Lee Barry Composition Diary

  On August 8, 2022, the FBI raided Mar a Lago--the same day as the Nixon resignation in 1973. On August 11, 1956, Jackson Pollock died when he overturned his Oldsmobile 88 convertible while driving drunk, while on August 11, 1995, Brian Eno was at Jimmy’s Disco: “Possibly one of the most hateful places I’ve ever been. All those rich young people, so chic, and thin as two planks. A vodka? £34. A Heineken? £24. I wanted to throw a grenade in there. Just, one, please”. On August 11, 2022, I wrote (about art): “Real art” is based on our universal sense of what art can be. This was greatly expanded in the 20th century and continues”. On August 12, 1969, The Beatles were in the studio doing final overdubs on Not Guilty , and on August 12, 1997, I wrote, “We should play God because it might be fun to pretend” But the question is: would we really be pretending?”, on August 12, 2017, I take a photograph and title it “inequality”. On August 14, 2017, I was predicting that the future of musi...

7/28/2012  Soapbox No. 2 (Bughouse Square)               7/28/2021 I get a certain cognitive lift from going back to writing things down manually. I prefer the old way of inputting the notes and then playing it. It's a really great way of recycling things that were just fine the way they were. They didn't need innovation.  7/28/2022 Tradition is epigenetic in many ways which is in constant conflict with modern life. There can be cultural traditions and individual traditions which arise from the arc of one’s life. Making music is a tradition for me but it wasn’t for my family. It’s traditional for Boomers to have grown up with both the family values of the 1950s and the individualistic cultural values of the 1960s. They have since become the tectonic plates of 21st century society, now with a reactivation of East versus West philosophies.  7/28/2024 Another AI book, AI Mirror . It’s the new self-help genre. I was thinking that AI art and ...

 

January 26ths 7/26/1997             Music strategies : abstraction-sex; arrangement-contrast tempi; treatments-Indian drone; mood/texture-distorted/grainy; Key-G# minor; meter-5/8; topic-the sea.             [7/26/2024: AI could never do this] [7/26/2025: Prompt: A love song in 6/8 that begins slowly and gradually increases in intensity, Romantic, Mysterious, Male Vocals, Bass, Drums, Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Piano, Steady, Pulsing. It makes my point. The music is syrupy because my lyrics are syrupy. But I have a version that is in fact in 6/8. The way AI seems to work is that it “sniffs” the words and finds stems that fit the words. AI can't come close to real music, but what it can create is "palatable"].    7/26/2004 Hunger Pain                                       7/26/2024 Today's Songday is based on...

7/23/1998  “It’s not so much that something is true, it’s that it sounds true. Reading book on memory: Searching For Memory by Dan Schacter. In discussing emotional memories, he posited the “weapon focusing” theory based upon data showing that people held up at gunpoint tend to remember the weapon and none of the other details, such as the gunman’s face. Similarly in music, people tend to focus on the singer (the gun) and seldom notice the periphery.  [7/23/2024: Sometimes only the periphery is noticed when the brain is not on high alert, and we tend to focus on the things that typically interest us and avoid things that don’t. The example I always cite is admiring the frame of a painting because you’re not interested in the painting, or not interested in art in general. You’re searching for something, that will in the moment, assuage boredom. Another example is reacting based on familiarity. You might not like art, but will say that it reminds you of something. You searched ...

 

 

January 18ths  7/18/2015 New Kithara , 19.75 x 25.25 inches, acrylic and pastel on paper. Abstract expressionist painting partially inspired by the alternately-tuned instruments of Harry Partch.                                           7/18/2024 A year ago Montpelier Vermont was hit with catastrophic flooding. What’s particularly interesting about this footage is that it is full of keynotes and rhythms produced by the various alarms. All of them fit under a drone in A minor.  Revisited my old Music Ideas list from the 90s. This is #75 "She's A Star". I think the idea at the time was that the word "star" would have a dissonant interval in it. This would be the intro, a la You Can't Always Get You Want , but would be a fast EDM, not classic rock. In the end, both she (and he) are "diminished". Female Voices She's a star She's our star She's a star He's so glam She's a ...

