Thomas Brett
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One Way To Listen To Music: Notes On Mark Fell’s “Multistability 6-B”
One way to listen to music–and by to I mean up and over and through and around music–is to imagine it as proposing a set of ideas for our consideration. From this perspective we can think about any music as sonically embodying, modeling, and organizing itself through these ideas. As we listen the ideas become… Continue reading
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Ventrilo-Dialogue: Theorist Versus Pragmatist
Theorist: To compose music is to engage philosophically with music. Music is always about other things–about a bigger picture. Pragmatist: Not at all–to compose music is to engage tactilely with putting sounds together. Music is always about just music. T: But surely you want to know to what end you’re doing the organizing? P: I know my… Continue reading
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On Resonant Thoughts: Geoff Dyer on Clichés
“Beware of clichés… There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought–even of conception. Many novels [or pieces of music, say], even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.” –Geoff Dyer Continue reading
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Notes On Kyna Leski’s “The Storm Of Creativity”
“The principal consequence of the creative process is transformation.” -Kyna Leski, The Storm of Creativity, p.4. There is a reassuring and distilled clarity about Kyna Leski’s excellent recent book, The Storm of Creativity (MIT Press, 2015). Leski (http://kynaleski.com), an architect, designer, and teacher at the Rhode Island School Of Design, takes you by the hand… Continue reading
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Notes On A Tim Hecker Concert
“A lot of good things come from isolation and hard work and being truthful to some object. The first work of artists often comes from that angle, the liberation of expectation from what that work will be.” – Tim Hecker (interviewed here). Recently I went to see the Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker perform at… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: The Field’s “Pink Sun”
“I think that the music of our time has succeeded in achieving a kind of texture in which musical atoms (pitches and intervals) and dualisms (melody and harmony, dissonance and consonance, diatonic and chromatic) become absorbed in an overall background, so that what one hears in a great deal of contemporary music is background brought… Continue reading
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