-
Space Is The Place: Missy Elliot’s “I’m Better”
Missy Elliot’s recent single “I’m Better” is a great example of how to use space in music to dramatic effect. The track opens with a tiny rising synth figure, plink, plink, plink, over which the producer Lamb speak-raps the song’s refrain. When Missy enters a single massive kick drum slams on beat one. Surprisingly though,… Continue reading
-
Three Excellent Books About Creativity
Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. Philippe Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime. Kyna Leski’s The Storm of Creativity. Continue reading
-
Notes On Russell Hartenberger’s “Performance Practice in the Music of Steve Reich”
I first heard Steve Reich’s music in the early 1990s when I was studying music at the University of Toronto. At a used record store I bought an LP of his Six Marimbas and Sextet, and a CD of his early tape pieces, Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. The music sounded otherworldly—as if… Continue reading
-
Haruki Murakami On Writing And Rhythm
“No one ever taught me how to write, and I’ve never made a study of writing techniques. So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an… Continue reading
-
Discovery Chains: From Murcof To Murch
This post is about how one thing can lead to another. In other words, it’s about process. I checked my email and opened a newsletter from the online music retailer, bleep.com. Scrolling through Bleep’s recommendations I found a number that seemed promising, and began downloading them on Spotify. One release that stood out was a… Continue reading
-
John Cage And Improvisation
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living. -John Cage The American experimental composer John Cage once said that he didn’t believe in improvising as a composing technique. The reason is that when we improvise we only play what we already know. But that has not been my experience. When… Continue reading
-
Notes On David Salle’s “How To See”
“To take a work’s psychic temperature, look at its surface energy.” – David Salle, How To See, p. 15. David Salle’s How To See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art is a superb collection of writings about understanding visual art in terms of its intrinsic affective qualities rather than in terms of what it may express about… Continue reading
-
Working Knowledge: Creating Space Between The Notes Or, Subtractive Epistemology
It may be a bit of a cliché in music to talk about the space between the notes, but it’s a cliché for good reasons and with good intentions. The space between the notes is where the time of the music is most perceptible. In drumming, for instance, the space between two stick attacks on… Continue reading
brettworks 
You must be logged in to post a comment.