   A songday for the 100th anniversary of Guernica, April 26, 2036, based on text from April 26, 2001. "Behavior" is an "upbeat" word, and "structure" is staccato, which results in a metal feel. It is also onomatopoeic in the way the the opening phrase was in Beethoven's 5th as a "knock on the door". Onomatopoeia is thought to be the origin of language--but so is music. 4/26/2001 Program on "blurred boundaries" between humans and animals, now that we know how similar we are, but yet so different. Interesting: Behavior as a structure.

 7/17/2007   7/17/2022 Book: The Power Of Daily Practice . There was an interesting part about who we identify as painters, regardless of domains. Are you a Paul Klee or a Joan Miro in your working style? How do we show up for creativity, and where are we on the spectrum of serious to playful, left-brained to right-brained? When I am in divergent mode I’m in idea-collection mode and open to happy accidents. But at some point you have to get started on making something, which will tilt you into left-brain mode. If I’m working in a score I’m almost all left-brain. Since I’m not a skilled orchestrator I have to study more. The Songdays are now my daily practice, whereas before it was the daily riffs, which I stopped doing. 7/17/2025 On relying on AI to make music: Your skills would devolve and over time would lose the ability to "fly". You'd become a musical penguin. "People who’ve never driven a car without GPS can’t drive using road signs, for example. Your brain ...

 

The other side of the year: December 21sts  6/21/1999 Lunchtime concert by Nigerian group. Summer solstice. Came and went at 2:49 p.m. while I was in a meeting.      6/21/2000 The web is about “meaningful miniatures” [Shorts]. A short video clip that’s meaningful is better than a 2-minute clip that takes 5 minutes to download and winds up being not worth the time. [6/21/2026: Meaning can be a feeling of satiety, but then there can never be enough meaning (or satiety)].         6/21/2009 Bought the iPhone. When you get one of these, they become a body organ you can’t live without. It remains to be seen if it informs life or becomes another distraction.  6/21/2012 The greatest shadows from June light around 530P:               6/21/2014, Saturday Field recording at Lurie Garden . There are three spatial layers: sound of birds (foreground 1), human voices (foreground 2); mechanical noises (background 1), w...

January 11ths  7/11/1886 (Thomas Sullivan) The storm broke near midnight—torrential rain drumming against the windows with such force I feared the glass might break. Streets were muddy rivers. Standing at the window watching the city shake itself dry, a line came to me: Faith is a "we"; destiny is an "I". The distinction feels important, though I cannot yet articulate why. Perhaps it's the way we gather in congregations to believe together, yet face our individual fates alone. Or how faith requires community to sustain itself, while destiny remains stubbornly singular.   7/11/2011 Convenience Store Marriage                      7/11/2023 The capital of Vermont, Montpelier in deluge, hit with 10 inches of rain. The entire downtown area is under 2-3 feet of water. Heart-rending to watch the video footage. There was one taken mostly during the evening with the ubiquitous sound of alarms. It sounded like electronic “crick...

 

 

 Broken Windows Theory

Reflections are interesting in that they show three planes, in this case the one behind me, the room, and the view from the room. The rippled and buffed floor looks like a continuation of the surface of the lake outside the window

Firework

The other side of the year   7/2/1994  Bought Ensoniq TS-12 synth.  [I loved this quirky synth with its alternate tunings keyboard and great keytar sound, but alas, was stolen].  7/2/2002  What a critic said about John Entwistle: “He was unique and replaceable all in one.”  [This is an odd statement because no one could have replaced him with that kind of technique. Geddy Lee attempts to incorporate it with a bright clanky sound, but every player brings a unique set of ergonomics, particularly on bass guitars--with a combination of the size of hands and arms and how high or low they wear the instrument. Entwistle was probably the first bassist that used paradiddles. Tony Levin did it with drum sticks]. 7/2/2016 On the “focus” of composition: If it is philosophical in nature, then focus on the strategies, the things you can or can’t do artistically or culturally, how to reconcile what you’ve done before and what you want to do, and so on. On the level of cra...