About Music and Making Music

    I spend about equal time writing about music and making music and these experiences are quite different from one another. When I’m writing about music I’m on the outside of it, listening in. It feels like the music is far away—as if it’s a foreign craft practiced by a different kind of person than me… Continue reading

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  • (parenthetical thoughts)

    (One of the most beautiful musical moments that happens from time to time: I’m listening to something and a single tone, moving from a lower pitch to one higher, sends me towards revelation, into a thought cloud realization that I may have music all wrong. It’s not the sound that’s beautiful (the piano is nice… Continue reading

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  • Resonant Thoughts: On Pascal Quignard’s “The Hatred Of Music”

      “Music is what man owes to time” (85). “It is possible that listening to music consists less in distracting be mind from ‘acoustic suffering’ than in struggling to reestablish animal alert. What characterizes harmony is that it resuscitates the acoustic curiosity that is lost as soon as articulated and semantic language spreads within us”… Continue reading

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  • On Music Performance As Epistemological Journey

    An idea that has influenced me this past year comes from the writer Geoff Dyer: All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge. I have mentioned Dyer numerous times on this blog. He’s the author of a remarkable fictionalized non-fiction book about jazz, But Beautiful, and a classic set of… Continue reading

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  • Gould’s Bach

    Gould found music in geography fusing Bach with Canadian North cold weather counterpoint snow blanketed fugues solitary driving as three-part invention the self on wheels and radio hearing in seasons articulate matter. Continue reading

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  • Curating The Week: Alan Watts, Jonathan Gold, Kelela

    • Alan Watts makes a musical analogy. • A food critic interviews himself about how he came by his views of a restaurant. “Because [chef] Jordan Kahn is playing with modes of dining that have never before been articulated. Because months after your meal, images and juxtapositions will flash through your thoughts, as vivid as… Continue reading

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  • Frustration Music

    Composing fixes the broken sounds and captures out of reach melodies of every desire: distant scores passing arrangements living orchestrations soundtracks for the unheard experience is polyphonic but we sing only one line at a time. Continue reading

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  • Visual Culture

    Maybe the Instagrammers are right— a photo’s worth is more than words’ affect shown besting the described colors not letters retro-filtered immediately digested chronicling proof that a selfie’s gift is adoring the present. Continue reading

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  • Searches That Brought You Here

    • “Poets wear sombreros.” This search is a reference to a line in one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems, “Six Significant Landscapes” (1916). The line–which actually reads “rationalists would wear sombreros”–appears at the end of the sixth and final stanza: “Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the… Continue reading

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  • Reset

    In my current work of performing music, perhaps the most useful “secret” for maintaining a high standard of playing is my ability to reset. In my life outside of music, there are very few occasions in need of resetting—at home, there’s pressing the small button on the kitchen thermometer, or unplugging the cable modem now… Continue reading

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