music
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)” (2020)
“Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the… Continue reading
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Music Without A Body
In Times Square the guys hawking their hip hop CDs and the guys hawking their fake Buddhist bracelets are of a piece, both unaware that art, as a commodity, has no value. But the hawkers know something about symbolic value and that the way of imbuing their wares with magic is through their person. The… Continue reading
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Music’s Complex Problem
Édouard Vuillard, Morning Concert (1937-38) Why do we turn to music when there are so many other artistic, physical, social, trivial, and spiritual pursuits claiming our attention? One reason is that music is a multimodal experience that is already meaningfully integrated into our lives. Music is everywhere as a tacit shared language, a perpetual underscore… Continue reading
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Stolen Moments Are Open-Ended
The brief moments in which many musical projects begin feel stolen because they are as if outside of time, free from routine, surprising, and rich in delight. They’re powerful because they’re witness to something new happening. But how does this unfold? As usual there’s no plan, I’m just exploring—clicking on sounds, moving audio around, or… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music: Actress, Suzanne Ciani, “Concrète Waves London B2” (2026).
Same Walk, Different Music. Actress, Suzanne Ciani, Concrète Waves London B2 (2026). I’m always looking for music that merits obsessive listening, but I rarely find it. There’s a lot of good music, some excellent music, but little I want to return to. This raises the question, What is it in music that keeps us listening?… Continue reading
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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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