brettworks

thinking through music

the poetics of music

  • Where Old Music Lives

    Some old music lives in scores and performance practice– picture a string quartet rehearsing, eyes facing black dots on the pages, one musician leaning in to make an annotation in pencil, almost touching the composer’s notes that combine to make the music so touching. Other old music lives in speakers and Muzak soundtracks– picture yourself Continue reading

  • Musical Longitudes And Latitudes

    Music has geography– located in a place, rooted in a set of coordinates, mappable onto interpretive grids. Like a spinning globe music’s time moves from left to right, it’s melodies fall from high to low, it’s bass and treble create near and far. Music has depth–it’s 4D. Music also has inner coordinates. Imagine smashing that Continue reading

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  • Things That Shake, Rattle, And Roll

    Percussion instruments once said a great teacher, are the only ones not in contact with the musician before they are sounded. They take an unusual degree of imagination to get them going, to get them vibrating. I’m surrounded by wood, skin, and metal, real world materials that make otherworldly soundings. The instruments resonate only as Continue reading

  • Where Are Are The Points At Which One Music Becomes Another?

    It’s a topic I’ve thought about whenever I hear a new sound that disregards the old and rushes headlong into uncharted waters. Water is the appropriate metaphor for music’s fluidity, fungibility, and fantastic flow quality as it moves from being this, to becoming that. Do you remember those old hip hop beats, marking two and Continue reading

  • How Pop Music Boxed Itself In

    It began innocently enough– somewhere along the road of blues and R&B, when Little Richard’s piano hands pushed drummer Palmer to split the beat into two instead of three, with backbeats on two and four. Then the squareness of this sound –the duple, the beat as a four-sided box– caught on, moving rock further from Continue reading

  • On The Musicological Juncture

    Words are not going to get us there, are they? Words won’t bring us to music’s promised land. They weren’t given the right directions, the right coordinates for finding where exactly music resides. Words reach, but unlike music, they don’t touch. The “musicological juncture” was Charles Seeger’s phrase, coined long ago to describe the situation Continue reading

  • On Street Musicians

    Here and there along my city travels I see musicians playing on the street, offering their sounds for whoever cares to listen. There are guitar-playing singers walking from subway car to car, an accordionist at grand central, the bucket drummer at 49th, the kora bard, and a child playing Beethoven loops while his father looks Continue reading

  • How Music Lost Its Body

    Not so long ago music was a relationship between a musician and an instrument, a performance in front of an audience, a sharing of a space through sound. Then those spinning discs took music from the musician, the instrument, and the space of performance, bringing sound right into ears, minds, and hands as a commodity form. Continue reading