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brettworks

thinking through music


  • June 9, 2025

    Composing and Scarcity

    Does composing music happen at a precise moment? Is it when you have a concept for a piece? When a looping rhythm comes alive? When you alight on a chord progression that does something new? When a technology generates a beautiful error? When an improvisation opens up a world? Or when an orchestration of parts… Continue reading

    composing
  • June 5, 2025

    Database: Tim Oliver On Listening, Scaling To Intention, And Making Sure Something Is Always Leading Your Ear

    “It’s listening. It’s a bit being able to zoom in and zoom out in perspective. That’s a good practice. I think if I were still alive ten years from now, or if I can still hear then, that if I listened back to a mix I’m doing now, I’d probably think the same negative things… Continue reading

    database
  • June 4, 2025

    Marimbascape

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    abundance, drone, Uncategorized
  • June 2, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Nadia Asparouhova’s “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading” (2025)

    “Creative self-expression is the only way we will continue to make our mark as humans in times of uncertainty, and it doesn’t come from doing what you think will sell to other people “(21). “Antimemetics are a shadow city built on thoughts, knowledge, and practices that do not spread easily, despite their importance to our… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts, Uncategorized
    consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality, writing
  • May 30, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Paul Graham On The Rhythm Of Writing

    “When writing sounds good, it’s mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It’s not so regular. If it were, it wouldn’t be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts, rhythm modalities
  • May 28, 2025

    Adore (Cycles Version)

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    abundance, cycles version
  • May 26, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Beatrice Dillon’s “Basho” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks, musical pacing
  • May 23, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Dino Saluzzi’s “Quiet March” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • May 22, 2025

    Curating The Week: Experience In The Digital Age, Swing Changes And Teachers, Social Media Art, Narrative Warfare

    An essay about experience in the digital age. “It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
    AI, art, Creativity, education, teaching
  • May 21, 2025

    Resonant Thoughts: Jordan Mechner’s “The Making of Prince of Persia” (2011)

    “I’m having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures” (33). “The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concretereality of what I programmed today” (103). “Level design is a creative process, like screenwriting: you can’t just sit down and put in ten hours at a stretch, you… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts
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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.

Recent Posts

  • Database: Christian Löffler on Working Quickly and Using Field Recordings
  • Curating the Week: The Additional Touch, Philip Glass’s Music, How to Write a Paper
  • Performance Practice: Lessons from Music for 18 Musicians
  • Resonant Thoughts: James Marriott’s “The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” (2026)
  • 5 October

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