November 4ths

11/4/1998

Interesting that Ragtime was never meant to be played fast. 

[“During the sinking of the Titanic, musicians played light ragtime tunes to maintain a sense that life was perfectly normal. (LLM:”Discuss Ragtime”)]     

11/4/2008            

Summer-like warmth, 75 degrees            

Obama rally in Grant Park.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11/4/2010

Playing music is a way to be genuine.

[11/4/2024: Playing music for 3-5 minutes clears my head. I’m with Daniel Levitin that music can be pharmaceutical (adjective).] Quincy Jones: "Music was the only thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. my family problems disappeared. I didn't have to search for answers. The [greater] than the bell of any trumpet in my scrawled penciled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant, and cool."

11/4/2015

It’s interesting how music is used as anodyne after major horrific events. I recall after 9/11 there was music one could or could not play as being appropriate or inappropriate. In the days and weeks after the attacks, I’d be listening to the radio and there would be interesting serendipity: You’d be listening to a report about Islamic holy wars, change the dial to rock station, and hear Lennon’s “Instant Karma” followed by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”. You can’t remove meaning from random events as they occur. They are distinctly personal experiences that seem to be made just for you. 

11/4/2016, Friday

Cubs victory parade—perfect weather.

 

11/4/2021

Over the past few weeks, I have been spending a little bit of time (still) trying to find something interesting and useful in AI music. The one that I used that was kind of interesting is called Boomy. It creates tracks by selecting genres, sub-genres, and instruments, and then you scroll through until you find something that you like. This is the way that I think AI works at the user level, in which it generates permutations and then you select the shots that you want, not unlike going through a video and selecting Stills....

Timber Cities on the Edge of Nature, an ambient piece, is my first official piece created with AI, albeit with some “treatments”. What I realized is that these tools always bring me back to traditional compositional procedures—and that is exactly what tools are supposed to do: to find the signal in the noise of an idea. We’re pattern seekers, not noise seekers. We’re looking for logical patterns that we can work with as building blocks. 

[11/4/2024: There have been some good developments in AI and more artists might be using the tools. But I find myself frustrated with endless tweaking rather than working. It’s the big-box store of AI–perhaps a form of mindless entertainment, but you can’t decide on what mindless entertainment to watch. I see it all as screwing up the mind and soul].

[11/4/2025: Generating music with AI is mostly an absurd exercise, but interesting nonetheless. I've never had a problem generating ideas, and it just gives you more to work with]. 

11/4/2023

As I was working on Disaster Movies this morning there was a protest happening on the street and took a video to capture the audio: 

Stop their suffering
Stop their pain

 

11/4/2024

Quincy Jones dead at 91. "Music was the only thing I could control. It was the one world that offered me freedom. When I played music, my nightmares ended. my family problems disappeared. I didn't have to search for answers. The answers greater than the bell of any trumpet in my scrawled penciled scores. Music made me full, strong, popular, self-reliant, and cool." What's remarkable about artists who live into their 90s is that they never stopped doing things they like to do, or having a desire to do them. I've never fully understood the person that is "just being". Perhaps there is still a desire but is transcended. They're still making artwork, but the art is their life. Jones could work both of those ways. 

This is why music has a natural mystical quality, and can be used in tandem with a spiritual practice. I've been trying to figure out a way to do this while still retaining my artistic freedom without the constraints of it being necessarily mystical music, ambient or new age, which I don't necessarily want to do all the time. Interesting: Jones learned piano from his next-door neighbor. That's how it starts--where you're in proximity of someone who has an instrument in their home and you're magnetized and galvanized. This is how it happened with me, first an acoustic guitar, then a Wurlitzer organ, then a guitar with only 4 strings, then a bass].