improvisation
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Fragments
Photo Credit: Fragments from The Tithonus poem by Sappho (630-580 BC), about a singer who will lose her beauty as she ages but retain her musical abilities. • Quickly commit then slowly edit. I spend little time finding a sound, but a lot of time finessing it into a more interesting version of itself. Altering… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd’s “Coral” (2020)
(Brett’s Sound Picks 2020). Continue reading
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Improvising To Find Something Interesting
One of the quandaries I find myself in when I sit down to play keyboard is how to come up with something interesting—and by interesting I mean something that I haven’t quite heard before. I begin by just playing. My hands go towards the minor keys, but I’m not thinking about keys if I can… Continue reading
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Composing By Playing
I want to begin the piece carefully, by considering my options and plotting a sensible route. But I can’t design from the top down, only from the ground up, so I begin playing to hear where that takes me. Whenever you’re in doubt about what to do or how to proceed, just start playing. By… Continue reading
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An Improvisation
Yesterday’s piano improvisation began with the usual frustration of looking for new chords—this time something around B minor. Just when I was sure I would find nothing, I began playing a repeating interval of a 3rd and a 12th above a G, then moved them around. I liked the repetition and stasis of the changing… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ulf Olson’s “Listening For The Secret” (2017)
“There is…an interesting dialectic of tradition and Avant-Garde at the heart of the Grateful Dead’s music, a dialectic that might be generated by the larger dislocations taking place on a worldwide scale, but enacted within a community, forming around a group of musicians, that would gradually grow until it would become a national, and to… Continue reading
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The Improviser
Improvising is a litmus of the thinking under the notes the knowledge behind the gestures the taste over the technique: hands on strings the musician tunes into concord then embarks slow and spare bird flight from a distance sounding the scale notes one after another, climbing tracking free meter beats, counting slow phrases, color the mood circle… Continue reading
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