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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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Resonant Thoughts: On Pascal Quignard’s “The Hatred Of Music”
“Music is what man owes to time” (85). “It is possible that listening to music consists less in distracting be mind from ‘acoustic suffering’ than in struggling to reestablish animal alert. What characterizes harmony is that it resuscitates the acoustic curiosity that is lost as soon as articulated and semantic language spreads within us”… Continue reading
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On Music Performance As Epistemological Journey
An idea that has influenced me this past year comes from the writer Geoff Dyer: All the best essays are epistemological journeys from ignorance or curiosity to knowledge. I have mentioned Dyer numerous times on this blog. He’s the author of a remarkable fictionalized non-fiction book about jazz, But Beautiful, and a classic set of… Continue reading
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Gould’s Bach
Gould found music in geography fusing Bach with Canadian North cold weather counterpoint snow blanketed fugues solitary driving as three-part invention the self on wheels and radio hearing in seasons articulate matter. Continue reading
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Frustration Music
Composing fixes the broken sounds and captures out of reach melodies of every desire: distant scores passing arrangements living orchestrations soundtracks for the unheard experience is polyphonic but we sing only one line at a time. Continue reading
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