Lee Barry Composition Diary

  Short (Side 1)   Short (Side 2)   As April comes to a close, so does my experiment for April generating a song idea per day. What has been most interesting is that working from the music of language, as opposed to the language of music (with music coming first in the form of a chord change or riff,) results in a wider range of musical styles. It also creates perhaps too many ideas, and they have to be triaged or converged and need to enter the full writing stage. Or they can be done live, where one player creates a riff based on it and the other players follow it as a form of improv. This of course is nothing new, but my spin is that it's a remix based on what happens on a particular day, regardless of year, and is an abstraction of it, not a literal storyline based on any one event. The 4/30 song idea: 4/30/1870 (William James Correspondence) "I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of f...

 

    Purchase at Amazon   May is F# Lydian Month. From Rifts , Autolands *** A track from Music For Places III: Thorne Rooms incorporating clips from a 1930s astrology program, on May birthdays. *** On May 1, 1964, The Beatles were in the studio recording I Saw Her Standing There . Neone (the main character in Reset , with the name derived from the title of a piece of music composed in May 2012), was born in May 2023 in Shanghai. On May 1, 2046, at age 23, Neone had become immortal and was in the recording studio at the stroke of midnight working on The I and the Me . In May 2011, Osama Bin Laden was killed in a commando raid after a decade of conflict in Afghanistan, while people were attending Occupy Wall Street protests. On May 1, 1995, Brian Eno was in Bosnia in the middle of the Balkans War. In May 2059, Neone's daughter has her first child, while Neone is still 23. Most importantly, all May 7ths are on a weekend.   Footnotes   1. https://www.moredar...

Another short chorus idea for 4/29 based on a diary entry by Lewis (or) Clark. "Marthys River" n/k/a "Martha's River", or Big Muddy Creek.  4/29/1805 (Lewis And Clark) "Courses and distances of the 29th of April...to the entrance of a Marthys river in a bend on Stard where we encamped for the night. this stream we call [ blank] 25... miles" Source ( Perplexity ) Martha's River by meta4s Possible string and choir arrangement against the song form: Martha's River (String Quartet and Choir) by meta4s

4/29/1817, Halifax (Anne Lister Diary) Went to Whitley’s to pay for the blank [diary], then said to Whitley I wanted to hear Sugden play on the flute. [200 years ago music had to be performed from published music, and people would go to great lengths to get the sheet music for music they wanted to learn to play. This continued on through most of the 80s and perhaps into the 90s, until the internet killed print publishing]. 4/29/1998 At about the time that rock and pop music was going off into a psychedelic direction, John Cage was influencing what was happening in the academic world, and then “studied” producers like George Martin, introduced these radical procedures in sessions with Beatles, and studio technology made it possible. ["Discuss John Cage's influence on pop music"]   4/29/2010 It’s interesting how suburbia affected pop music. Pop music would not have evolved as it has without the suburbs, as it allowed bands to rehearse in basements and garages. In the late 7...

  Today's (somewhat sad) abstraction is drawn from two sources: Brian Eno's diary entry for 4/28/1995 and a passage from W.G. Sebald's The Rings Of Saturn --as well as Oneiromancy, the divination through dreams . The Sebald passage was also the source for Cantley II , which was on Music For Places IV .  The finished song will be appropriately "Sebaldian" and moody. Rings was also about the evocation of dreamy imagery, which Sebald depicted through the use of degraded black and white photographs. Both sources are about the psychological scars of war (World War I and II and the Balkans war).  Nothing to be seen But the grass and the reeds Little houses once held life Meeting daily needs Dreams may serve as windows Beams of light through the seams When the wind is blowing A little glimpse of the sea Finding all the spaces Between never and the night Looking out the windows Prevents the loss of sight An old diesel train The grinding of the cogs East of the city Into t...

A possible meaning (not about Anne Frank per se): A walking on egg shells in a relationship so as to not make waves: "Daring to move an inch".  The egg itself (as referenced in Eno's diary) is also a form of sustenance and nutrition, but leaves traces. I chose F minor because it is the key of both All The Things You Are and My Funny Valentine and can inherit some accumulated meanings from those songs. 4/27/1943 (Diary of Anne Frank) "Our German visitors were back last Saturday. They stayed until six. We all sat upstairs, not daring to move an inch . If there's no one else working in the building or in the neighborhood, you can hear every single step in the private office. I've got ants in my pants again from having to sit still so long ...." 4/27/1995 (Brian Eno Diary) "I called Mum and talked to her a bit about her time in Germany. She told me that a farmer used to slip an egg through the fence of the camp for her." Still So Long by met...

