music
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Studio Observations: Listening To Improvisation
(Detail from Judith Leyster, Merry Company, c. 1629) A friend of mine, who isn’t a musician, enjoys my piano music. So occasionally I’ll email him an mp3 of something I’ve done to get feedback. Music inspires him to ask thought-provoking questions. One day he texted, Do you play music with your heart or your body? Uhh,… Continue reading
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Aftertouch
Johannes Vermeer, A Young Woman seated at a Virginal (c. 1670-72) In MIDI parlance, aftertouch refers to MIDI data that’s transmitted when a key or pad on an electronic controller is held down after the initial attack to control parameters such as volume, vibrato depth, or filter brightness. One of the first synthesizers to incorporate… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight (1915) Debussy, Images, Livre II, Et la lune descends sur la temple qui fut (1907). In the early 1990s I spent the evenings of one summer typing up book notes for my mom, who had returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in English literature. (Her dissertation used psychoanalytic… Continue reading
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Change One Thing
Paul Klee, Ancient Sound (1925) “The key about a process is that it has time in it.” – Nassim Taleb, Fooled By Randomness When I’m writing new music I sometimes preserve one thing from a previous project, but change it slightly. Let’s say I’ve just finished a work for solo keyboard. Usually what happens is… Continue reading
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When Less Leads To More
My hope for every music production session is for something unexpected to catch my attention and open a new perceptual world. But such worlds almost never open right off the bat. Like anything aesthetically significant, they tend to require time and attention–you have to work into them. How does one do that? It helps to… Continue reading
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Problems of Connection
(Detail from Leonard da Vinci’s Portrait of a Musician, c. 1483-1487) Something I encounter almost daily in the omnimusical realm of music production is the problem of connecting with my instruments, by which I mean DAW software, virtual synthesizers and samplers, and keyboard controllers. I depend on these technologies to make some kinds of music,… Continue reading
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Holding Out For Better
“Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its center and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own.The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.” John Berger, About Looking (1980), 204-205. There’s a type of being stuck that I quite like… Continue reading
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