December 24ths

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 pieces that blended in the background. (This was before people had GPS capability on smartphones, and then I was relying more on the iPod. ) It was essentially an attempt at a synergy between extra-musical sounds naturally occurring in spaces and music scored against it such that every time you’d go back to the place, there was a piece already composed for it. (Like a sound sculpture). They could also be a way to document various spaces before they are shut down or torn down such that returning to the site one can hear it as it once sounded.

12/24/2016            

Slang Soul (And Other Metaphors): Something has to be a vehicle for making slang possible. In music, certain instruments make certain music possible. (The Medium is the Music). But it’s usually linguistic in origin, which is the primary reason for musical slang.            

Any time I pick up a bass I usually play something funky. It’s almost built into the instrument, and is completely intuitive: the function of bass is closest to the drum.            

African music is embedded into all music at this point, in all cultures. African musical slang has been expressed in various forms of jazz since the 1920s and evolved to the next level as R&B in the 1950s by Silent Generation musicians, then again by Boomer and GenX generations, in all countries that enjoy pop music.            

Anything built on drummed rhythms is going to be open to “slanged” language (“Slanguage”)-- such as wordplay through scat and rap–which then becomes the engine for music. Once instrumental music involves language, its rhythms change in fundamental ways: Adding lyrics to existing music involves using word placeholders that get replaced later on. Very often the original scats work as the original—the reason being that words in pop songs are there for rhythmic purposes, not to be taken literally, even though a bunch of random phrases can add up to meaning through inferences.) American folk song is somewhat anomalous, in that it doesn’t allow for the natural rhythms of language to shape the music itself. It is primarily poetry with accompaniment. In African tribal ceremonies, the rhythms are not Music, and not associated with written text, but are rather a codification of tribal rites. We do that in Western culture primarily with text, and the Internet is now the medium for it.            

It will be interesting to see how music and language evolve with machines and AI in the mix. The big dunce of AI will be its ignorance of the foregoing.

Rhythm is essentially internalized (in Classical music), but rhythm comes alive in the body through language and movement. If you get stuck on playing difficult rhythms, it usually helps to vocalize it (scat, rap, whatever is next)            

(Perhaps the wiring in the brain associated with spoken language and drumming are close together.) White culture has squelched this because the inner sense of rhythm (and tempo or perception of time) 
            
[12/24/2024: Itt is interesting how music and language have evolved with machines and AI with LLMs (even musical ones). I use them everyday now with my Songday System, which involves taking words and phrases and extracting rhythms from them as the basis for songs and other compositions]. 

12/24/2023

Phil Glass: When I’m on a tour with the dance company we work in a different-sized theater every night. The first thing the dance company does when we arrive is to measure the stage. They have to reset the dance to fit that stage. So you also have to reset the time of the music: In a larger theater, you must play slower. In a smaller theater, you have to play faster. The relation of time and space in music is dynamic. I have a range of speed in mind. If the players don’t pay attention to that, it will look really funny. You can see the stage fill up with dancers because they are playing at the wrong speed.   

12/24/2024

Dyn: You don’t necessarily have to hear music or see art. Like the daytime sky, the planets and stars are always there.

 

12/24/2025

There are different kinds of randomness. The human version is better because humans are more cosmic in nature. The cosmos didn't emerge because some emergent  organism invented a computer. I realize this when I compare random ideas that emerge when I'm playing an instrument as opposed to generating music with AI. With instruments you are in the loop, so your hands can do anything on the instrument. When I play guitar with the TV on in the background ideas always come up. But the ideas that might appear while generating music are from a tiny universe of potential ideas, even if the data set is a million songs.