                                        4/27/1943 (Diary of Anne Frank) “Our German visitors were back last Saturday. They stayed until six. We all sat upstairs, not daring to move an inch. If there’s no one else working in the building or in the neighborhood, you can hear every single step... The rhythm:     *** None of the topics really relate to each other--yet. The nature of random processes is that they converge at some point. The rhythm feels like an undercurrent--a drone. It could be about an oil rig worker with second thoughts about being on it and want to be on the road. Sunken oil, underground river [Sunken oil underground river] It doesn't matter what you do You can change it Started “On the Road” In the small hours of the morning Hotter than ever In the heat of work Discovered an important opening unity It doesn't matter what you do You can change it  ...

  4/26/1937 was the attack on Guernica The "seed": 4/26/2014    4/26/2021 Apparently there’s this pop group in in Russia called Cream Soda that writes music using AI and to create their videos. They said that “the sentence or the lyric is the canvas”, which I thought was an interesting metaphor. Their videos are created by having a neural network go out on Google and pull in images then run a filter on them of some kind. I wonder how AI as used in music is going to evolve because I haven't seen much of an evolution over the last five years, perhaps because people aren't using it. Maybe its use and popularity will spur innovation and development.  4/26/2026: With AI music the lyric drives the music, as it always does. But humans are still better at it].    4/26/2022 I’ve tried writing music with AI because it’s The New but I can’t stand doing it for more than 30 minutes. I can force myself to intentionally continue with it, but if free will is fully fu...

 

4/25/1987, Saturday             (Keith Haring Journal)             “Drive to Netherlands to see museum with Hans. Possible place to show the big sculptures. Great sculpture garden, incredible Van Gogh collections all hanging salon style, side by side, packed together because main building was being repainted or other construction. Funny situation. It made them all look like cheap invitations (sic) because of how they were hung, Manet and Renoir and Mondrians all mixed up, side by side and only inches apart. Funny how important space is. When their importance is reduced they are forced to compete with each other they are not so grand anymore. Only the great ones withstand the test. Great lesson in art history and reality. Drive back to Dusseldorf at 110 miles an hour in Hans’ BMW convertible just in time to change and shower to go to dinner at Krupp’s house.”             [The corollar...

Abstractions from today, Earth Day" 4/22/1817, Halifax (Anne Lister Diary) Bought Droiiet's flute piece God Save The King. Apparently the composer made 20 guineas a week playing around London.  4/22/2005            A music education doesn’t necessarily have to include written music. Classical Indian music is taught directly by the guru to the disciple rather than by the notation method used in the West. In the modern world, the metaphor of “the guru” is “digital media” and “the disciple” is the rabid fan with a fast internet connection, an iPod, and a cell phone. (At this point, we didn’t know they would all merge in two year's time).  4/22/2023 Learning music theory will in fact re-limit (or delimit) the flow of ideas. Ideally you will use it for those ideas where knowledge and skill is required. Otherwise, creativity (now) has no bounds. Even if you work with beats and samples, one element will put constraints on others. An ...

A poem from abstractions of today pulled from the Beatles' Studio Diary and other snips from 4/21. What I'm realizing is that this whole process of using an existing "data set"  is finding signal in the "noise", not unlike seeing a dalmatian in a random array of spots. (A new title for the series might be Abstractions Of Today instead of Songdays ). Also, working from prose to poetry to lyric ultimately requires radical reductions, which brings in more musical signal while keeping the central idea--which is the idea of a "hidden track", most recently used in CDs, but back in 1960s, they would put them in the concentric space on the vinyl disc. The effect is similar to sine-wave speech, where first it sounds incoherent, then begins to make sense, although in poetry or lyrics you want to retain the ambiguity for effect. *** The Hidden Track If there was a silence after the final chord Or noise in the concentric The sound of clattering iron... David ...

4/20/2002 Nigerian Band at Hot House. Forgot battery for video camera and took some slow-shutter shots with still cam.     4/20/2021 The book I'm currently reading is They Are Already Here UFO Culture And Why We See Saucers . There was another book that came out a couple years ago called American Cosmic which I thought was the better book but this one is good too. It hasn't changed my mind about them because first of all, I've never seen them and I always wonder how it is that they have the technology to traverse the galaxy or intergalactic space… 4/20/2022 Reading book of Man Ray’s writings. Simply amazing how long letters were. In the book sometimes they span 3 or 4 pages in a small font. It’s also remarkable that people used them to create closer bonds with people, and people would usually respond in kind. It’s just the way the world worked, it was the (good) norm. Artists would send letters to their contemporaries about things they were working on. Now everyone i...

4/19/2016               I love Scott Walker (Noel Scott Engel)--a true artist. An artist should be able to make art across genre lines, from pop music to the avant-garde, From the Walker Brothers (with perhaps an Elvis influence) to “Jesse”. Frank Zappa on the other hand never compromised being a wag--even when he wanted to be serious--but that was his M.O. ***  Today's song goes back to the lockdown in 2020. The feel is darkly cinematic and "Hopperesque", and I was musing on how the moment would inform film-making. At the time, Hopper paintings were popular because of their lonely vibe. It's also self-referential in the sense that the process of abstraction of text is kind of an "exhaust" or by-product of existing material as Remix. 4/19/2020 All film-watching is now nostalgic because it is the way the world was . Social-distancing in any films that are theatrical in nature can't exist as before, evincing the over-the-shoulder shot, with ch...

