December 26ths

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 should follow so that it makes sense to the “consensus of minds”, the “collective unconscious” of musical logic.

[12/26/2024: Surely, Schoenberg would have been interested in AI—as opposed to other composers, given his analytical approach to music. I think all creative people should now be of two minds about how they move forward with their creative practice, as there is probably a “collective unconscious of creativity” that reciprocally changes with the times. It’s been the case all along.] 

12/26/1999

What about all the people who will die immediately before 2000?

Curtis Mayfield died at 57.

12/26/2017

Book: Before You Know It by John Bargh. The us versus them trope is evident in sports team rivalries and easily ports over to politics. In some ways, music is a sport: Paganini-like guitar soloing is really borrowed from sports. But playing sports is not the same as performing a symphony written by a composer  A composer may write in cadenzas, or particular parts may call for virtuosity, such as the Concerto, but the purpose is not to compete. In battle of the bands the focus is on the human inclination for competition, sometimes even brutally.

12/26/2021

What draws me to music most strongly is the tactile: I simply like the feel of vibrating strings across a slab of wood, and is so much more satisfying than a computer keyboard or a piece of glass. 

I’ve become somewhat attached to my instruments, which is a testament to an emotional bond. I think that’s crucial to wanting to play music. But in spiritual terms this might be a bad thing—it’s a form of desire and attachment. What if you don’t have an instrument when ideas arise? This is where a more generalized creativity comes into play. 

[12/26/2024: Whatever one thinks about AI being cold and inhumane, it is a very interesting tool for creativity–if you keep it in its place. I always have an instrument for ideas, my trusty Standard Issue No. 3 for jotting down rhythmic “scaffolding” and an acoustic guitar. Sometimes an AI-generated idea floats to the top, but the ideas in the notebook are still worthy of being developed. All the AI music I’ve generated thus far is far different from the original notebook entries, and not necessarily better musically. They are better because the music is fully produced–processed, packaged and ready for consumption without having to make multi-tracked recordings, mixing, mastering, etc. It’s “turnkey” music. The story of most young musicians is that they were drawn to an instrument—which is different from a computer because everyone has one—as opposed to a guitar sitting in a corner and you picked it up one day.] 

12/26/2025 

I like the distinction between process-based and outcome-based creative modalities. Manual creativity is process-based and AI-generation is more outcome-based. If you have set aside an hour to do something, you can generate everything and have 10 results as opposed to a process-based approach, where you might not even have 1, but the latter is long-durational and has a framework that is generative, where you may have 10-12 complete pieces in 6 months. AI generates too much material, and you have to spend a considerable amount of time curating it. Side-by-side, the curated 12 may have similar quality to yours, but the manual process-based creativity might be more satisfying because we know it came from us rather than having been phoned-in and overnighted. People like to drive cars because they are at the controls. It is essentially a process getting from A-B but is process-based as well because we are enjoying the process. Doing something in a perfunctory way is seldom exciting and social media engagement might be the only motivation because we like the positive engagement. The process-based artist goes back to the studio but the outcome-based artist goes back to the assembly line.