music performance
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Sketches: Afloat
Listen on Spotify and Apple Music. Continue reading
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On Performance In Electronic Music Production
When you imagine a musician or band really killing it onstage, you hold in mind the traditional notion of musical performance as musicians’ real-time striving to accomplish a goal in the moment. This could be improvising a solo, playing a composed piece from memory, or rendering a classic song one more time. Part of why Continue reading
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On Copying, Manipulating, and Pasting Musical Parts
One of the few rules of composing music I almost always adhere to is to play every single part myself in real-time. Based on the kind of music I like to listen to, I’m convinced—or I’ve convinced myself—that this approach produces the most reliably interesting results in the shortest amount of time. If I want Continue reading
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Thinking About How Musicians Think When Playing: Music As Sensory Enhancement And Heightening
Getting at how musicians think while they’re playing—what they think about, where their thinking goes and how it interfaces with the sounds they make and hear—seems like a tall task of understanding, a challenge like asking a tennis or soccer player: what was going through your mind when you played that shot/when you scored that goal? Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Arnold Berleant’s “Notes For A Phenomenology Of Musical Performance” (1999)
“The performer necessarily comes at the music from within…Most often the performance situation catapults a musician into a rare and unusual condition, one that reveals the basic features of experience with eloquent directness, free, at least to some extent, from the usual overlay of cultural and philosophical presuppositions that nearly always obstruct our awareness. What is Continue reading
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On The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics III: Acousmatic Sound And Authenticity At The 2012 Grammy Awards
“All cultural change is essentially technology-driven.” – William Gibson This year’s Grammy Awards featured the first ever performances of live electronic dance music, showcasing the DJs David Guetta and deadmau5 with R&B singer Chris Brown, rapper Lil Wayne, and the rock band Foo Fighters in what the Los Angeles Times aptly called “a confused, if Continue reading
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On Simon Reynold’s Retromania
Recently I spun through the New York City FM pop radio dial and in the space of a few minutes heard a slew of old music from the past few decades, including The Animals’ version of “House Of The Rising Sun”, Brian Adam’s “Run To You”, Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”, AC-DC’s “Back In Black”, and Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” Continue reading
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On James Blake Live At The Bowery Ballroom
The most interesting part of James Blake’s live show at the Bowery Ballroom last night was his trio’s seamless use of technology to bring to the stage some of the electronic and otherworldly textures of Blake’s debut album, James Blake. Blake was playing a Prophet synthesizer for his gritty analog keyboard textures along with a Continue reading
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On Making Music Tangible
“How physical is music?” asks Clive Bell at the outset of a recent article in Wire magazine on the English musician Richard Skelton. Part of what makes Skelton unique is his approach to trying to make music making a more physical thing than its evanescent sounds might suggest. Thus, the composer-musician embraces a unique recording process: he Continue reading
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On Becoming A Virtuoso Of Knobs, Buttons, and Sliders
In the course of preparing for a paper on laptop music making as creative practice I’m giving this summer at Cambridge University, I’ve been thinking about how exactly one goes about performing music with/on a laptop: What are the decision-making and problem-solving processes musicians use in performance and in preparing for performance? I’m approaching topic as Continue reading
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