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thinking through music


  • April 24, 2025

    Database: Rachika Nayar On Composing As A Prism

    “That’s how I think of mutating my guitar lines and sending it through these layers of recombination. It’s like putting it through a prism; exploring a single idea through all these multiplying perspectives [and] seeing one thing in hundreds of its different facets and selves.” Rachika Nayar Continue reading

    database
  • April 23, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Walt McClements’ “A Painted Ship” (2025)

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    accordion music, Brett’s Sound Picks
  • April 22, 2025

    Curating The Week: The Bottleneck, Drum Machines, AI and Writing, What To Do

    • An essay on the bottleneck. “The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.” “It starts with substitution:… Continue reading

    AI, Curating The Week, drum machines
    AI, artificial-intelligence, chatgpt, technology, writing
  • April 21, 2025

    Piano Outside

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    from l’atelier, from the archives, soundscapes
  • April 19, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Arvo Pärt’s “Berliner Messe (Version for Mixed Choir and String Orchestra): Sanctus” (1990)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • April 16, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Romance’s “Too Much Love” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • April 15, 2025

    Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch” (2019)

    “intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine” (42). “No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always… Continue reading

    Resonant Thoughts
    art, artist, painting, writing
  • April 14, 2025

    Tuned 10

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    accidental epistemologies, bells, metallophones
  • April 10, 2025

    Database: Ellen Arkbro On Harmony As Moving Clouds

    “Somehow the music slowly evolves through harmony in a way that feels like the movement of clouds. When you watch the sky and see clouds slowly passing by, creating new landscapes—the music feels a bit like that.” Ellen Arkbro Continue reading

    database
  • April 9, 2025

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s “Gift Song 1” (2025)

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    Brett’s Sound Picks, musical taste
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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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