Lee Barry Composition Diary

12/31/1999 Today is the defining moment as to whether our lives are truly pervaded by the computer age, and if something goes awry in Russia the world will be toast tomorrow. President Yeltsin abruptly resigns. Putin, a former KGB agent, takes over. Disturbing.                      The “brand new day”. Honeymoon will last for a while, but will it withstand the vagaries of real life?             [12/31/2024: It’s interesting to reflect after 25 years. I was skeptical of the “brand new day” zeitgeist even then, although the next few years were indeed an internet zeitgeist. Many feel we are entering a new dark age, or are already in it]. 12/31/2000 Show on TV about Alzheimer’s patient, at age 80 started painting and drawing, showing awesome talent. Was it always there, and activated by disease, or does disease create a brain state on the fly?...

 

 

 

 

Your Table Is Ready...

 

12/30/1897 (Paris)             (Harry Kessler Diary)             Purchased Seurat’s “The Models at Vollard’s” for 1,200 francs. One of the masterworks of the French school!             (This is the image that Kessler bought. It’s interesting that it is cropped and enlarged, as well rotated horizontally):                  [69 years later there is a musical group playing guitars that you plug in. They are able to trace their performances as one would paint on a canvas–but with sound. 69 years in the future in 2093 there will be young artists making some form of art that is now unimaginable. When one of the musicians turns 64 in the 2140s there will be other technologies akin to sampling in 2000 that was inconceivable 50 years prior] 12/30/1966 Mono mixing: “ When I’m Sixty Four” tape copying, “ Strawberry Fields Forever”, Recording “ Pe...

12/29/1966 "Interviewed in November 1965 Paul McCartney mentioned that he’d been toying with the idea of writing a song called “Penny Lane” because he liked the poetry of the name. Penny Lane was, and still is, the name of the road in this suburb immediately to the south of Liverpool city centre, close to where the Beatles grew up. It took another year for Paul to actually write the song but with its description of the shops and the people and the “blue suburban skies” his Penny Lane was a fine counterpoint to John’s “Strawberry Fields Forever”" [12/29/2024: 1966 has always been my pet year. (Everyone might have one where they plant a flag on it), but it seems to be pivotal and culminating, the result of the “lag of the seasons” in a cultural sense. GenX thinks it’s 1974 or 1975. For older millennials it might be 1984]. See: The Threshold of 1966 : Excerpt Library : "Discuss how the year 1966 was a pivotal year in world culture"  12/29/1999 A friend asked me wh...

 Music generated by AI  using a short cryptic poem I had written, as a "score" for a Sebald photograph (Benacre Broad?) taken around the time of Rings of Saturn , and has a the typical "Sebaldian" saturnine quality, then arranged for string quartet on a lark as a "shortet", a minute in length. String Shortet No. __ ("Vintage of the Vinyl") by meta4s

12/28/1998 Re: marketing strategy for Secret Sphinx . I'd rather have some story to tell about it–just writing songs and arbitrarily sticking them on a CD is boring. We'll have to get the story straight.  12/28/2008 Incredibly warm for December, 60°, which created interesting fog conditions. Went out in the PM and took photos at park. I called them “Blackfrost” . 12/28/2010 Recordings in the age of mashups are ‘organic’, like fruit on a tree, free for the taking and consumed/enjoyed for its properties without knowing what produced it. [12/28/2024: “Not knowing what produced it”, or how it was made will be the mystery of the future when there will be seas of content created by AI, originally generated in 2024, then remixed and restyled generation after generation throughout the 21st century with no attribution at all. All a historian might have is a generic username]. 12/28/2014 A new photo series: Architectural Deconstruction . This particular series has to do with the “deconst...

12/27/2009 Part of the reason Hitchcock shot Psycho in BW was that it would mask blood. The first color out of a world of black and white is red. 12/27/2016 When we think of light, we understand it as a retinal phenomenon. But music has been used as a metaphor for centuries, most notably during the impressionist period in the late 19th century, with works primarily by Debussy and Ravel.               In the 20th century, artists such as James Turrell and Brian Eno extended the phenomenological (or ambient) aspects of light. Eno was interested in light even before he became involved with sound and Turrell, while not an audio artist, recontextualized light as being an ambient phenomenon worthy of deeper meaning and attention. There is a natural linearity of moving from visual phenomenon to sound; They are joined at the hip in many ways. People who have synesthesia understand this with an intensity that others may not. Still, most understand that lig...

 Man Ray

Design Museum of Chicago: Letters Beyond Form: Chicago Types

 

 

 A smoky blues/jazz ballad on a minimalist/surrealist lyric. With an AI treatment and paintings by Paschke. The lyrics are essentially about a deepfake world that is all AI-generated. Ideally, you could make a movie where all the characters and dialog are generated from an LLM. No one knows anything or has experienced anything, yet it seems like they do. It's the lack of the verisimilitude of real life, even one that had been a fictional story written by a human writer.

12/26/1997, Friday             Book: Fundamentals of Music Composition by Arnold Schoenberg. A very dense, erudite book, but he has some interesting points: Music consists of elements functioning like a living organism. The presentation of ideas must be based on their relationship with the other elements and parts in the music. Anything too extended cannot be coherently processed by the brain. Intelligibility in music is impossible without repetition (but too much of it can be patronizing.) A theme should have a certain “something” which the whole world already knows.” (Mattheson Music is composed of sentences, a language (but single words can also be meaningful). “The construction of the beginning determines the construction of the continuation.” Schoenberg is much too academic but he does make some good observations about composition that remain contemporary. Our ability to comprehend musical sequences is innate and therefore there are patterns we s...

