February 2nds

2/2/1995

(Brian Eno Diary)

Suddenly had the strongest urge to get out into the bright sun, and did....

2/2/1998

Writing music is like making food from a recipe: There are processes that are known to work, and they produce similar results every time. It’s also a reliable process because you can make a meal of tried-and-true recipes and know that the guests will like it. Just as in cooking, where there are certain procedures that always work, for example, doing things separately and then combining, making music has its own rules of thumb. Now that music is now more DIY, you get everyone collaborating on a “meal”, regardless of whether they know how to cook, and the outcome is more provisional. But ultimately, everyone had fun and left the party satisfied. We might have lost sight of our initial intention, which was to make a tasty meal, but everything turned out, regardless of whether a proper recipe was used.

[2/2/2026: At the time I was thinking about collaboration versus working alone, and using the metaphor of a recipe, with that recipe being a score or sheet music. The results that you get from working from a score would be like making a meal with somebody else working from a recipe with very little variation, or very little individuality. The meal would be perfect, but maybe wouldn't be as fun as improvising a meal. Collaboration may start with a recipe but you'd rather improvise it by doing various things like changing the spicing or substituting ingredients]. 

2/2/2011

Blizzard.

 

2/2/2020

On Twitter, someone posted a clip of Anthony Hopkins reciting the last stanza of the Dylan Thomas poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, in a post related to Brexit. I was moved by the natural prosody and the natural rhythms in the words in its recitation. It is written in the form of a villanelle, a ballad-like song with no fixed form. Both Thomas and Hopkins seem to evoke a march rhythm. 

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light" can be a repeating refrain, even softly under the rest of the poem. This can also be used as a kind of soft protest march. At a slower tempo, it could be dirge-like.

2/2/2024

Back in 2015 I released Music For Places III: Thorne Rooms, which were musical miniatures for the dioramas. I’ve since realized we’ve now moved towards listening to music more visually. Obviously, we’ve been doing this since the advent of the music video two generations ago. But I would have never thought in my teens and 20s that we would listen to an album on a TV. We’ve also had cable radio for decades, but the graphics might consist of a small thumbnail of the album cover, which may or may not show if the images aren’t loading for some reason. I like the idea of “watching” albums. In this case, it’s almost required, because you can look at the rooms while listening to the music, which is optimal for this particular concept. The idea was that the rooms are period film sets and the music is a “score”, but they aren’t music videos per se. The visuals don’t “confabulate” the music as music videos typically do. 

2/2/2025
            
With AI songwriting, the words are everything you do—it’s your only creative role. To me, it’s still satisfying. It demonstrates that even if that role is small we get a sense that we’ve made something. But lyrics can take a long time to be noticed in a song for the intended (or inferred) meaning. Similarly, our creative input in other domains, or in a work situation can go unnoticed or unappreciated. It’s just the nature of creativity. In first century Rome there were creative people whose work was obvious, but was not typically attributed to them. But they could still say, “I made that”, even if it was a small background in a painting. We do this now with resumes where we list the things we’ve done so that they’re appreciated enough to get a job. But beyond that it will be the same situation where appreciation for our creative input will be elusive. Artists should be satisfied with any residuals, which both indicate “I made that” and “I was here”.

***

Watched Fireaid performances, then Grammys. We actually can’t begin to realize how affected musicians’ lives are—that there was this period in American history where people became ultra-wealthy just from making pop music that would have been considered stupid in any other era, get huge mansions in paradise, then it comes to a horrible end. But as they preached at the Grammys, the essence of music will prevail, sometimes its only residual qualities. I simply cannot fathom what it would be like to lose a studio and instruments, let alone recordings that would have burned up on the various media accumulated over the past 50 years. Even if the media couldn’t be played, it’s now more lost.