Lee Barry Composition Diary

3/31/2009 In pop music, efficient repetition is your friend.   Headz:   3/31/2015 When I was a composition student, one exercise was to create a music paraphrase of an existing piece (in this case a piece by Schubert), where the piano part was cut and pasted to a new score, to which a new melody was composed to the Little Rose of the Field . Nothing was "stolen" in this case, but rather more cut-up a la Burroughs or Schwitters collage. 3/31/2025 The early editions were slim volumes, and now have grown to 400 pages--each. This is because I either dictate everything, or there are video transcriptions, which can be quite long. In addition, there are quite a few photographs, which makes it a longer book. Remember, this is 28 years of March entries.  The United States has no resemblance to the United States in 1997, when I started the diary. In retrospect, I saw things really going off the rails in about 2011.

 3/31/2009  

 

 Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago  

 Shadow Crash  

 The Well    

 Rules  

3/30/1998   The whole idea of generative art forms brings to mind Eric Drexler’s book about molecular engineering in nanotechnology where you can “grow” matter and assign them to be specific objects. You define the parameters and then cultivate the soil and water the seeds.  [3/30/2026: This is essentially what the Songday series is about: Find a rhythmic riff and that becomes the seed].  3/30/1999   3/30/2006 Old Cal's, Wells and Van Buren There is a small window to the right of the entrance, which had a "blues shrine" in it with a broken guitar and a Sinatra record. There was a story behind this, I'm sure, and we'll never know it.  3/30/2021 Music For Photographs--a Robert Frank   Route 285 is a north-south state road in New Mexico that's mostly a barren landscape and is in the vicinity of Area 51, and I wanted to incorporate that "vibe". At the end, I shift from Eb Major to Eb Minor which I think works well with the vibe of the photo, and the dark...

3/29/1999 Joni Mitchell: I'm a painter first, and unlike a musician, is driven to innovate. You want to discover. Idea: Instead of sampling music from the past, sample it from the present and in 20 years time it will sound retro. But how would you know what will be culturally relevant? [3/29/2025: I think it's true. This is the reason that musicians are always creating music as a visual art,  which is different from art being a kind of music. But even in 1999, there were decades of innovation in music. Perhaps at that time she was grappling with sampling and the advent of Napster and free downloads]. 3/29/2002 More 1966 research: Life magazine in April 1966, $0.35.; More fascination with UFOs, Lisa Lotte, clothing designer, "Winston tastes good...", first docking in space. 5/20/66: "The Big Snoop"—Electronic snooping, fascination with espionage "Space Age" advertising copy/slogans, article on the "Free University", "teach-ins", ...

Respirator (3/29/2020) by meta4s Use the "Walrus" lyric schema for verses: Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess Boy you been a naughty girl You let your knickers down

 

 

 

3/28/2014   The sonic landscape of a city has its own ecology of “organisms”: the screeching sounds of metal against metal, background hum from power lines, buzzing neon, passing elevated trains, pneumatic machinery—the natural sounds of a city landscape that becomes a quotidian experience, yet unobtrusive and perhaps has a calming effect. (This was mixed to not interfere with the top layer of attention).  3/28/2015 In the old radio days one had favorite DJs pre-packaging potential influences, now musicians have to wade through it all. In visual art there’s the load of Art Forums to pursue new interesting work. [3/28/2026: A good way to understand a new technology is through the lens of another. Broadcast radio would be a way to consume content peripherally in the background like a radio playing without our having to interact with it. This is essentially McLuhan's theory. Scrolling is the bane of a medium being too cool. But you don't want it too hot either. That would be tota...

3/27/2001 Rael, the alien spiritual leader, says he will clone a human by 2002—and it will look like the alien stereotype with large cat eyes.  [3/27/2026: 25 years later, a song based in this entry with music generated with AI. Quite comical, but could be an interesting idea for a musical]. Rael Alien spiritual leader Rael Looking for believers Receiving false communion From a pop star on a station Moment of creation Spacemen for a nation Racing in a car Not going very far Creating human clones Righteous to the bone  The Curio:    3/27/2015, Friday A Harry Weese (200 S Wacker)                    3/27/2024 I came across something I had written in the diary after listening to a David Bowie interview. He said what he was interested in were the top-level systems–he didn't want to just make canoes (songs), he wanted to make the waterways. I think that's what I was thinking at the time I was doing Ancient AI : a system tha...

