Lee Barry Composition Diary

Urban parks generally always have quite a lot of sirens, helicopters and planes at regular intervals in the background. The ubiquity of them makes them imperceptible, except when you tune into them. Here it is interesting to contrast helicopters with the calls of blackbirds. There are no keynotes, except for the prosody of passing voices.

  The word "cover" is a "downbeat" word; you can't speak it on an upbeat, but in music you can use it for funky rhythmic effects. Here it sounds Latin, and "running for cover" is spoken like "oye como va". You can use all kinds of lyric variations on the same rhythm, or even just use "oye como va", which inverts the word "como" to an "upbeat" word, and sounds like "let me come over". Running For Cover (Oye Como Va?) (12-21) by meta4s

Search more in the Diary Library   5/23/1912, Paris  (Harry Kessler Diary)  Kessler picks up Stravinsky and takes him to [D Miller] Craig’s, apparently who had been overwhelmed by so many people arriving that he was brusque with Stravinsky. Craig said he wanted to “rid music of everything that wasn’t rhythm.”  [ The Rite of Spring premiered a year later. Perhaps Craig influenced him to do something more rhythmic] [Brian Eno once suggested in one of the “Swollen Appendices” that we could make music, but “leave the music out”, meaning that music was really more of an expression of culture, i.e. a postmodern phenomenon. This was probably happening in 1912 as well where something was to be left out–namely, melody and harmony. That’s exactly what happened 70 years later beginning hip-hop and rap. Now it seems to be wanting to go back in the other direction with metamodernism or remodernism].     [5/2026: AI music also leaves the music and the musicians...

 Owl In The Tree

 

 

 

5/22/1998 Constraints when composing music are necessary only to the point that the breaking of rules is necessary to finish the task.  [5/22/2025: When I studied with jazz composer Bill Russo, one of the rules was we couldn’t use dots or ties. I suppose you could start with those constraints but I couldn’t imagine a music that didn’t have syncopation. We couldn’t have jazz or rock’n’ roll without it so it was always ironic for me. There’s also the idea of “rule drift” where you build in that eventuality. Making something involves steering it to a conclusion, or is a process of “fixing” things that don’t work and rules don’t allow for that, so you “jailbreak” it].         *** The concept of "evil" manifests itself through art in many ways. Think of all the ways in which evil is depicted art through human history, then think how that look of evil would sound. Manipulation of sound, especially through electronic media, is a way to express those...

5/10/2005 Louis XIV Jason Hill: “I had to find the white blues guys to get to the black blues guys who were doing it better.” This is how inspiration works: you discover the copy, which leads you back to the original influences. This is how one discovers classical music as well. You can never expect that people will appreciate music history if they don’t see the context. ( Like telling people The Rite of Spring caused riots at its Premiere). [5/10/2025: It’s interesting now with AI-generated music that there are no influences that we could ever know because it’s all anonymous. Musicians always learned through imitation at some point, but with AI artists, they might be asked in the future who their influences were, and they will have no answer–or it might be anything except music]. 5/10/2013 Carbon Dioxide at NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory Reaches New Milestone: Tops 400 Parts Per Million [ Now at 4 31]  When I like something, then I discover something that I have been before, that is...

    5/15/1997 As a songwriter, I find it to be immensely important to write compelling music--music that is exciting. I will admit that controversy is indeed exciting. To be on the cutting edge of art is exciting--this is where the music industry wants to be (and needs to be--the music industry is in a serious slump). But is it really "music", and is it really "art"?  I got into a serious discussion a few days ago with a friend, and I was giving him my thoughts about music and art. I had come to some tentative conclusions that "good music" is not necessarily "good art", and was trying to articulate' my hypothesis. A piece of music can be well crafted, but in the context of current musical tastes, can be deemed "bad art" because it fails to consider what the current American cultural psyche is. As an exercise, I threw out some words that I think describe our current pop psyche: trash, kill, rape, rip-off, blood, worthless, death, dec...

Fall-like, 55 degrees. Even the clouds look October-ish.  

Today's Songday is based on the 5/13/1977 Keith Haring journal entry, apparently when he was hitchhiking from Minnesota to North Dakota.  "Took a bus to 1-94 and caught a few little rides and then a truck ride all the way to the border of N. Dakota where we ate three cheeseburgers and drank some beers. It was all farmers and when I went to the bathroom they all talked about my hair...Rednecks! Then we got a ride from a pilot who likes Bachman Turner Overdrive and then a truck ride into N. Dakota." Arranged for string quartet and became one of the Shortets: 5/13/2012 Duck Dunn died at 70 in Tokyo. 5/13/2015 Music in 2015 is where cubism was 100 years ago, ready to be redefined for better or for worse. Perhaps this type of rhythmic structure eluding the bar line is the perfect expression for life in the teens, as we may look back at it 100 years from now, which is how long it may take for music to completely change. [5/13/2025: AI music can’t be avant-garde (yet) or eve...

 

 While waiting for a friend to attend a jazz show, a woman with her pet duck.

