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From The Archives: Paul Morley’s “Words And Music”
(In these posts I resurrect older brettworks blog posts because their subject matter continues to compel me.) Notes On Paul Morley’s “Words and Music” Continue reading
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Devotional Music
At 74th street station the Hare Krishna guys are making a din with harmonium cymbals voices and drums playing loose fitting rhythms to offer a question— Is music devotion or plain interruption? Continue reading
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Listening Over And From Afar
“Hearing is like being touched and moved from a distance.” – David Burrows, Time and the Warm Body, p. 89. I’ve been trying out new ways of listening while performing, trying to get beyond the sounds of my percussion instruments and get closer to the other sounds around and beyond me. When I do this,… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: James Dyson On Creativity
Here is British inventor/engineer James Dyson, known for his innovative vacuum cleaner design: “People think of creativity as a mystical process. The idea is that creative insights emerge from the ether, through pure contemplation. This model conceives of innovation as something that happens to people, normally geniuses. But this could not be more wrong. Creativity… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Unlearning And Disciplined Dissidence In Andy Merrifield’s “The Amateur” (2017)
“I consider myself as deschooled: I learned how to unlearn, and continue to follow the twisted path of ‘disciplined dissidence.’”* (*“Disciplined dissidence” is a phrase of Ivan Illich, who speaks of it in his Deschooling Society as a quality “which cannot be measured against any rod, or any curriculum, nor compared to someone else’s achievements”… Continue reading
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Art About Music: John Cage’s “Sonatas and Interludes” (1946-1948)
(Preparations chart for prepared piano.) Continue reading
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Practicing
Consider yourself and everyone around you as consummate practicers refining ways of being, honing their speaking tones and counterpoint gestures, assuming the sound and the movement of who and what they want to be we’re practicing all the time, practicing the patterns of what we can’t yet play. 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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