 

No One's Status Is Unknown (3/27/2020) by meta4s

3/26/1997 I don't want fame, I just want fortune and buy the fame when I want it. Can you buy fame? Riff from this entry:                   3/26/2002 From “The People’s Chronology” on 1966: Electric guitar gains prominence in England, where US rock musician Jimi Hendrix, 23, begins to exploit the full potential of the relatively new instrument. Hendrix uses imagination, virtuosity, invention, and sexual pantomime in his stage appearances”, Bacos came on market, “mod” look, mini skirts, Beatles more popular than Jesus, use of Sitar, Indian culture.  3/26/2010 Possible Dynaxioms:  Jazz turns melody on its side and makes it sound like harmony, When you’re creating something, you’re essentially steering it to a conclusion. 3/26/2021 Sometimes when I work on mixes I push the louder things to the background. For example, loud distorted guitars sound like they’re two blocks away.   There was a book I read recently that relates, and i...

 It's interesting how AI will summarize the things that you’ve said. Here I was just dictating my thoughts on how people interpret lyrics, which can intentionally be very random, and generated from cut-up a la William Burroughs. Personally, I like this approach, but it's interesting how one can stumble on something in a book ( Superbloom ) that relates to how you've been thinking about something, and AI will synthesize those thoughts. “Lyric writing, according to the sources, is an interesting art form where the meaning might not be immediately obvious. Unlike prose, where clarity of meaning is often the primary goal, in lyric writing, words must be shaped to be singable, not necessarily to mean something specific. This suggests that the sonic and rhythmic qualities of the words are prioritized, and literal meaning can take a secondary role. The source describes lyric writing as a mechanical process that can sometimes have different interpretations. This implies that the co...

  By Oskar Schlemmer -- A Weimar artist A "curio" or short for the AI-generated version. Perhaps the next "Sum" (Sum IV) album will be these orchestral curios, perhaps woven into a heavier vibe. It's interesting that AI is in the loop. This way I have more of a real hand in things rather than selecting a few options in software. The orchestral ensembles would all be different.   Goodbye to Berlin (Curio) by meta4s

Antipode: September 24ths 3/24/1998   Interesting approach: Make CD cover art, choose band name and album title, song titles, and then write the songs. [3/2026: You can do this now with AI]   Worked on compilations. Songs to redo: Blood River , Mr PC , Tube Voyeur 3/24/2001 Film: 15 Minutes . Great film. Good depiction of the world post OJ and post-Clinton, i.e., you can get away with anything in America. Liked the line, “Perception is everything, not truth”, the camera as a gun, the camera the third eye. Drum Grooves/Riffs:   3/24/2021 The 21/8 Dream—a nocturnal earworm. All music in dreams seems to run on a loop.  In music, musicians will approach it in non-musical ways: they won’t think of it as scales or chords or won’t use music theory. Similarly in art, artists will approach it the same way: they will use the materials however they want or they’ll just use found objects. That’s the essence of DIY. *** In the Mirror Sound book, the author was in some count...

3/23/1995   (Brian Eno Diary)   A comment on the diminishing returns of technology at the advent of the internet: “But something struck me quite forcefully. On the one hand there was Kevin [Kelly] eulogizing the technological revolution, and what it meant in terms of empowerment and freedom. Yet at 9.00, straight after the programme, was the news: that a small bunch of nutters in Tokyo had put 3,000 people in hospital. It struck me forcefully (again) that the more ‘richly connected’ we make our world the more vulnerable we make it...” [3/23/2025: And here we are. Many of us tech-oriented people always sing the praises of new technologies, but they always go off the rails. The internet went off the rails probably within five or six years. But AI is already going off the rails because there are no guardrails. At least in 1995 we had a government that was concerned about ethics, but the majority of members probably knew very little about computers and perhaps didn’t even own a PC...

3/22/1944  (Naples 44) At the time of my arrival the lava was pushing its way very quietly down the main street, and about fifty yards from the edge of this great, slowly-shifting slagheap, a crowd of several hundred people, mostly in black, knelt in prayer. Holy banners and church images were held aloft, and acolytes swung censers and sprinkled holy water in the direction of the cinders. Occasionally a grief-crazed citizen would grab one of the banners and dash towards the wall of lava, asking it angrily as to warn off the malignant spirits of the eruption. The spectacle of the eruption was totally unexpected. I had been prepared for rivers of fire, but there was no fire and no burning anywhere — only the slow, deliberate suffocation of the town under millions of tons of clinkers. The lava was moving at a rate of only a few yards an hour, and it had covered half the town to a depth of perhaps thirty-feet.  Book Excerpt Library : "Write a report of the eruption of Mount Vesuvi...

Macrophage V.1 , 24 x 24 inches, acrylic, stencil, seam tape, hardware and El wire on panel. (2025) POR Next in the Macrophage series, as an over-painting of Smoke No. 7 , as well as a continuation of Through the Dark City .     With El Wire On   Inverted      

3/21/2001   Piece on NPR about Paul Horn’s new solo flute disc recorded in the Taj Mahal. The interviewer asked, “How is this different from all the other thousands of new age recordings?” “It has a sense of place”, he said. If you don’t know the context in which it was recorded in India, you wouldn’t know the difference. A stereo recording obviously captures an immersive environment such as the Taj Mahal: You have to physically be in the space to get the full impact of this kind of work. This is the type of piece that makes a recording superfluous.   [4/2021: An interesting play on words for Music For Places would be “Music For Palaces”. Sometimes music requires a place and recordings can provide that by padding the music in some way with the use of some kind of an effect or reverb. Otherwise it’s just too flat and reverb is a way to not only add a space but it also decorates the music and creates a production “look”, as there would be a “look” or color space applied to a fil...

