November 6ths

11/6/2000

Show on TV about town in Japan where its residents often live to be 100 years old, and they can't quite figure out why. This shows that context is so important—that a certain constellation of factors creates a particular outcome. Sometimes you don't really know which star in the constellation is the dominant one.

 11/6/2002

Republicans win in landslide. Now we have to wait until 2004. Blagojevich first Democratic governor in Illinois in 30 years. 

11/6/2010

Navy Pier for SOFA show. Photos, low-angle November sun setting: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photographs For Music: Departure. Music: The Scandal (Music For Places IV). 

 11/6/2012

Elliot Carter dies at 103. “As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public,” he once explained to an interviewer who asked him why he had chosen to write such difficult music. “I learned that the public didn’t care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested.”

[Exactly. It's also interesting that music can sort-of protect the brain in that it involves always doing some kind of calculation in your head, intervals, transpositions, ranges, etc] 

11/6/2020

The idea of using AI for production (side-stepping human creativity) still makes no sense to me. Multi-track recording, and to some extent MIDI, are fully-matured tools that can be refined by extension. AI has a long way to go to get to that level. Andy Clark touched on this in Surfing Uncertainty.

[11/6/2025: What a difference 5 years makes, but people who started using it 3 years ago see it as the only way of working. Already there is an intellectual sophistication of using AI. On Reddit the other day someone posted A Critical Defense of Human Authorship in AI-Generated Music. To non-musicians it is easy to place a philosophical position before craft. I am of two minds about it since I am a trained musician, as well as an untrained visual artist. Everything I do in art is essentially postmodernist, and I love working in this way. But I tend to get homesick for both: if I've left craft for a while I tend to Is this? miss it. I see the possibility of a happy medium using both as hybrids]

[11/6/2026: musicians and producers are already abandoning the traditional ways of producing music and using mostly AI because there’s less of an investment in gear, plug-ins, and so on. It’s almost too convenient that you could take a rough demo, and not spend a lot of time on tracking it up, and have Suno model it within seconds.The downside of this is that it’s too easy to accept the result and not think about the ways that you would do it in a unique way]

11/6/2022

I recall Bowie saying in an interview that the door was closing on postmodernism and that we should seize the day. What used to be cool is still cool but has a different patina. Like Steve Lacy’s performance on SNL last night: I saw it as 70s-retro redolent of 1976 top-40 which perhaps he picked up in a kind of “morphic resonance”. What people might be doing is ushering in the end of postmodernism with nostalgia trips to places they’ve never been to so as to experience the same nostalgias of older generations in order to find the postmodernist cool in it before it runs out, as Bowie prognosticated, or to dismiss postmodernism altogether.

From a musical standpoint as a composer, revisiting ways of working from 30 years ago is exciting in its own way because it is deeply personal rather than a collective re-interpretation or simply a continuation of it. You also get to repeat entire cycles rather than just being nostalgic for one point in the cycle, e.g.. going back to only 1992. In each cycle you see new things on the repeats, but it’s just slightly new. 

Postmodernism suggests revolutionary upheavals, but it’s never the end of any history. 

[Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that people are pulling away from experimentation and exploring things that wouldn’t necessarily involve any one technology More people are using AI in the flow of whatever they do, and can be somewhat of a distraction. But as an artist, you have to allow for such distractions, and looping back to ways you used to work and try to integrate them. I’ve been doing it in the form of re-processing music that I did decades ago, and also adding new elements to it. It’s also interesting to reimagine lyrics in different genres, such that you as the lyricist are finding artists who produce your music in different forms, and you can find other parts of yourself that you are willing to accept. I only marginally liked country and rockabilly, even going back to the 80s, because it was frequently used in pop music. For example, take the band Rockpile with David, Edmunds, and Nick Lowe—and Elvis Costello as well, so there was always an interest in using that kind of a sound, and now it’s more possible simply by using the word “country” in your prompt. But none of that is postmodernist, and AI Music certainly isn’t, unless you’re making it something that looks like something you’re getting away with. For example, in the 1960s pop art was something that suddenly you could get away with,—making paintings of advertisements and other banalities. But I don’t see that kind of thinking anymore, which doesn’t indicate that we’ve become metamodernist necessarily. Using that word in your prompt wouldn’t mean anything, which is an interesting idea in that using words as concepts that affect the music as “romantic” would.]

"Discuss the end of postmodernism"