  5/12/2008 If you can’t find a ‘spiritual’ core in making any art (meaning accessible at some human level (good or bad) don’t bother doing it.  [I bothered to make work 2008-2020, some of it in retrospect not spiritual in any way]. 5/12/2025: I made only one painting since 2020, a paint-over of a work from 2012. I’m still anti-object which is why I prefer scoring music and creating digital art. Physical art has to hold meaning long enough for it to remain relevant enough to hang on a wall for years. Physical art is also visible to fewer people in its entirety: If a work is in a private collection there may only be a photograph of it that the public sees, whereas audio recordings are a kind of digital photograph that can still have a negative (score) and can be “reconstituted”. I’m not against making art, but it’s an object that has to be stored if not otherwise displayed. Music manuscripts create whole libraries but now many of them are digitized. If you have a PDF of everyth...

Antipode: November 11ths  5/11/1898, Berlin (Harry Kessler Diary)  Kessler has a visit with Novelist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He hates Berlin and the idea that “there are people with lots of money and little intellect.”  5/11/1967 Beatles at Olympic Sound Studios 9.00 pm-3.00 am, ‘Baby You’re A Rich Man’.          Derived from the entry: 5/11/2022, Why do we still believe in magic when we know the facts? 5/11/2002 Average Joe (a digital original). Alternate title: “Dr. Web”                                         5/11/2016 May can be the "fog" month in Chicago. It's also the cover of Some May .                                       5/11/2023 It’s been interesting to watch the cover songs of Gordon Lightfoot. One of them was by Billy Joel of Sundown....

 

 Final mix on Hot New Earth .

  Man Ray by meta4s

  A Songday based on a 4/11/1943 Ann Frank entry, 2 Beatles titles, and the title of a film (We Live In Public)

 

It was such a nice day that on a lark I went up to Southport. It was my real-life nostalgia trip, as I frequently used to go the the Music Box. Took a few pics. Now when I go out on weekends I'm scouting for "Photos Taken On A Weekend".  Music Box

 Cafe Tola      

 

 7 Views of the Vista Tower

  Vernacular Landscape (Strings) by meta4s   In retrospect, I think it was in memoriam to Dickey Betts. I realized that he was from the Silent Generation, which explains the musical parentage. If you were just learning guitar in 1960, your heroes wouldn’t have included Jimmy Page or Jeff Beck and were probably Chet Atkins and Les Paul. Also back then most aspiring musicians probably had some musical training, such as piano lessons. It’s interesting how young musicians emulate players they admire, and they do so with the extant culture and technology. For Ellington, it was watching piano rolls.

  Based on the Beatles studio diary for 4/14/1966: “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.... 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 loudspeaker as a microphone. We positioned it directly in front of the bass speaker and the moving diaphragm of the second speaker made the electric current.”

 

  A Songday based on the 4/7/1998 entry that Tammy Wynette died at 55. (It was actually 4/6).

 

 Belmont Rocks Shadows

 The Last Art of April 4/30/2002   Planetary alignment of J upiter, Saturn, Mars ,  Venus, and Mercury in the western sky at sunset. (First time in 80 years)  It's been cloudy, so no one's been able to see it.    

 Comedy Night Went to the Lake Theater to see Zone Of Interest . The audio editing has its own zone with chthonic rumblings and muted blood-curdling screams coming just over the wall from Auschwitz. It's an ironic ecotone separating savage demonization and a comfy life in the German countryside. What was more disturbing than the film was the coming attraction of the Civil War film. If disaster movies function as I've been theorizing then we'll be experiencing what's in that film. A real coming attraction.

 Don't Lose Your Key Israel mulling a counter-attack. The Middle East has always been about "the first stone". (someone on CNN called Iran's offensive was a "telegraph" which was an interesting metaphor). There's already been one round. At some point someone has to not react. This was always my stance on 9/11. The US should have not retaliated. A few days ago I was watching an interview with Caroline Myss. I think she's interesting in that she's a "secular spiritialist".  "I'm going to go against what my reason wants me to do what my heart what my gut says. I want to destroy these people and I'm going to go against that and say I want that desire out of me."

Weather very pleasant, 60 degrees. Oldest living conjoined twins die at 62.  Two people that were never lonely.

 The Last Photo of April

5/4/1982 (Keith Haring Diary) In one year my art has taken me to Europe and propelled me into a kind of limelight....things tend to get over-hyped and then consumed and placed into a “safe place” (history). I do admit in some ways this does frighten me, but on the other hand: what is the alternative? Elvis must be Elvis. Looking at Willem de Kooning’s ugly new paintings at the show at the Stedelijk frightens me. I would rather die than become that. However, where I am now is feeling rather good. I mean in some ways it is the situation I always wanted or always dreamed of. I’m not sure where that dream came from, but it is hard to make it go away once it has started. I think the most important thing is keeping it all in perspective. Knowing that it is up to me what happens next. (And knowing when it is out of my hands.) The one thing (and in the end it was always the only thing) that I have control of is what comes out of me and into the world.”   Abstracted poetry/lyr...