Lee Barry Composition Diary

One of the "Astrolabes", my proto-orchestral miniatures. This one is for brass choir. (Score below if you are a brass choir ready and waiting to play.) ***

    Takuri Lines , 20 X 10.75 inches, acrylic and ink on lotka paper. $450 OBO [Inquire] Fourth in the series inspired by candlestick charts. See also: Doji Dragonfly Black Marubozu Bullish Harami

  A late-90s song based on a real estate ad. The McCartney influence is obvious. It was composed initially on guitar, and here's the plinky MIDI version. (It can be played on piano but I'm not about to score it as such). Who wouldn't want the above? Church For Sale by meta4s  *** A Video 45 based on the same chords. I retitled it Christmas 1983 because this was the sound of pop music back then, and is somewhat of a personal musical memory.  

After watching the film The Proposal , it reminded me of this tiny oil pastel I did in 2007. It isn't as (ir)reverent. #architecture

A new song about the submerged Welsh town of Llanwddyn . The town was also referenced in Sebald's Austerlitz : "A kind of Old Testament mythology of retribution gradually built up inside my head, and I always saw its supreme expression in the submersion of the village of Llanwddyn beneath the waters of the Vyrnwy reservoir. As far as I can remember it was on the way back from one of his journeys to preach away from home, at either Abertridwr or Pont Llogel, that Elias stopped the pony-trap on the banks of this lake and walked out with me to the middle of the dam, where he told me about his family home lying down there at a depth of about a hundred feet under the dark water, and not just his own family home but at least forty other houses and farms, together with the church of St. John of Jerusalem, three chapels, and three pubs, all of them drowned when the dam was finished in the autumn of 1888...."   

"Windows" is used as a double-metaphor, referencing the basic 16 colors in the Windows 3.1 operating system, and various window styles, and how they were used as inspiration by artists in the past. In 1949, minimalist artist Ellsworth Kelly created a piece based on the windows in the Museum of Modern Art Paris . Here I am using it as a compositional element and wrapping the 16 colors in a repeating series across the panels. Installation details : Ideally in a large well-lit lobby area with east, south, or west sun exposure for solar panel power generation. as well as a luminous stained-glass effect. Medium : Sculpture, Installation, Light-Box “Column” or “Lantern” Dimensions : TBD, Various Materials : Stainless steel, aluminum, hard plastic or painted or stained wood for the window frames. Windows are acrylic with color appliques affixed to the inside. Columns rest on a concrete slab. On the inside of the column is a pod of LEDs, powered by solar panels mounted on t...

The original demo from 1996

Alliterative Haiku Cover Comps in black, white and red versions The idea for this book arose directly from the character limit constraints of Twitter in early 2015, when I began posting them under the #sixwords hashtag. They are not haiku per se, but use similar rules, in this case, three-word pairs in alphabetic order. Print Edition now available on Amazon . Rules: 1. All lower case 2. Re-use of words and couplets allowed 3. Overlap in alphabet allowed, e.g. yza, zab 4. Ampersands and hyphens allowed 5. Sound-alike consonants allowed, e.g. "fine photography", and their spoonerisms "phine fotography" 6. Merged words are allowed, and can be formated per the following: northkorea, NorthKorea *** Color System under the Black White and Red series of works: I have systematized the font colors and page borders to correspond with ranges of letters as follows: #2015 #classificati...

We're all looking for Mary And sometimes when we find her We always lose her again Maybe then you'll see with your own eyes Maybe then you'll hear with your own ears

[Vocal: Leo Littles] 5/2/1997 Visionary art Culture create Useful technology What cannot we make? Weaving the cloth that keeps us warm Leaving the land so trashed and worn The balance of soul To the roots in the land To the gothic cathedrals Where the masses band The song and dance of the social norm Is now the slam dunk of the antisocial porn In a hot new earth In a cold cold sweat Hot new earth Meets a cold cold death Force times velocity Will give us power In a hot new earth Hot new earth Overrated human The master of slaves Never the spiritual Just material craves A culture to integrate that math with the art Are we ignorant? Or are we too smart? (Chorus) Removal of skin The raising of the sea Take away the trees The means for recovery Poison pills for a feverish child Cure the ills Before it dies (Chorus)   Lead Sheet: 

