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thinking through music


  • December 17, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection” (2025)

    “Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating” (19). “It was the admission stamp into a community bound by a shared reality, or quasi-reality” (21). “They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around… Continue reading

    Uncategorized
    book reviews
  • December 16, 2025

    Database: Claire M Singer on Writing By Improvising

    “Improvising is hugely important in my writing process. All of my pieces, whether on organ or cello, come from me sitting and improvising on the instrument and through this process I capture the parts l like (whether writing it down or recording it) and over time it becomes a set scored piece.” Claire M Singer… Continue reading

    database, Uncategorized
  • December 12, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Matthew H. Birkhold’s “Metronome” (2025)

    “…psychologists like Carl Seashore and Edward Wheeler Scripture considered performers’ discrepancies from the metronomic beat an ‘artistic deviation’ and held the ‘successful player’ to be the musician with the fewest rhythmical variations from the precise metronomic tempo. They wrote books and authored studies advocating for this new type of musician” (45). “The internal pulse upon… Continue reading

    musical time, pulseology, Resonant Thoughts
  • December 11, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Claire M Singer’s “Rionnag a Tuath” (2025)

    Playlist 2025 Continue reading

    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • December 10, 2025

    Holding Out For Better

    “Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.” John Berger, About Looking (1980), 204-205. There’s a type of being stuck that I quite like… Continue reading

    stuckness
    music, writing
  • December 9, 2025

    Database: Lia Kohls On Recording As Layering Time

    “I’m responding to the recordings that I took and layering things on top, but I always started with the field recording. The recording is a collaborator. The world is a collaborator. I find it really difficult to sit down and make something out of the blue. I’m not someone who hears melodies in their head,… Continue reading

    database
  • December 8, 2025

    Offering (FourFour Version)

    Continue reading

    FourFour versions
  • December 5, 2025

    Notes On Music and Humor: Flight of the Conchords

    When I used to teach at a school on the Lower East Side, from 2007-2010, one day on my long walk on Houston Street from Avenue D to the 2nd Avenue subway stop I passed several actor trailers for the HBO show, Flight of the Conchords. The show, which ran for only two seasons, follows… Continue reading

    humor
  • December 4, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Merely’s “Weightless Fugue” (2025)

    playlist 2025 Continue reading

    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • December 3, 2025

    Curating The Week: AI and Search, AI in Music, Perfectionism

    • An essay on AI and search. “There is a road that must be crossed, by Google and also by the rest of us. On one side is a digital world with its largely familiar structure, fuelled by familiar kinds of advertising, in many of whose forms Google excels. To make liveable whatever lies on… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
    AI, artificial-intelligence, music
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Thomas Brett is a musician and writer who holds a PhD in ethnomusicology from New York University. He is the author of Principles of Electronic Music Production and The Creative Electronic Music Producer, a book described by Sound On Sound magazine as “a deep philosophical analysis of the various creative inspirations, ideas and processes involved in producing electronic music.” His essays have appeared in the journals Popular Music and Popular Music and Society, as well as edited collections by Routledge, Oxford, and Cambridge University presses. Thomas has played percussion on Broadway since 1997 and writes about music at brettworks.com.

Recent Posts

  • Database: Christian Löffler on Working Quickly and Using Field Recordings
  • Curating the Week: The Additional Touch, Philip Glass’s Music, How to Write a Paper
  • Performance Practice: Lessons from Music for 18 Musicians
  • Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)
  • 5 October

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