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Arrows Of Attention: 100 Words As Creative Actions
1. Accept 2. Accumulate 3. Age 4. Animate 5. Articulate 6. Assign 7. Borrow 8. Brighten 9. Build 10. Channel 11. Chart 12. Compress 13. Complexify 14. Configure 15. Contour 16. Copy 17. Counterpoint 18. Darken 19. Decorate 20. Define 21. Delay 22. Delete 23. Detune 24. Diminish 25. Doubt 26. Drum 27. Duplicate 28.… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: Oliver Alary’s “Pieces For Sine Wave Oscillators”
(You wouldn’t think sine waves could be so warm, so evocative of musical places you didn’t know you wanted to be. This is a beautiful recording.) Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Barbara Gail Montero’s “Thought In Action” (2016)
“In the arts the best performances allow observers to witness some deliberate, conscious thought in action. Consider the difference between listening to someone lecture on her feet and listening to someone read a paper…The performance bereft of the mind would be, in certain respects, like watching a machine: although the output could be amazing, the… Continue reading
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Brett’s Best: 2017
Favorite readings: Jace Clayton. Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture. A well-traveled experimental dance music DJ’s perspective on the intersections of global music, technology, and creativity. Clayton has endless thoughtful perspectives on how today’s music is made and circulated and writes compellingly about what it all means. I may review this book when… Continue reading
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On Web Searches That Brought You Here: A.R. Ammons, Rihanna, Quadraphonic Sound
• a poem is a walk summary. This search query found my post on A.R. Ammons’ magnificent essay on the phenomenology of poetry. Ammons’ observations on poetry apply equally to music: “What we want to see a poem do is to become itself, to reach as nearly perfect a state of self-direction and self-responsibility as can… Continue reading
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Freestyle: On Sounding Real And Sounding Fake
A keyboardist-composer friend at work, BJ, was talking to me about some sampled string libraries she had recently been auditioning. “They sound incredible” she said, in reference to Vienna Strings. “But the thing is, if you don’t understand the idiom of the instrument you’re writing for, it’s not going to be believable.” I nodded and… Continue reading
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Better
How to get better? is a question I think about when I’m playing music and something doesn’t go as I had planned or assumed it would. An errant note, a momentary lapse of concentration, a dropped stick, a shaker that goes flying out of my hand (yes, it happened once), noticing my timekeeping dragging, or… Continue reading
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