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Sound Advice: Frank Gehry Speaks
“Your best work is you’re expressing yourself. Now, you may not be the best at it, but when you do it you’re the only expert in it. When I teach students in architecture I try to get them to understand that they have a signature– their body, their hand-eye coordination, their biological make-up.” Continue reading
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On Music and Discipline: Anna Goldsworthy’s Piano Lessons
Anna Goldsworthy’s memoir Piano Lessons (2010) is a coming of age story about a girl growing up and learning to play the piano in Australia. From age nine to her late teens, Goldsworthy’s teacher was Russian émigré and master pianist Eleonora Sivan. Over the years, Sivan guides her pupil through increasingly advanced piano technique and the great keyboard literature of Chopin, Bach, Mozart,… Continue reading
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On Sounds And Silence: Travels With Manfred Eicher
Last week I attended the New York City premiere of Sounds And Silence, a documentary about the work of ECM record label founder and producer Manfred Eicher. ECM is known for its exquisitely recorded releases by modern composers, jazz improvisers, folk and world music artists. There’s a lot of natural resonance and space on ECM releases, partly due to the… Continue reading
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Letting Randoms In: On The Music Of Burial
“I don’t really go on the Internet, it’s like a Ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in.” – Burial Although I’m clearly a few years behind the curve with this particular bit of music news, I’ve been thinking about the music of acclaimed London-based producer Burial lately and what… Continue reading
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On Simon Reynold’s Retromania
Recently I spun through the New York City FM pop radio dial and in the space of a few minutes heard a slew of old music from the past few decades, including The Animals’ version of “House Of The Rising Sun”, Brian Adam’s “Run To You”, Prince’s “Raspberry Beret”, AC-DC’s “Back In Black”, and Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”… Continue reading
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On Boredom, Music and Time
One of the symmetries between the psychological state of boredom and the experience of listening to music is that they both shape how we feel time. In his book Boredom (Yale University Press, 2010), Peter Toohey quotes the poet Joseph Brodsky speaking of boredom as representing “pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor” (186). Elsewhere, Toohey also… Continue reading
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Ventrilo-Dialogue: A Conversation With Autechre
Autechre, “Dropp” (from EP7) Autechre, “Overand” (from Tri Repetae) Autechre, “Simmm” (from Quaristice) Continue reading
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On Embracing The (Repetitious) Mundane: Two Works By Jean-Philippe Toussaint
I recently discovered some short novels by French novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint. In his books Monsieur (1986) and Television (1997), Toussaint explores with whimsical yet clinical detail the dynamics of repetition–along with the virtues of doing very little to get by in life so that its textures and contours are revealed to us. In Monsieur, our otherwise unnamed protagonist… Continue reading
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On The Neuroscience Of Magic And The Magic Of Aural Illusions In Music
In their engaging book Sleights Of Mind, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde explore the neurobiology of attention in the context of the magician’s art. They argue that illusions, slights of hand and other tricks have much to offer the study of how we think because magicians specialize in playing with our perceptions and (mis)guiding our attention. Magic manipulates the reality of our… Continue reading
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