Thomas Brett
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Borrowed Thoughts: Haruki Murakami On Mundane Actions
“No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act.” – Haruki Murakami Continue reading
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On How The Shape Of A Sound Shapes Us
I noticed a simple thing the other day while working on some music. The sounds I was working with were long tones with slow attacks and long decays. (Can you guess the instrument?) What I noticed was how instantaneously the shape of the sounds shaped me. The sounds literally slowed me down–making me feel as… Continue reading
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On David Esterly’s “The Lost Carving”
“On go the hands.” – David Esterly In his book The Lost Carving, David Esterly describes in luminous detail his experiences in the art of decorative wood carving. In the mid-1980s, Esterly, a self-taught carver, worked on a year-long restoration project at Hampton Court Palace, a royal estate in England, to repair and re-carve some… Continue reading
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On Salvador Dali’s “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory”
There is something unsettling about Salvador Dali’s The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954). On the face of it, it looks like an outdoor scene composed of water, sky, and mountains. But what about those rectangular blocks and melting clocks? The blocks convey one time sense moving forward in an orderly way. But the blocks… Continue reading
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On Using Repetition As A Generative Tool: Yu Yamauchi’s “Dawn”
For five straight months, four years in a row, for a total of 600 days, the Japanese artist Yu Yamauchi lived in a hut near the summit of Mt. Fuji. Every morning at dawn he took photographs of the rising sun, sky and clouds. If you ask me, that’s a cool project. And the photographs… Continue reading
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Musical Resonances: On Nate Silver’s The Signal And The Noise
The gist of Nate Silver’s excellent The Signal and the Noise (2012) is that in order to make good predictions about the world we need to learn to think probabilistically. Delving into a range of rigorous case studies ranging from baseball and presidential elections to the stock market, poker playing, global warming and terrorism, Silver… Continue reading
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Notes On A Talk By W.S. Merwin
When I was in graduate school at NYU, I occasionally spent time wandering the stacks of Bobst Library. With only a subject matter and a range of Dewey Decimal numbers in mind, I’d take to the shelves intuitively–looking for interesting book titles to crack open. One afternoon, while scanning a long and deserted isle of… Continue reading
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Strange Mechanisms II: On Exercise And Musical Tempo
Last week I found myself thinking about the effects of listening to music while exercising. I run a lot but have never listened to music while doing so. The reason I guess is that I want to listen to the cadence of my feet and hear ambient sounds around me for safety reasons. My attention… Continue reading
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On The Influence Of One’s Musical Teachers
In his New Yorker piece “Every Good Boy Does Fine”, pianist Jeremy Denk reflects on taking piano lessons from the time he first took up the instrument at the age five through his college years. Denk’s teachers helped him learn to better practice, interpret and think musically. “Learning to play the piano” says Denk, “is… Continue reading
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Notes On A Talk By Robert Fripp
On a whim I searched Spotify for music by Robert Fripp but found none. Instead there was a recording of him speaking to a crowd about various musical things. And it was good. “Music never goes away” he said, “It’s always available, but we are not always available to music.” And when pushed to say… Continue reading
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