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Freestyle: Music Aphorisms 5
Browsing through sound presets in soft synthesizers reminds us that sound designers do not necessarily create sounds that are musical. (Are they musicians?) Our ears relish relations and meaningful patterns in the music more than (merely) attractive sounds. It’s as if the busy hi hat patterns in contemporary hip hop are (desperately) trying to get… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Deckle Edge’s “Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
“Against a rising tide of automation and increasing digital complexity, we are becoming further divorced from the very thing that defines us: we are makers, crafters of things. When our lives once comprised an almost unbroken chain of movements and actions as we interacted physically with the material requirements of our existence, today we stare… Continue reading
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The Problem Of Exactitude
exactitude – not approximate in any way; precise, from the Latin verb exigere – to thoroughly perform The phrase the problem of exactitude occurs to me to describe a kind of left-field situation I encounter regularly when I’m working on music or writing about it. The situation can be described as a tension between my… Continue reading
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Searches That Brought You Here
• Russell Hartenberger Steve Reich. This search brought you to my post on Hartenberger’s stellar book, Performance Practice in the Music Of Steve Reich. In my post I wrote: “As I read Performance Practice I was struck by the similarities between its flow and the gradual unfolding of Reich’s music. The smooth surface of Hartenberger’s… Continue reading
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Lessons From Dilla 7: Master A Single Instrument
Dilla used just a single instrument to make his tracks. Continue reading
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Driving Hi Hats
I noticed the sound while driving flipping through radio stations listening to new york’s hottest hip hop and r & b not from back then but from the edge of right now a soundtrack to the road’s present I keep pursuing over the horizon I noticed the hi hats chattering in double-time sixteenth and thirty-second… Continue reading
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Fulcrum
fulcrum – the point on which a lever pivots; a thing that plays an essential role in an activity (from Latin fulcire “to prop up”) While the implements percussionists use—sticks and mallets and other kinds of beaters—are imperfect constructions, there are ways of holding these implements that feel closer to perfect. The key is finding… Continue reading
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Musical Analogy
To know how a music works over time notice it aimed years later somewhere else and far away in a Target or Macy’s where the song has you under its fluorescence tingeing the silence as a woman sniffs diffusers comparing the feeling of lavender and matcha and Howard in returns (his ears are huge) takes… Continue reading
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