Used Unused (2019) 11x14 inches, ink on lotka paper (Black mat in white gallery frame) $200 Inquire A list of my unused lyric and title ideas done in scriptio continua , now transformed into a piece of visual art. As it relates to a human universal, scriptio continua could be categorized as "continua (ordering as a cognitive pattern)" as delineated by Donald Brown in the book Human Universals , and relates to writing, communication, and organizing information. Used Unused by Lee Barry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . Based on a work at https://barryartschicago.blogspot.com/2019/08/usedunused.html . An AI-generated track based on some lines: 

Black Marubozu (2019) , 20 X 10.75 inches, acrylic and pen on lotka paper. Third in the series inspired by candlestick charts. $450

Critical Mies This particular series has to do with the "deconstruction" (or parody as in Stanley Tigerman's "Titanic of 1978" ) whereby shards are broken off and floated off into the sky, sometimes obscuring the sky altogether. I was always interested in architecture, even from a young age, and photography is a vicarious pleasure.  I sometimes refer to it as "word processing" for architectural photographs. View Gallery Prints are available for the following triptych only. Contact me for more details. #2014 #angles #geometric

The curated captures for 2019. View Gallery

A chord cycle with descending bass lines, under minor chords a major third apart. Score MIDI Audio

   Hipstamatics While there are myriad photo apps now, in 2009 there were few. One of them I still like is Hipstamatic. There is an element of chance which I like, and it tends to make me look for things that are more on the banal or wacky side, or what I would have taken with a Holga or Diana. View the Gallery

A harmonic etude that is essentially a variant on the ii-V-i progression, but is rather ii-VII-V, with the V chord switching to the minor mode at the beginning of each progression. (It can also be thought of as v-IV-I in the Mixolydian mode). A piece I composed on the Etude, Day and Age Cycle for the verses: D-/C/G G-/F/C C-/Bb/F Turnaround (E7) A-/G/D The complete cycle around the circle of fourths: D-/C/G G-/F/C C-/Bb/F F-/Eb/Bb Bb-/Ab/Eb Eb-/Db/Ab G#-/F#/C# C#-/B/F# F#-/E/B B-/A/E E-/D/A A-/G/D Audio File The lead sheet:  

   Doji Dragonfly (2019), 20x18.5 inches, acrylic on black lotka paper Second in a series of works loosely inspired by Candlestick Charts. See also Bullish Harami $200

Once you've taken note of something, it's easier to recognize. Emulation in art and music works on this principle and is hugely powerful in the development of a signature vision or style. Most of the time we don't recall where we've seen or heard something, yet subtly influences what we do--sometimes for our entire lives. Long shadows and chiaroscuro are something we've noticed for eons.  What's interesting is the distinction between "I've seen that before" as a cynical comment about cliche, and a moment of inspiration, i.e. "I've seen that before and I don't recall where--but I like it."  If you do a search "bottle shadow photography" you'll notice neural nets have noticed. This brings us to the larger question of whether machine learning has spotted all our cliches--and removed all inspiration. (I was thinking of a photo I had seen--perhaps by Brassai). #2019 #guitar #curves 0972. The problem with b...

As both pun and self-reference, a possible photo collage across the window panel facets (faces) at the Spertus Museum in Chicago. Images would be printed on pressure sensitive adhesive vinyl. #2013 #angles

   In a continuum of luminance from complete darkness to pure white, the first logical color frequencies are red and orange hues, and I am applying them in various transfer modes over a low-contrast, desaturated base image. I'm interested in the visual perceptual biases with respect to color preferences and choices. The logical answer to the question "After white black and gray, what would be the next logical color?" I am presuming that the answer would be a unanimous--red. This has cultural implications as well, with a wide range of affordances to the appearance of red, and what it may connote, e.g. life and death (when mixed with black) and love/affection (pink) when mixed with white, political ideology/repression, and so on. View all artworks in the Black White and Red series Other designs in BWR ("Arty Apparel") BWR in Car Colors In aerial views of parking lots one typically sees car colors that are some shade of black, shades of gray, silvers,...

