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Aim
aim—[verb] point or direct at a target; from the Latin aestimare ‘assess, estimate’ When I’m playing music I’m continually aiming and re-aiming my attention as the music goes along, and my aiming happens on different levels of perception. Since I play mallet percussion, there’s a spatial aiming of my mallet-holding hands along the marimba keys,… Continue reading
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Listening To Studio Monitors
I’m at an electronics store, in the studio monitors listening room. It’s dark and the temperature feels about 50 degrees. I wish I brought hat and gloves—it’s frigid in here. The salesman turns on the song “Deacon Blues” from Steely Dan’s 1977 album Aja, which is probably the most listened to album by people demoing… Continue reading
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Theory As Poetry: Rosalind Krauss’s “Grids” (1979)
The grid is an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself. It is a mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself. As we have a more and more extended experience… Continue reading
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On Ray Hudson’s Verbal Poetics
“Not by accident, nothing capricious about it, nothing fortunate –it was insightful, questioning football.” – Ray Hudson If you are a soccer fan and you watch it on TV, as I do, you may have encountered the splendiferous voice of Scottish announcer Ray Hudson. Hudson played as a professional with Newcastle United from 1974-77 and… Continue reading
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Freestyle: Music Aphorisms 3
Your resistance to a music is a measure of the music’s capacity to destabilize notions you didn’t know you hold dear. The singer of the pop song assumes that if she repeats the chorus enough someone will believe her. Classical music’s contemporary uses illustrate how the music has always been, among other things, an aspirational… Continue reading
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On Spotify’s Vastness Versus Listening’s Smallness
The other day I was browsing through Spotify’s seemingly endless genre categories (a subject for a future blog post), marveling at how the company’s algorithms manage to carve music into so many micro-genres. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not just about rock, hip hop, EDM, and classical anymore: through Spotify’s eyes, there’s a musical… Continue reading
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(parenthetical thoughts)
(Harold Budd is walking in sandals around the shrubs and weeds of his backyard in Pasadena, California. It’s mid-afternoon, hot and sunny out. He kicks a stone that triggers a tiny dust explosion on his feet. Over the backyard are two telephone wires, a white bird sitting still on one of them. Budd is thinking… Continue reading
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(parenthetical thoughts)
(One of the most beautiful musical moments that happens from time to time: I’m listening to something and a single tone, moving from a lower pitch to one higher, sends me towards revelation, into a thought cloud realization that I may have music all wrong. It’s not the sound that’s beautiful (the piano is nice… Continue reading
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