February 27ths

2/27/1943

(Diary of Anne Frank)

Jan brought along the episcopal letter that the bishops addressed to their parishioners. It was beautiful and inspiring. "People of the Netherlands, stand up and take action. Each of us must choose our own weapons to fight for the freedom of our country, our people and our religion! Give your help and support. 

A chant:

 

 

 

2/27/1998

Bill Russo on WBEZ this morning about recreations of jazz records from the 1920s. Since most of the performances are only on vinyl, the music needs to be transcribed. I wonder what is lost, or gained, from transcription. It brought to mind the new transcription of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. Bill also talked about his trip to Italy saying that everyone’s lives are in an improvisatory style. The key is to have the faith and skill to know that you will be able to solve any problem that comes along.

[2/17/2025: I have been doing quite a bit of transcription from the AI generated music. it’s interesting to look under the hood of something that was machine-generated, and frequently there are some very good musical ideas. Whether they are someone’s ideas remains to be seen.]

2/27/2001

Interview with Keith Jarrett. He had chronic fatigue syndrome for 2 years. I’m amazed that his passion and productivity in music remained intact. Being sick and listening to his old music, he found a lot of things he didn’t like about it, evaluated his sound and made adjustments. Illness does have a positive purpose.

2/27/2005

“Thought Trains”, conceived using E-G#-D-F# tuning, using a combination of natural harmonics and fretted notes, set against a polyrhythmic groove.
 

2/27/2014

The longer you are doing creative work the deeper the connections to the past, that surface in your work decades later.
            
The Talking Heads would not have had the same success without Brian Eno (arguably). Eno would not have the same success without John Cage, Steve Reich, and Roy Ascott, and so on. There can be many degrees of separation, but we’re all related in the genealogy of artists. 
            
We think we forget things or move on from old styles, but it is all still bedrock that lots of generations can build on top of.

2/27/2023

Watched Louisiana Channel documentary on Terry Riley titled “Music as a continuum”. I think he’s in his 90s now and he’s still composing and performing. His way of working is very intuitive and very right-hemisphere, where he starts out with a seed idea and follows it, and either proceeds with it or abandons it. It’s feeling-based music as opposed to architectural approaches, which I typically use.

If you get a group of composers in a room together and they talk about how they work, the common response would be something like, “I started with a seed idea and then it went off in this direction and either I continued on with it and finished it or I abandoned it, or I took something from it and made something else out of it.” Those are the universals of any creative process–that you have to sit with it and see where it goes. But it’s interesting how there are different divergent methods that composers use to do what they do, but there are common procedures that all creative people use. #riff

2/27/2024
            
I’ve been experimenting with a new tuning, and it’s generating a lot of ideas, and it’s bringing back the days when I used to just write on a bass. But they’re terrible songs if they just feature it. They don’t “travel well,” and the parts you think are so special get easily buried in mixes. I like the possibilities with harmonics in altered tunings, but they don’t make a song. The instrument that you start on generates the raw ideas, but it can’t be the final idea. 

2/27/2025

I’ve started using the Google NotebookLM software. Interesting suggested topic: How did technology change Stravinsky’s music? Answer: “Even the most nearly perfect musical machine is useless until joined to a person with musical skill and imagination.” This is how I feel about generating music with AI. The lyrics have to be musical first, and musicians as opposed to listeners know how words and phrases can be musical, but I could be wrong. Perhaps music generators are the “access point”  to musical interests and abilities. For other people it might not spark anything.

"Stravinsky viewed recording technology as a "lever" that allowed him to step outside his role as a performer and listen critically to himself". [2/27/2026: If find this happens with AI music where I'm just the lyricist listening to music that was generated from them, which makes me a non-musician].

Also interesting how it generates a "Deep Dive" by two wonkish robots, sounding a podcast of some kind, all scraped from the data set.

***

Playing any kind of music can be orthogonal to anything that you do in everyday life. For most of us in the Western world, we spend most of our lives in our heads. But when you pick up a drum, a guitar, bang on a piano you’re immediately out of the left hemisphere. The style of music that you play should be irrelevant and ideally it should be something that’s more improvisatory, using whatever skills that you have. (Think Richard Feynman who was brilliant on the bongos...)