November 1sts

11/1/1941

 

Moonrise, Hernandez is taken by Ansel Adams from a shoulder of highway US 84/US 285 in New Mexico.

Became a track on Music For Places V:

 

 AI-generated versions with me playing bass and keyboard parts against them, as a "hybrid" production.

 

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[11/1/2025: The music people listened to in 1941 was either classical, folk, or jazz. The whole idea of "ambience" comes from how films began being padded with atmosphere once synths started to be used]. 

"Ansel Adams was deeply trained in classical music and initially envisioned a career as a concert pianist before turning to photography. His immersion in music began at age 12, inspired by his neighbor Henry Cowell, who would later become a renowned avant-garde composer. Adams taught himself to play and read music, receiving lessons from Cowell and other distinguished teachers throughout his adolescence." [More] 

11/1/1944

[Norman Lewis - Naples 44]

The miserable news is that the counterintelligence funds are to be reduced to 400 lire, a lire per week per section member. The meanness impelling this decision leaves us stunned. 

11/1/2005

Had this thought while on walk: "Half the world will sleep through the end of the world". At the same time I overheard a woman say "the baby was sleeping". (A "thinkronicity")

11/1/2021

The "Blue Slide Rule" Dream: I was with a friend who had a book about metacognition. Every page of the worn paperback was highlighted and underlined such that it bled into the edges of the book. There was a section in it with various rules, one of them a kind of slide rule for blues scales. I kept asking questions about the book.

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We're now watching more videos and listening to more audio than we are going through lines of text. The metaverse could change that. Reading long-form content will be too difficult and consequently there will be very little text. We'll be listening and watching and interacting--perhaps too much. 

[11/1/2024: The shift to watching video over reading lines of text continues. I see it as a major cognitive shift. It might become more “PechaKucha”, which means “chit chat” in Japanese, using images instead of text. Preservation Oak Park uses the 20-by-20 rule, where presentations consist of 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds, a total presentation time of six minutes and 40 seconds. There will be more of this kind of “exformed” content, at least for the time being. Eventually it will go back to more long-form content in the future because it will be "new"].

Audio Diary: Generational Waves. We're always stopping doing something: we stopped emailing in favor of texting. In the future, we'll stop texting and do something else. We stopped a lot of things in the past with new conveniences...

[11/1/2024: Around 1998 I stopped writing music in notation because I wanted to do something “new”. But I’ve rekindled my interest in it and include orchestral writing in my new music. But I still have a way to restart the old engine. Make sure you have some kind of “engine” in your life that can be re-started in 40 years. Then you can go back to focusing on The New, knowing that the old things are still usable].

11/1/2021

Creativity operates on its own “internet”—it’s its own system. The inputs might be visual or acoustic in nature. In the case of music, there is no one overarching philosophy that feeds into it, but over the years I’ve thought more philosophically about music—particularly ambient music, which was the result of an interest in cybernetics (through Eno in the 80s). 

11/1/2022

The baroque and classical periods are pop music's parentage but only marginally. The fact that it has that connection gives it a "higher quality". Pop music can't escape its confines, so even if it became more theoretically sophisticated it wouldn't be pop music. That's the thing with influence: take just enough and leave the rest....

[11/1/2024: I realized I learned music initially through magazines: Bass Player, Guitar Player, Keyboard Player, as was everyone else. I never thought I could be a columnist. What is missing now is humility about art forms. Jazz always had that].

11/1/2024

Music is unique in that it remains hidden until we play it or perform it, unlike an artwork that is within view. A record collection objectifies the intangibility of sound. Album art with song lists and credits reminds us where the songs are.” Album art used to typically be the object that would complete the music listening experience, not unlike spines of books on a shelf remind us of what’s in them, or how we organize them on a shelf. Accumulations of objects can become useful lists if we spend the time organizing them. 

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They say artists must be activists. My political activism is feckless: Every time I’ve posted something on social media to get people out to vote, it’s never up-voted nor shared. The reality is that everything is driven by celebrity and popularity regardless of its substantiveness or urgency. Yet when I posted an Ansel Adams’ Moonrise photo it received lots of likes.