Thomas Brett
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Finding Musical Analogies In Lawrence Weschler’s “On The Digital Animation Of The Face”
“Coldness is about more than just a sound and a look, and it’s more than the coldness of a technological being, too. Coldness is what we fear lies beyond human capability. Coldness is the gap between human intentions and outcomes. It’s the uncanny valley of the human reflected in the non-human.”–Adam Harper In his marvelous… Continue reading
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On The Musicality Of Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Martin Mull Walking across a recently re-designed section of Times Square last week I had a pleasant sensation that the design was working on me, on us pedestrians, guiding us along certain paths and shaping our sense of space. Sometime last year I read a New… Continue reading
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On The Music Of Laraaji
I sometimes forget that much of my everyday music listening comes to me by way of established channels–whether these be record labels, music streaming recommendations, or tips from music reviews. So I’m surprised when one of those channels leads me to something off the well-trodden path of what is critically admired at the moment. Last… Continue reading
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On Musical Traces: Some Favorite Musical Moments Of 2013
Musical memory is an interesting thing. Sometimes we remember with great clarity bits and pieces of a music–a beat, a catchy hook, a lyric, a chord progression. My wife’s memory seems to work this way: she has total recall of the words and melodies of just about any song she’s ever heard. Another kind of… Continue reading
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On Earworms: Remembering Billy Cobham’s “Red Baron”
Walking home from the local grocery store, I found myself at a steady but slower than normal stride, moving my head up and down, and yes, beat boxing a beat and a bassline. I may have even spun a move over the curb, skipping along as the plastic bag with the peanut butter bounced off… Continue reading
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On Wit And Work: Adam Gopnik On Two Kinds Of Creativity
In his recent New Yorker essay on creativity in jazz and popular music (drawing on recent biographies of Duke Ellington and The Beatles as his case studies), Adam Gopnik makes a distinction between idea-based and action-based notions of creativity: “Originality comes in two kinds: originality of ideas, and originality of labor, and although it is… Continue reading
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On Creative Analogies: Lessons From El Bulli
“Order, order, order, that’s how you create.”–Ferran Adria If you have an interest in creativity, there are a number of reasons to recommend watching the film Cooking In Progress. The film tracks Ferran Adria and his crew from the famous El Bulli restaurant in a coastal town in north-east Spain. El Bulli is now closed–Adria… Continue reading
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On Bi-Musicality: An American Performs On Arabs Got Talent
In 1960, the ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood wrote an influential article called “The Challenge Of Bi-Musicality.” The article argues for the importance of the western student learning how to perform non-western music. Performance allows us to get inside the music and experience its technical, aesthetic, and sonic challenges. Drawing on examples from his research on Indonesian… Continue reading
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A Wishlist Of Musical Plenty
Give me better music, more interesting and compelling music, more groovy music, more transcendent music, more euphonious and euphoric music, more logical and sensible music, more noisy, out-of-tune, lifted-up-over-sounded music, more unpopular music, more unforgettable music, more peopled music, more anonymous music, more goal-oriented music, more soundscape music, more mindful music, more wandering music, more religious… Continue reading
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