brettworks

thinking through music

September 18, 2015

Curating The Week: On Editing, Sound And Brain Evolution, And Classical Music As Tonic

1. Another essential article by John McPhee about editing and cutting material. “The creativity lies in what you choose to write about, how you go about doing it, the arrangement through which you present things, the skill and the touch with which you describe people and succeed in developing them as characters, the rhythms of… Continue reading

Curating The Week
September 15, 2015

Where Are Are The Points At Which One Music Becomes Another?

It’s a topic I’ve thought about whenever I hear a new sound that disregards the old and rushes headlong into uncharted waters. Water is the appropriate metaphor for music’s fluidity, fungibility, and fantastic flow quality as it moves from being this, to becoming that. Do you remember those old hip hop beats, marking two and… Continue reading

the poetics of music

flow quality
September 10, 2015

Curating The Week: On Musical Chills, Deep Listening, And Brian Eno

1. An article about why and how music gives us chills. “…the chemical that’s released during musical chills, dopamine, is one that is also acted on by things like cocaine or amphetamine or other intensely pleasurable experiences.” 2. An article about deep listening–not in a musical context but certainly applicable to one. “Avoid preconceived notions,… Continue reading

Curating The Week
September 8, 2015

How Pop Music Boxed Itself In

It began innocently enough– somewhere along the road of blues and R&B, when Little Richard’s piano hands pushed drummer Palmer to split the beat into two instead of three, with backbeats on two and four. Then the squareness of this sound –the duple, the beat as a four-sided box– caught on, moving rock further from… Continue reading

the poetics of music

beat
September 3, 2015

Curating The Week: Crafting A Pop Hit, Laraaji, And New York Hardcore Music

1. An article and a mini documentary about how two DJ-producers and a famous singer collaborated to create a pop hit. “What you want is an earworm that you can literally listen to an hour or two in a row and not get bored of it.” 2. An interview with the musician Laraaji. “My music… Continue reading

Curating The Week
September 1, 2015

On The Musicological Juncture

Words are not going to get us there, are they? Words won’t bring us to music’s promised land. They weren’t given the right directions, the right coordinates for finding where exactly music resides. Words reach, but unlike music, they don’t touch. The “musicological juncture” was Charles Seeger’s phrase, coined long ago to describe the situation… Continue reading

the poetics of music
August 26, 2015

Curating The Week: On Audiophiles, Canadian Speech, And The Film Modulations

1. An article about the culture of audiophiles. “The old line about great hi-fi making it feel like the band’s in the room with you isn’t quite right. It doesn’t sound like live music: it sounds better. Clearer, more pure. The weirdest thing is that the music doesn’t appear to be coming out of the speakers:… Continue reading

Curating The Week
August 21, 2015

Reading Analogically: Thinking About Music As A Landscape

“Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That’s why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man’s version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.”… Continue reading

Reading Analogically

James Rebanks
August 18, 2015

Brett’s Sound Picks: Four Tet’s “Morning Side”

Four Tet’s “Morning Side” from his Morning/Evening is a 20-minute track that presents a gentle techno beat as a backdrop for a sample of legendary Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar singing “Main Teri Chhoti Behana Hoon” from the 1983 film Souten. The music unfolds gradually with a slow-moving chord progression, chattering hi hats, floaty synthesizer lines,… Continue reading

Brett’s Sound Picks

four tet, Lata Mangeshkar, Morning Side, Teri Chhoti Behana Hoon
August 17, 2015

Notes On Musical Popularity And Critical Respect

On the one hand, music that is popular (though not necessarily critically respected) has earned the affection and admiration of its fans because they have found a use for it. The uses of musics are many–as numerous as music’s endless styles–including using music to show others that you like the same music they do. On the other… Continue reading

critical respect, popularity

admiration

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.