Just the Blue Channel of a Jazz Guitar. Catching the morning sun across my L40. #2019 #angles #curves #shadows

Johnnie's Blue 3300x4200 px (11x17 in) Grayscale (blue channel split) Request a Print A popular haunt in Elmwood Park Illinois. I love this angular roadside diner architecture from the 1950s that is still around. Very often even the buildings were built on an angle on the lot. A friend said it reminded him of Hopper's "Nighthawks". It reminds me of Ruscha's "Standard Oil". #2019 #black&white

   Solo piano improvisations in the Lydian mode for all 12 keys, following the circle of fourths. ***    The purpose of the exercise was to see what I could do manually as an improvisation using a constraint (the Lydian Mode), then create an algorithm to do the same thing. Musical improvisation is one of the highest forms of free will. It will show what is pure free will, simply playing anything on the piano for example. Someone who knows how to play will make some kind of coherent music. Someone who has hardly touched a piano may play on the black keys. The acid test is whether it has musical value. AI could be used to do the same thing and would sound like music, as it has a basic instruction. In contrast, the programming to do the same thing seems completely unrewarding. Even though my piano skills are mediocre, and my implicit knowledge of music well-developed, the music that is human-made is good enough for me. If a non-musician can do it bette...

These images are amazingly small, most less than 100KB. The pixel dimensions are only 640x480, although some have been enlarged for printing. The print sizes could not exceed 2 x1.5 inches. This was the point we started down the road to accepting that prints weren't necessary. View Gallery

A page from my paper diary March 1, 2007, in which I was experimenting with the concept of "The Art Machine", i.e. the creative feedback loop between the disciplines. (I think I had just been to an exhibition of Jeff Wall's photographs). What had inspired me was his cinematographic approach to photography--that it was a "frame capture" of a moment in time. I then had the idea that film stills could be transformed into other media, such as sculpture, then back again in the form of a photograph or other 2D forms. "...they give rise to the situationists' detournement, in which your work is altered or recontextualized to create a meaning that opposes its original intention. They are the moments of distraction when one is engaged in a task, the sudden shifts of attention to something apparently irrelevant or disconnected. They are the final acknowledgment the pataphysician makes that the universe is governed by chance, so the words we speak, the things w...

Macrophage V 13.5 x 19 x .75, mixed media on panel. Fifth in the series ("M5").  $555 Inquire Possible Universals, with associated pages in the CONTINUA-TION book: Continua (119) Intertwining (111) Logical notion of part/whole (177) Numerals (counting) (132) Tying material (90) #2019 #text #texture #neodada #layered

An idea which started with an idea on a bass tuned DGDG. All other rhythm and synth tracks were built on top of it. Almost everything in this track is somehow "vintage": the organ part is almost a Booker T riff from the 60s, the synth sounds are early 80s, even the bass I'm using is a 1962 Jazz Bass. It's also a possible track for the "Immortality Ball", May 1, 2046 (to represent Neone's pre-immortality state). Melange by Lee Barry

In the winter months in any city with glass towers, the low angle of the sun reflects off the structures and casts a warm moon-like reflected light into what would have been areas in shadow. The glass panels also project interesting caustic reflections. I'm surprised cities aren't installing heliostats on tops of buildings to direct sunlight into shadowed areas. (Also known as "daylighting").  They did exactly this in the Norwegian city of Rjukan . As it is in a valley, the town is frequently in the shadow of the surrounding mountains. The installation of heliostats bathes the town square. In northern latitudes that are typically overcast, any sunlight should be cherished. #2019 #reflections #refraction

In many ways, the method by which we now compose and record music is very much like the editing of film. Film editing takes the linear experience of real life and rearranges the sequence of events to construct a storyline, and places things in specific contexts (“reel” life). This is much different from real-time performance, where there are no second chances, and the only option is to do it right the first time. You could film a theatrical event and later go back, rearrange the sequence of events, include a soundtrack and you’d have something completely different from the actual performance. By simply adding a sound to a visual event you can change its meaning. Placing one event before another changes the viewer's interpretation of the moment. And in music, making recordings gives us the illusion of things taking place in one moment, but in fact could have taken place days, weeks or even years apart. In the mid to late 1960s, recording technology grew exponentially. When the ...

 On Drone Music (Speakers On Drones):   Recent iterations: System of a Sound at Australian National University, where weather data is correlated music moods.   ***   The Broken Cello system. ***   The “Ambient Jukebox” Multi-Dimensional Random Sound Environment By: Lee Barry October 19, 2002 Surround-sound and other 3-dimensional sound environments hold great promise in the future of recorded music. In traditional stereo, sound can only be separated into a flat uni-dimensional configuration, coming from only two sound sources. In a natural acoustic environment, sounds come from all directions, reflecting off various surfaces. In fact, stereo panning is a very primitive attempt at recreating an acoustical space. For example, you might pan a guitar to the left channel to suggest that the player is situated on the left, but in a real environment, reflections would be coming from all directions. I coined the term Ambient Jukebox (“AJ”) to describe a system where m...