November 9ths

11/9/2009

20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In many ways, the breaking or crumbling of boundaries is an emergent property (or teleological condition) of its symbology but also assumes that even if the physical barriers are removed, the semiotics endure. "For many years after reunification, there still was talk in Germany of cultural differences between East and West Germans (colloquially Ossis and Wessis), sometimes described as Mauer im Kopf (The wall in the head)."

[11/9/2024: The 20th@15. “In a modern world we should draw no lines, but our lives are framed in fear. In a peaceful world, there can be no war, but the enemies are always near.”] It's a Perfect World...

They’re restoring the WWI memorial in Scoville Park, and when the protective sheaths blow over the sculpture it clings in interesting ways. Also interesting how the ropes are bound at the ankles.

11/9/2013

At the compositional level, it is always more interesting to have a good set of bones to hang the music on. (This used to be known as a “lead sheet” but that term is now somewhat archaic, dying with paper). (I also like the idea of setting up a “situation”, which is a short set of instructions from which to improvise on.) This reductive approach to playing music can go a long way to produce consistent results that have an inherent cohesion or logic—that is sometimes referred to as “soul”, a kind of slang or shortcut around larger formal structures, like the Score.

It can also be satisfying to see how improvisations can spontaneously interpret a virtual or artificial manifestation of a song that was created in a studio. The “dry” version can seem shockingly flat and transparent, with all the effects removed—but the essence may still be found there. Good musicians know how to find those essences. 

11/9/2020

November is C Lydian month. (Painting is Course of Empire (Destruction) by Thomas Cole (1830).

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I have been very interested in the "music of language" ("speech melody") since hearing Steve Reich's Different Trains, which used audio of interviews given about the events pre and post World War II. 

11/9/2022

What causes a certain piece of art or a certain piece of music to be more relatable than other pieces of music? I find that a lot of the stuff that I do is somewhat solipsistic: it's only me and my own echo chamber and I can't imagine how people would hear it from another perspective or from a collective perspective, so it's important when we're making art to be more imaginative in the sense that there's an audience there listening to it, but even then, the audience is going to come in and out: at one point there might be a hundred people in your audience and another time there might be one or nobody. Once you start focusing on the music yourself the audience leaves automatically. #riff

[11/9/2025: Invariably, the things I don’t like other people like–and you’ll find that with many artists and musicians. Bill Joel didn’t like many of the songs that became hits, Bruce Springsteen didn’t like Born In the USA (initially), Robert Plant doesn’t like “Stairway to Heaven”. Relatability is a combination of saturation and the context of one’s personal mindset and a collective mindset, and in each there are various good and bad trigger points. In current times there are trigger points everywhere. An artist in these times is more of a button-pusher in the sense that you have to think of which buttons to push, and has to be finely finessed.] 

11/9/2024 

It’s interesting to hear how AI interprets your songs. I tried it on Force of Will. My singing voice and production is bad, but I still like my demo. The problem I have with AI is that it never gets the music in the language right. Very annoying. It’s interesting how it changes the word “angle” to “angel”. I think it might have to do with the style, which I chose as “mystical”. It’s kind of a happy accident, but not one I would accept at the time I was writing it. The other happy accident is the abrupt ending of the song on “blowing out the candles”. AI has interesting arrangement ideas, but artistically they’re clunky as if made by a bad producer. 

The good thing about AI music is that the production is done and it works out of the box. That’s something that’s always a problem for me because I don’t have a fully-equipped studio and I do the best I can with the tools that I have. AI gives us those production tools, but at what cost to the more rigorous and satisfying creative process? The other problem I have is how it chops up language in non-human ways. The way I view the writing of the lyric is that it has to be comfortably singable by the singer, and all singers are different in the way they interpret the rhythms in language. I think AI over-syncopates everything, but we naturally speak in syncopations; there are no bar lines in language. Bar lines in lyrics started to fade with rap. Todd Rundgren, even though he rapped on some of his songs, called it “a bunch of talkin’”.