book reviews
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Book Review
My book, The Creative Electronic Music Producer, was generously reviewed by Hugh Robjohns in Sound On Sound. You can read the review here. Continue reading
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Notes On Creativity As Blind Variation And Selective Retention
In a chapter on the sources of creativity in his book The Wandering Mind (2015), Michael C. Corballis draws on a 1960 article by D.T. Campbell (“Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes.” Psychological Review 67, 380-400) about the constitutive elements of creative thought. Campbell distills the process into two Continue reading
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Notes On Russell Hartenberger’s “Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich”
I first heard Steve Reich’s music in the early 1990s when I was studying music at the University of Toronto. At a used record store I bought an LP of his Six Marimbas and Sextet, and a CD of his early tape pieces, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. The music sounded otherworldly—as if Continue reading
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Notes On David Salle’s “How To See”
“To take a work’s psychic temperature, look at its surface energy.” – David Salle, How To See, p. 15. David Salle’s How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is a superb collection of writings about understanding visual art in terms of its intrinsic affective qualities rather than in terms of what it may express about Continue reading
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Book Review: The Cambridge Companion to Percussion
percussion—from the Latin verb percutere, to strike forcibly As a family of instruments that make sound by being struck as well as a community of musicians who do this striking, percussion and percussionists encompass a vast terrain. Percussion of one type or another is found in virtually every musical culture in the world, and the Continue reading
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Notes On Virginia Heffernan’s “Magic And Loss”
“All ‘realism’ grounded in the confidence of art’s ‘fidelity’ to reality is a conceit of certain technologies.” – Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss, p. 127. Among the many pleasures of reading Virginia Heffernan’s Magic and Loss, a wildly creative, energized, and forward thinking meditation on the Internet and online experience as a global collaborative artwork, 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 John Berger’s “Portraits”
“The given is a prison.” – John Berger, Portraits, p. 37. For a few years now I’ve been loving the writing of the English critic, novelist, and cultural historian John Berger. I came to him through the work of Geoff Dyer, who is a huge Berger fan himself and made me aware of Berger’s classic Continue reading
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An Article In The Oxford Handbook Of Music And Virtuality
I have an article in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality (2016), edited by the late Sheila Whiteley and Shara Rambarran. The book’s thirty-one chapters, write the editors, examine “the intersections, mutations, and transmigrations of the virtual and the real” by offering “a kaleidoscope of interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars around the globe on the Continue reading
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Notes on Dennis DeSantis’s “Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies For Electronic Music Producers”
“Making Music is not a collection of vague aphorisms. Instead, it combines motivational ideas about the philosophy and psychology of music-making with hands-on tools and techniques that musicians of all kinds can use to really get work done.” – Dennis DeSantis, Making Music Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies For Electronic Music Producers (2015) by Dennis Continue reading
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