brettworks

thinking through music

Thomas Brett

October 19, 2015

Curating The Week: BBC Radio Documentaries On Music, Alva Noë On Art, And An Article About The Pop Music Industry

1. A fascinating series of BBC radio documentaries about all aspects of musical experience. Here is quote from the program “Playing With Patterns”: “Our brain is responding to that tension between recognizing a pattern at work, but not a pattern that is so simple that we can predict what will happen next…In each piece [Bach]… Continue reading

Curating The Week
October 14, 2015

Reading Analogically: Notes On Western Logic And Eastern Dialecticism In Richard Nisbett’s “Mindware”

In one of the more fascinating sections of Richard Nisbett’s gripping book Mindware, there is a comparison between the principles of Western logic versus those of Eastern dialecticism. As I read through the comparison I thought about how these different mindsets might manifest themselves in musical contexts. Let’s take a look. Three principles underlie the… Continue reading

Reading Analogically
October 12, 2015

Ventrilo-Dialogue: A Conversation Between Expression And Experiment

Expression: I make music to express my feelings, my emotions. Experiment: I make music to create feelings and emotions. Expression: I feel a connection between the sounds and how I feel inside. Experiment: I notice a connection between my process and the sounds. Expression: There’s a story to my music. Experiment: Story is something we… Continue reading

ventrilo-dialogue
October 5, 2015

Notes On An Autechre Concert In New York City

We’ll never make music that’s compatible with the dance floor, because we don’t really like things that are compatible with anything. – Sean Booth, Autechre (interviewed by Geeta Dayal) Last week I went to see Autechre perform at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn. “See” isn’t quite the right word though, as I never got anything… Continue reading

concert reviews
October 3, 2015

Curating The Week: Brian Eno’s Peel Lecture, Low Bit Recordings, And J.S. Bach’s Crab Canon

1. Brian Eno gives the Peel Lecture on the BBC. “Art is everything you don’t have to do…What are we doing when we make art and when we consume it?” 2. An article about learning to appreciate low bit rates on recordings. “Songs ripped from CDs, uploaded to streaming sites, shared via P2P, and burned… Continue reading

Curating The Week
September 29, 2015

Musical Longitudes And Latitudes

Music has geography– located in a place, rooted in a set of coordinates, mappable onto interpretive grids. Like a spinning globe music’s time moves from left to right, it’s melodies fall from high to low, it’s bass and treble create near and far. Music has depth–it’s 4D. Music also has inner coordinates. Imagine smashing that… Continue reading

the poetics of music

coordinates, music, spinning globe music
September 25, 2015

Curating The Week: On Field Recording, Insect Communication, And A Conversation With Matthew Dear And Jad Abumrad

1. An article about field recording. “Broadly, field recording can be summarised as a diverse set of practices concerned with recording sound from atmospheric, hydrophonic, geophonic, electro-magnetic and other sources. It is a sprawling pursuit, but resolves toward an interest in creating and transmitting an impression of audition in time. As field recording, in its… Continue reading

Curating The Week

field recording
September 22, 2015

Things That Shake, Rattle, And Roll

Percussion instruments once said a great teacher, are the only ones not in contact with the musician before they are sounded. They take an unusual degree of imagination to get them going, to get them vibrating. I’m surrounded by wood, skin, and metal, real world materials that make otherworldly soundings. The instruments resonate only as… Continue reading

the poetics of music
September 18, 2015

Curating The Week: On Editing, Sound And Brain Evolution, And Classical Music As Tonic

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… Continue reading

Curating The Week
September 15, 2015

Where Are Are The Points At Which One Music Becomes Another?

It’s a topic I’ve thought about whenever I hear a new sound that disregards the old and rushes headlong into uncharted waters. Water is the appropriate metaphor for music’s fluidity, fungibility, and fantastic flow quality as it moves from being this, to becoming that. Do you remember those old hip hop beats, marking two and… Continue reading

the poetics of music

flow quality

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.