 All AI-generated, including the voices (one of which sounds a bit like Johnny Cash)

12/25/1924   Can't get any better than this--Christmas amongst architects and musicians.  12/25/1997              A Reverend said that he thought that dancing was even more powerful than language in terms of shared spiritual experience, where all muscles are moving together.  Excerpt Library (Music) : "Discuss dancing as a manifestation of the spiritual."  12/25/2000 Christmas solar eclipse this morning at 11:20. Everything bathed in dim sunlight. There won't be another Christmas eclipse until the year 2307. An excellent example of random variation, where certain objects interact at specific points in time, and happen at unique moments. 12/25/2003 Film:  Lovely and Amazing. 12/25/2006 James Brown died. He was the guy that popularized the notion of “The One” and awareness (and possibility) where lots of syncopation in music, and the treatments of all instruments as percussion instruments. (Bass is really a tuned drum).  12...

12/24/1998 When you leave something unfinished or omit something in a piece of art, it leaves the question open, “why is it unfinished? It invites the listener to think about it rather than to just gloss over the surface. [ On Finishing ] 12/24/1999 To MCA to see 100 Years of Architecture exhibit. (Apparently lots of others are doing this “non-traditional” activity). Daunting installation on four floors. Highlights: visionary work of Le Corbusier, Russian avant-garde, the German functional kitchen idea, Frank Gehry (his comment, “things look better unfinished”), my idea for “sound houses”. Idea to keep organized with multiple projects: the “daily triad”, where you choose the three most important tasks for the day. (Expand to "weekly triad" and "monthly triad"). 12/24/2011              My initial concept for Music For Places was to scout and find indoor and outdoor locations that had unique ambient sound characteristics, record them, and then compose p...

Astrolabe Series Astrolabe No. 7 (Choir) [Minute Music] by meta4s

12/23/1998              The irony about the success of Miles From Mars is that I never took it that seriously. I created it for solely artistic purposes, but never had my ego wrapped up in it. [12/23/2025: Wu wei essentially. The act of trying might be a function of ego–that we feel we are in control].   12/23/1999             Last minute shopping at Marshall Fields with mobs of people buying things for the sake of buying them–perhaps because they feel it’s the “last Christmas”. Left early and met A. at MCA.  12/23/2002               Went to Michelangelo exhibit Art Institute. Interesting: his work was done primarily as a study, a way of experimenting and working things out, solving problems. 12/23/2003 Prediction:  The selling of music will get like the selling of appliances with extended warranties, rebates, and so on. It will no longer be as free as it was in...

  12/22/1999               Cable installed. Now this is the way to surf the internet!  12/22/2016 I’m still not sold on the idea to stop making objects, but perhaps they should not be kept around, but rather be put in places where they have no intimate connection to the lives of the artists. This has an interesting connection to the whole idea of Minimalism, to be coldly detached from emotion and devotion, that results in objects such as white and black paintings, plain white cubes, and so on, that only exist in public and not in private collections of people with no connection with the artist. [12/22/2024: This is an argument in favor of art being representative requiring no explanation, but I think artists tire of it. If everything you do is some literal representation of the world, why not just make stills from surveillance cameras? That’s quite interesting actually: photorealist paintings made from webcam stills. The explanation of t...

12/21/1999 Celestial triple-play occurred today. the winter solstice (when the earth is closest to the sun), the full moon, and the moon at perigee. It hasn't happened in 166 years. 12/21/2010 For the first time in 372 years, Monday into Tuesday’s lunar eclipse coincided with the start of the winter solstice. I love synchronicities like this. Interesting that the Lascaux caves were designed such that the cave openings would direct a sunbeam into the cave at the solstices. 12/21/2020 The Jupiter-Saturn great conjunction simultaneous with the winter solstice is another example of the “touching”—the universe is telling us something with this particular display. But the “something” is just another “anything”: the ascription of meaning is both personal and collective. 12/21/2021 Sunny solstice morning, 9:58. A day of 1s and 2s (122121). A six-word haiku: repeating ritual stonehenge solstice tilt terminus Reading The Dawn of Everything , a posthumous tome by David Graeber. Interesting se...

December 30ths   6/30/1999 On the Red Violin film: Years ago it was the instrument itself that became the memory, now it's the sound, the recording or the cultural footprint that the artist makes that gets remembered. [2025: Containers of Music ]  6/30/2001 Interesting: Bill Kurtis traveled the world and found that he resonated with a simple place like Kansas. Everyone has one place where they fit in perfectly. Went to Davis Theater to see AI . It had its moments, good and bad. Kubrick was always like that: brilliant moments spoiled by stupid stuff. Things I liked: the “designed” scenes, camera angles, reflections, and so on. If they repeated some of that throughout the film, it would have made it 100% better. Also, the Amen people circa 4500 AD.  [6/30/2025: Like all paradigmatic technologies, AI is a trope, a mythology, woven into the human experience. For artists, these things are typically grist for the mill.] 6/30/2002             ...

  12/20/1997 Interesting interview with Harvard intelligence researcher Howard Gardner. He says that it’s time that prevents us from being adept at many things. If we had forever, then we could develop these areas....  [12/20/2024: AI will provide a “virtual immortality” (VI). Machine learning is essentially “fixing mistakes”.] This “VI” can also be seen as an extension of imagination, where machines are “imagining” and we will have essentially taken the magic and mystery out of it.] [12/20/2025: “But once we realize that people have very different kinds of minds, different kinds of strengths—some people are good in thinking spatially, some in thinking language, others are very logical, other people need to be hands-on and explore actively and try things out—then education, which treats everybody the same way, is actually the most unfair education.” [This is very true–especially to people who are musically inclined. If they haven’t discovered language abilities, they are proba...