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Notes On Editing Music
Editing is taking things out, getting rid of pointless part doublings and overlaps. This creates space which allows what is already there to fill it. Editing is nudging a part earlier or later to sync (or not sync) better with the others. Editing is dropping a part into a lower register, moving a pitch up or… Continue reading
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Ventrilo-Dialogue: A Poet Meets A Composer
Poet: I take an idea and unravel it into its component parts so that they lie in front of me— a set of word tools used to both assemble and constitute a prose structure based upon the potentials inherent in the idea but in an abstracted musical form. Composer: I take an idea and develop it using… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: On Repetition And Baking Analogies In Shunryu Suzuki’s “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”
“We may find it not so interesting to cook the same thing over and over again every day. It is rather tedious, you may say. If you lose the spirit of repetition it will become quite difficult…Anyway, we cannot keep still: we have to do something. So if you do something, you should be very… Continue reading
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That Voice
The woman at the grocery checkout is the superstar of the place running on charm from Spanish to English inflected —How are you my dear?— moving accents offbeat, making thyme a sensible purchase that voice shape shifts and calibrates a thousand sensations, that voice bears gifts of depth and presence, that voice was randomly assigned… Continue reading
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The Improviser
Improvising is a litmus of the thinking under the notes the knowledge behind the gestures the taste over the technique: hands on strings the musician tunes into concord then embarks slow and spare bird flight from a distance sounding the scale notes one after another, climbing tracking free meter beats, counting slow phrases, color the mood circle… Continue reading
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Reading Analogically: Alain Passard’s Axis Of Creativity And Gestures
“You see, color is an axis of creativity. Arrange your yellow, crimson, green ingredients. When you begin your dish like this, you can play with it” (29). “With colors, I never go wrong. You choose the colors, you listen” (30). (From Christophe Blain, In the Kitchen with Alain Passard) • “We don’t record anything. We don’t write… Continue reading
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Counterpoint
Lessons on how to live are everywhere sounding in the relationships among human part-writing watch how people move their melodies along with and against the tunes of others to create reluctant harmony or passing polyrhythm notes interdependent yet disguised as offset, mirror, retrograde, inversion following rules to avoid parallel thoughts and move in contrary motion… Continue reading
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Bruise Blood: Not Remixing But Reimagining Steve Reich’s “Music for Pieces of Wood”
Bruise Blood: Reimagining Steve Reich’s ‘Music for Pieces of Wood’ (Transgressive Records) is a wonderful example of a practice of musical interrogation I have noticed popping up here and there over the years in contemporary acoustic and electronic music circles. Instead of merely sampling the past by taking a sonic photo of a musical moment,… Continue reading
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The Composer
The process sometimes begins by imagining an impossible place remote overlooking the ocean in Malibu or Majorca or Milos. The house is white concrete, all square corners and panorama glass. The sunlight falls into empty interiors leaving rectangular shadows that lengthen as the afternoon ticks by. The wind sings through open windows, the ocean below churns… Continue reading
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