4/18/1998 Miles From Mars description: accidental space jazz. When I composed it, it started out as neither space nor jazz, but it sort of evolved into it. The genesis was the “boinky” percussion sound in the background that can be an irritant if you listen to it alone, but it seems to work with the piece as a whole. 4/18/2001 Photographer who took the famous photo of gunman and Elian Gonzales wins Pulitzer Prize. He said that the photo accurately captures the emotion of the moment. (Can we always assume that snapshots in time define the complete flavor of the moment?)  [4/18/2025: History rhymes but not every time. Other times make different rhymes].                 [4/18/2026]:               4/18/2022 People say you can’t write on a bass, but I’ve written hundreds of pieces on a bass. It’s a very useful instrument for understanding harmony from the ground-up.  4/18/2024 An abstracted lyric from 4/18 ...

4/17/1997 Interesting piece on PBS on Ed Paschke. He was talking about the “inner” world of art, which stands in stark contrast to the “common” man.   [Absolutely love Paschke--a Chicago artist. There's nothing that comes close to his uniqueness. It certainly wasn't common, but he was kind of a regular guy]. [ More ]. Interesting what he says about the effect of ambient sounds and music on the creative process]   Guitao (sic) An idea for 4/17 based on diary entries--most likely to be atmospheric in its production. Essentially, Music For Places. 4/17/1998 Book: Vernacular Landscape by John B. Jackson. Book of essays drawn from lectures about the application of various disciplines to the development of environments. 4/17/2010 Interesting: Even though Stravinsky spent most of his life outside Russia, he always considered himself deeply rooted in his homeland . The music sounds like the product of cultural deracination , but is nostalgic at its core . He said, "I have spoke...

   Done in an early Beatles "skiffle" style: Records cut in America Believe in the process Working with a grid That started in Africa 4/14/1966 (Beatles Studio Diary) "There had for some time been puzzlement at Abbey Road as to why records cut in America sounded so much better than British cuts. The bass content in particular was greatly diminished on British records. Jerry Boys has a clear recollection of John Lennon demanding to know why the bass on a certain Wilson Pickett record far exceeded any Beatles disc. Certainly one has to listen very intently to hear Paul McCartney's bass playing on Beatles records pre-1966. But on 'Paperback Writer' all that changed. In fact, the bass is the most striking feature of the record. "'Paperback Writer' was the first time the bass sound had been heard in all its excitement," says Geoff Emerick. "For a start, Paul played a different bass, a Rickenbacker. Then we boosted it further by using a louds...

  4/13/1820, Halifax (Anne Lister Diary) Four of us walked to Sowerby Church . Witnessed cow calving in a field. [Apparently Leo Sowerby was a composer.] 4/13/1965 (Beatles Studio Diary) "As purely a working title, the Beatles' second feature film had been called "Beatles Production 2". Then a more permanent name was suggested, ' Eight Arms To Hold You ', [then] "Help!" was conceived....in later years he would look back on the lyric as pleading for help from somebody, anybody, to help relieve his insecurity...." Abstracted lyric:  Walked to Sowerby Church Eight arms to hold you Walked to Sowerby Church Walked to Sowerby Church Thirteen cows in the middle of the road Listening to the sound of a freight train Thirteen cows in the middle of the road But the Gentleman Jack is in a Cadillac   The guitar solo played by cello: 4/13/2026 With AI music, we might need to get back to making real music, with the goal of making things we like to play. There...

4/10/2025: Choir added  Song for April 10, derived from 4/10 entries, and using a "common chord progression". 4/10/1996 I've always felt that the best songs start from text. In this case, Wendy's lyric suggested a slow tempo in a minor key. I already had a chord sequence idea that was looking for a lyric and I married the two together.  4/10/2022 Music doesn't have an equivalent for "representational" because it doesn't represent anything in nature, as a portrait or landscape can. Music is almost entirely abstract, however, songs with lyrics are representational in the sense that they tell stories. Instrumental music is fundamentally abstract and conceptual, which is what makes it unique and interesting in its own right . 4/10/2023 "Truly original" tends to move towards the esoteric and eccentric , and copying, or being inspired by something traditional, makes it more viable. It still amazes me how much people still like very common c...

On April 7, 1998 I noted that Tammy Wynette died. She was only 55. This is a song idea from that line. I was never a fan of hers, then or now, so it's interesting that you can weave a narrative around it regardless of your personal connection or affinities. This may be a part of the Sum II album.  Possible strings: