November 28ths

11/28/2005            

While I still see the value in music education or enrichment, there’s something very arrogant about it. Music teaching should be Socratic, where the student “pulls” the knowledge rather than pulling what was arrogantly pushed. 

[11/28/2025]

The best way to make discoveries is to find an access point. It’s the first “secret” doorway]. 

In the final paragraph of the book Filterworld, the author states:

"There is no pure form of culture that happens outside of technological influence, nor is there a singular best way to consume culture. we cannot just rid ourselves of algorithmic influence, even if we wanted to, since the technology has already an inexorably shaped our era. but the first step of escaping the algorithms grip is recognizing it. By moving away from the mindset of passive consumption and thinking about a post algorithmic digital ecosystem, we begin to construct that alternative, demonstrating that the influence of algorithms is neither inevitable or permanent." 

The distinction for me is whether culture is being pushed at you or you are pulling it. Before the internet, we would have preferences for things and then go out and try to find those things. For me, in the 1970s,  there was nothing that suggested that I go to the Art Institute Of Chicago; it just seemed like a cool thing to do. And that's what started my art and music appreciation. If we're talking about human universals and human behavior, we don't necessarily need recommendations. What you need is one access point, and it doesn't need to be from the internet. But now we can second-guess our own desires by seeing if anyone else has them and abandoning them if they don't. The world goes where the popular conversations are but what if we aren't interested in those conversations? 

“Discuss access points in creativity”
 

11/28/2021

7:50 on Sunday morning. This is the November light.

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It’s been my long-running theory that 1966 was a sea change year when the whole mood of the planet started to change. I started to spot it in recordings released mid to late-1960s. Obviously, The Beatles were at the forefront of that experimentation (such as playing things backward and various other studio experiments), but it wasn’t necessarily the result of things changing in the world—it was simply that the technology was available. But that kind of experimentation had already been done in the avant-garde and in composition departments at universities where they were playing with electronics—and even farther back to the 1920s with Luigi Russolo and other composers. It was nothing new. But Paul McCartney was getting into that kind of thing, as was George Martin, so a convergence was occurring. Artists and musicians were witnessing a change in the world, as we are now, but in the opposite direction. 

[11/28/2025: There will be a sea-change year (a "1966") where the world "went electric and started playing things backwards". I think it will be 2024 or 2025]. 

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Starting with words doesn’t mean they have to be lyrics. It can be any form of writing. Sondheim talked about working from a monologue or placing it in context. You can do this yourself by writing a fake screenplay or dialogue, then having the music you are writing be the “soundtrack” for it.

There are many access points into a song. The “doors” are always open, but you’ll have to walk through only one, which will lead to other rooms with many doors, again choosing one door. Envisioning a final form is nice to have at the beginning, but the “tour” is going to be on a random trajectory anyway. Most of the time where you start and where you end are at odds with each other.

A lot of what goes into songwriting is “reading” it or otherwise sussing it out in terms of key, tempo, and so on, or how it’s “channeled”. In this interview, the interviewer likens it to frottage, a rubbing of paper against a surface (usually stone) to lift off an image. Personally I like “scoring” photographs, or listening to some other music while working on some form of visual art while the other piece is in the oven, and it solves the bottlenecks, not unlike my “Starbucks” or coffee shop technique: Sometimes music would be playing in the background that would meld with the earworm I had from working on a piece of music earlier and would resolve the impasse. I’m “lifting” those audio cues and applying the ghosted image of it. 

11/28/2024

I know I said that anyone can be a musician, but AI can’t. 
            
One of the differences between organic, human creativity and using AI is that if an idea doesn’t work, you let it go and perhaps come back to it later. With AI, the ideas die harder because we become addicted to the idea that AI will deliver a masterpiece if we keep trying. AI is the illusion of perfection that humans have yet to attain.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/28/2025

Making emotion work in instrumental music is not unlike the forced emotions of an actor. It’s an actual skill. While an actor might be good at one facet of acting, they could never “practice” it enough to be convincing. Actors often say to themselves before doing a role, “I’m leaving me behind so I can find the things that make the character comfortable.”

"Discuss deceit and fabrication in art and media"

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Work On Paper (Access Point)