December 6ths

12/6/1966 
            
(The Complete Beatles)
            
The recording of “Strawberry Fields Forever” finished and complete...the Beatles now turned their attention to the second song for the next album, Paul’s vaudeville-style charmer “When I’m Sixty-Four”...One possible reason for the song’s revival was that Paul’s father, James, had turned 64 in July 1966.1

[12/6/2025: An interesting juxtaposition is watching him on his latest tour, almost 20 years older than his father was in 1966]. 

2/6/1997

Book: How Brains Think by William Calvin. Calvin.  He talks about the chain of neural connections as a melody, which reminds me of an exercise in music class where a melody was played and we would sing the next note. Most of the time everyone would get the right note. He also posits that climate changes on earth are most likely one of the reasons we are what we are, which I agree with because it is consistent with lots of other things I’ve been reading, e.g. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory, where everything is constantly learning and growing in time and is intertwined with everything else. 

“Discuss melody, harmony, and rhythm as metaphors in science”

2/6/1999

Made disc of drum loops for Acid program. My fear is that this might lead to the “band in a box”, “music by numbers” approach. As technology makes it easier to make music by simply cutting and pasting sound files, it puts musicians who have studied and played music manually in a precarious position. While the cut and paste approach is a legitimate way of communicating a musical idea, there is a danger of slipping into artless amateurism. When things become too easy to make, as opposed to easy because of a conscious decision, you sacrifice a piece of the mind’s ability to visualize and follow through on seed ideas. As a composer, I don't want people to say he sold out to cheap prefabricated ideas.

[12/6/2024: 25 years later we have bands-in-a-box with AI music. One could see how selling out could be easy if the industry fully embraces AI. The culprit might be the idea of convenience: why scrub clothes on a rock by a river when an appliance had been invented? More than ever, moral hazards lurk around every corner when you're relying too much on technology. While I like listening to the songs that AI churns it's never what I would do. Artists have tough decisions to make, but that's what you want. You don't want the easy  way all the time. If you can have a completed song in an hour--with lyrics--and a mixed and mastered album in a day, what else is there to do but churn out more? Artists have to find the art, not just make it. Ask yourself after making something with AI: how is it that I did that?]

[12/6/2025: I haven’t sold-out to AI even though it’s in heavy rotation in the creative process--more as a "pallet cleanser". I don’t know why any artist who has been making art for at least 5 years would make art only with AI. It simply cannot do everything. The more you use it the more you’ll want to avoid the frustration of wanting something specific and never getting the results that you want. I can start with blank manuscript paper and a guitar and get exactly what I want]. 

12/6/2002

I was in a store and they were playing a Christmas song to a Motown beat and I found that I could sing “You can’t hurry love” against it and fit in perfect counterpoint. 

What I thought was interesting was that eventually, people started to listen to lyrics, even years after hearing it for the first time. It adds another dimension to the whole listening experience.

I heard some Quranic verse set Arabic music on the radio that they were playing for Ramadan. It was beautiful. But what was its message, and how were people interpreting the message, or were they listening to the words at all? Sometimes just the cadence of music sends a clear message, e.g. Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie.

[Again, relates to the idea that it’s the music that washes over us first and we don’t always tune into the words, but if the words are coming first, the music is a result of them. The best songs tend to meet in the center of that process collectively. The nature of pop music is that if it’s in the same key and tempo you could superimpose them. I’ve always loved the idea of these kinds of “context collisions” as a form of synchronicity].

12/6/2015

Wright Angles (Courtyard at Wright studio looking northwest)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/6/2024