Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 AI-generated based on a 2011 song conceived in an open G Minor tuning. All minor chords.  Score:

What was great about pre-20th century creativity was that the pace of technology was slow or even nonexistent. Things simply stayed the same all the time and was a stable environment for creating things—we didn’t feel like we had to be on the bandwagon about everything—have the Medium and the Substack, the Twitter following, and so on. All you need are the basic materials and perhaps a standardization of thinking. I know that has overtones of totalitarianism but what you want to do is to slow down enough to where you can work on one thing for several hours. In my experience, just warming up the creative process can take 3 hours, before anything gets racked up as being creative. In Beethoven’s time, people made things without technological change. Everything was local, and you had a stable atmosphere for creative work. I think we can still go back to something like that: where you have strictly local “sceniuses”. That’s probably hard to do now because things are all online and local com...

How AI interpreted old jazz works and ambient music. Splat was on Miles From Mars, a  quirky piece inspired by Stravinsky and Egyptian composer Mohammed Abdel Wahab. Woman From Mercury was inspired by Klezmer and Bulgarian Wedding music.

Filters in the wild: Reflections off transparent tinted mirrors   

 

Back in the early 1990s, I was a fanatic for world music, and for a while, I ran a world music mail-order company called Intersect Music . It had several sections for different regions from around the world. It's now interesting to think about all that music in context with what's happened since the early 90s and through the end of the century: Rodney King, the first World Trade Center attack, Waco, the OJ trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and so on. They were events that you watched on TV for hours and hours, all of which for me were in the background and were all unnerving--something I had never experienced before. For boomers, there was a palpable shift. What was particularly interesting to me was to think about how music can or can't be used--especially music that comes from Islamic countries. I always liked the music just for the music but there's there's a subtext that I have since realized--certainly post-9/11--that music can exist on its own and you could us...

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  Written in 1994, several years after the fall of the wall. I was still thinking that even when the wall came down, there was still what the Germans call “The wall in the head”, a "curtain". ***  In a perfect world We can have no walls But we hide behind a curtain In a restless world A government falls And leaves our futures quite uncertain In a modern world We should draw no lines But our lives are framed in fear In a peaceful world There can be no war But the enemies are always near In an ancient world The earth is flat and worn But the rocks are never too old to roll In a simple world The past is etched in symbols upon a stone But the future's always made of gold The West has lost its rival And the bureaucrats are dead But the circumstance we face Is just a different shade of red

(Pictures of the TV)