phenomenology
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Making Music Is Phenomenology
“I was thinking, yes, but in shifting shapes and rhythms and dimly colored vectors, thinking with my senses, feeling my way toward insights and understandings that had more the form of feelings blooming in my belly than of statements being spoken within my skull.” David Abram, Becoming Animal (2011), p. 112 Making music is phenomenology—accessing Continue reading
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Effects Are All About Affect
“I’ve found that quite a good trick is that if you feel like you’ve put too much reverb on something just add more.” – Clark When I’m composing, I’m playing or drumming on a keyboard controller, but mostly I’m looking at a screen and inhabiting the virtual world of DAW software, listening, trying to finesse whatever Continue reading
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Tweaking A Beat
The beat could be anything, or something quite simple. The beat was for nothing, or for being interesting in itself, for creating a mood. I choose the kit at random and found its kick and snare: boom – – – kah – – boom – – boom – kah – – – A generic a place 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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Playing Along
When I’m composing I’m almost always playing along with something that’s already sounding. Pop musicians often begin with a groove, but since I don’t make beat music (at the moment) I often begin with free improvisation at the keyboard. I’m searching for something—a chord, a bit of melody—that I haven’t exactly heard before. I’m searching Continue reading
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Long Tail Listening
In music, we pay a lot of attention to the onset of sounds—the point at which the sound begins its audible life. The onset of a sound is its attack point where the stick hits the drum, the bow grabs the string, the finger presses the key, and so on. From a sound’s attack we Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Simon Critchley’s “What We Think About When We Think About Soccer” (2017)
On phenomenology: Phenomenology is the attempt “to get close, as close as possible, to the grain, texture, and existential matrix of experience as it is given, and to allow words to echo that experience in a way that might allow us to see it in a new light, under a changed aspect” (17). On rhythm: 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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Resonant Thoughts: Thomas Clifton’s “Music As Heard” (1983)
“The theoretical act involves ‘observing the self observing the music’ (37). “The logic and sense of music are different from the logic of propositions” (71-72). “Before becoming a cultural artifact, a style, or an object of study, music is a presence” (80). “But to inhabit the world of music, it is necessary to be able Continue reading
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Reset
In my current work of performing music, perhaps the most useful “secret” for maintaining a high standard of playing is my ability to reset. In my life outside of music, there are very few occasions in need of resetting—at home, there’s pressing the small button on the kitchen thermometer, or unplugging the cable modem now Continue reading
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