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Brett’s Sound Picks: Leadcutter John’s “Resurrection”
(Beginnings can grab you, middles might compel, but sometimes you listen to seven minutes and forty-six seconds of music to arrive at its beguiling final three.) Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On John Cage’s “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)
“Refuse value judgments” (21). “all technology must move toward way things were before man began changing them: identification with nature in her manner of operation, complete mystery” (25). “Proposal: take facts of art seriously” (32). “There’s a temptation to do nothing simply because there’s so much to do that one doesn’t know where to begin.… Continue reading
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Musical Mind Reading
It’s hard to know what the musicians you’re playing with are thinking. Consider what you have to go on. First and foremost you have the sounds they make. Though some try, musicians can’t ever hide behind their sounds because their sounds reveal them—they give voice to their sound-producing capabilities and limits. Presumably, a musician’s sounds… Continue reading
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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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