brettworks

thinking through music

May 19, 2015

Brett’s Sound Picks: Nosaj Thing’s “Medic”

Nosaj Thing’s “Medic” is two minutes of a falling four note melody that catches you off guard melo-harmonically and rhythmically–a low register becomes a higher one, a quarter note becomes a quarter note triplet, a slow tempo is revealed as a fast 4/4–reminding you of music’s power to surprise. Here is an excerpt: Continue reading

Brett’s Sound Picks
May 14, 2015

On Diagrammatic Thinking

Here are some concepts that have helped me in my work: 1. Keep going straight until you have to turn. 2. Find the points of overlap among your projects. 3. Notice the resonances outwards from your initial idea. 4. Make things in series. Continue reading

diagrammatic thinking, musings, self-help
May 12, 2015

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

1. An article about a new way to play old recordings without touching them with a stylus. “The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates–with great accuracy–the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.” 2. An article about modern… Continue reading

Curating The Week
May 8, 2015

On How Composers Listen To Their Own Work

Having recently finished a project and waiting for it to be mastered, I found myself spending a few minutes each day listening to the pieces. I did this listening while doing other things like making toast or tidying up the apartment, and more often than not I listened from another room, letting the sounds move… Continue reading

composition, improvisation, listening, musical traces, musings
May 6, 2015

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

1. An article about the voice work of loopers. “Loopers are voice actors whose work begins after the show or film is shot and edited. Their job is to record what people in the background of a scene could be saying. Their dialogue is never really heard at full volume — and it’s mostly ad-libbed…Loopers… Continue reading

Curating The Week

Godfried Toussaint
May 1, 2015

Notes On Alessandro Baricco’s “The Barbarians: An Essay On The Mutation Of Culture”

“I had grown up with a different head, an old-fashioned one, and that sea of possibilities and different tasks seemed to me like something cooked up for people other than myself.” – Alessandro Baricco Last year I noticed a book for sale at, of all places, the checkout counter of the food emporium Eataly. The… Continue reading

book reviews

Alessandro Baricco
April 29, 2015

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

1. An article about how music can enhance the taste of wine and food. “We have found that people can experience 15% more pleasure if music matches the wine,” he said. “It is an exciting area: how soundscapes come together with taste to make the whole experience more enjoyable…It’s a kind of digital seasoning.” 2.… Continue reading

Curating The Week
April 24, 2015

Merleau-Ponty On The Organist

In his treatise on phenomenology, Phenomenology of Perception, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes compellingly on the role of our bodies in our experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty touches on musical experience here and there, so of course I blazed through the book in search of those heres and theres to see what he had… Continue reading

organ music, phenomenology
April 21, 2015

Curating The Week: Music-Related Stuff Online

1. An article about a concert hall simulator that provides musicians with the experience of a virtual audience. “Practising is a very private thing. You don’t want anyone else to hear. But [with] the performance … you want to have the feeling of giving to the audience, and then [have] something coming back.” 2. An… Continue reading

Curating The Week
April 16, 2015

On Leaving Space In Music

The other evening I felt like listening to some “zone out” music on my way home from work, so I put on Harold Budd’s Perhaps, a collection of piano music. As I walked the last few blocks from the subway I took measure of the great space in Budd’s improvisations–in the spaces he leaves between… Continue reading

listening, musings

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.