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brettworks

thinking through music


  • September 12, 2024

    HT Dub 6 (Brevis)

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    atelier
  • September 11, 2024

    Brett’s Sound Picks: Nonkeen’s “of plasticity” (2024)

    playlist Continue reading

    Brett’s Sound Picks
  • September 10, 2024

    Resonant Thoughts: David Hockney On Layering Time

    “My main argument was that a photograph could not be looked at for a long time. Have you noticed that? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t.… Continue reading

    time
  • September 9, 2024

    Keywords: Instrument Agnosticism

    Pompeo Massani, The Itinerant Musicians (1880-1889) If you’re a musician, you’re devoted to a single instrument you’ve learned to a depth that it feels expressive. But a music producer’s devotion is diffuse–it has more than one object. It’s in this way that musicians who compose by producing are instrument agnostic. Agnostic not in the sense… Continue reading

    instrumentality, keywords
  • September 6, 2024

    Two Pianos

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    piano music
  • September 5, 2024

    Curating The Week: AI And Real Art, Stubbornness, Superblasts

    • An essay by Ted Chiang about why AI-generated art isn’t real art. “Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we… Continue reading

    Curating The Week
  • September 4, 2024

    Musical System Lessons

    “The album would not exist, really, without convert to harmony […] This system lets you produce a kind of trace, and its unreliability gives you this funny little grit of chaos that you can use to grow something cool.” Drew Daniel “I developed this system of taking samples of already existing components and extracting them… Continue reading

    lessons, musical systems
  • September 3, 2024

    Art About Music: Nikita Gale’s “Tempo Rubato (Stolen Time)”, 2023-24

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    art about music
  • August 30, 2024

    Art About Music: Thomas Hart Benton’s “Evening Concert” (1952-1963) & “Sources of Country Music” (1973)

    Thomas Hart Benton, Evening Concert (1952-1963) Thomas Hart Benton, Sources of Country Music (1973) Continue reading

    art about music
  • August 29, 2024

    Same Walk, Different Music: Photek’s “The Hidden Camera” (1996)

    Photek, “The Hidden Camera” (1996). This track is classic drum and bass that exemplifies the genre’s rhythmic inventiveness and orchestrational-arrangement resourcefulness. Photek (Rupert Parkes) builds seven minutes of music around eight or so parts that enter and exit the mix at 8- and 16-bar intervals. The through line is a skittish breakbeat (kick and snare… Continue reading

    same walk, different music
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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

  • 14 October
  • 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)

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