Antipode: September 20ths 3/20/2016   Film: My Beautiful Broken Brain . What better producer than David Lynch? When a brain changes it shows new “films” on the screen of consciousness. What this might suggest is that AIs that are anthropomorphized are by default “broken”, yet have recoveries and setbacks. They can be best described through the metaphor of film and will run on millions of little “film clips”. There is a common correlation between visual disturbances and film effects, some of it done in After Effects.  3/20/2021 I'm currently at Scoville Park. It's about 55 degrees, and obviously it's sunny with blue skies. About two blocks behind me is the Hemingway birth home. The boyhood home is a couple of blocks away on Iowa. The reason I brought it up is that I have started to sport this gray beard now, and in this particular pose, I'm sort of looking like him. And I wonder if I should shave my beard.   ***  In order to be a good musician, music has to be do...

A data set speaks, comprised of articles that I scanned in the early 2000s, so some of this is outdated, but is still interesting to revisit. “The provided texts explore various facets of sound, music, and perception, ranging from the emotional impact of musical pulses and the disruption of artistic conventions to the relationship between sound and the construction of space in film and architecture. Several sources examine the creative processes and philosophies of Brian Eno, highlighting his innovative approaches to music production, technology, and the concept of "generative music." Others investigate how cultural background influences the understanding of visual and auditory information, while some focus on specific musical techniques, the role of soundtracks in film, and the connection between music and spirituality. Finally, the collection touches upon the influence of technology on music creation and perception, and the subjective nature of artistic value.”

3/19/2002                   3 Songday riffs--a medley in 8 bars:   3/19/2022 As Charles Mingus once said, “You have to improvise from something—you can’t improvise from nothing”. Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them.  3/19/2024 There are 2 kinds of envy: 1) when you want to be in someone’s shoes, and 2) when you wonder why they have the shoes they have, and both envy and resent them for the shoes and how they got the shoes.  3/19/2026 Idea of the day: Radio Station that plays songs in the same key against each other. AI would be used to match them so that they are listenable.  

3/18/2022 Lyric/Poem idea:  The things that she said She didn't even know She was talkin' on a talk show The places she went She didn't even go She was talkin' on a talk show Used for an AI-generated song.  3/18/2023 3/18/2026 In music, I've never really forced myself into one genre, and I like to do a lot of things at the same time. So nothing is stopping me from writing classical music with some pop music in the background. If I'm just putting in articulations or bowings, I could be listening to something else. Since the advent of the internet and especially social media, there's always the possibility of context collapse--that we have different audiences we have to play to. There's the classical audience that doesn't want to hear any pop music, and then there's the pop music audience that isn't interested in classical music. But I'm interested in both. It's now even more complicated with AI because I can easily write songs in ...

While the recording sounds good, AI-generated jazz is usually terrible when you analyze it. The phrasing is bad, and chord changes are too vague, but the tongue-in-cheek lyrics work well in a relationship that didn't. There might have been a subsequent date but we'll never know. The script is AI-generated.  This is the “transcribed” version in a better key. It's the "sequel standard", as Giant Steps was based on Cherokee .

Antipode: September 17ths   3/17/1998 The most memorable music is music that evokes images in the brain. For me, it’s the dreamy "cloudy day" music: I like Beth Orton’s She Cries Your Name which reminds me of Bobby Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe in some ways.  3/17/1999   Reading Attali’s book. He makes a distinction between music as representation and music as replication. But with sampling, replication is representation. 3/17/2001, Saturday   St. Pat’s, this year on a Sat.   The interesting thing about randomness is that it creates much needed variety. Otherwise things would always be too defined and too clean. Noise is good.  3/17/2002 Cold, rainy. Photoshoot at Lincoln Park Conservatory with Chicago Photo Network. They have their huge camera rigs, and me with my tiny digital camera.                                       3/17/2009 Great art and music cannot be r...

Antipode: September 16ths   3/16/1999   Interesting that when the phonograph was first invented it was designed only to preserve performances, not replicate them. We’ve come full circle: Now we’re back to preserving via sampling technology. 3/16/2005 Internet Demolition               3/16/2024 AI is a good way to rapid-prototype music if you have an assembled cryptic lyric. Crossing a Range was made of lines abstracted from diary entries made on March 16ths. The meaning is hazy when you first start working with them but possible meanings begin to emerge. The theme seems to be Sisyphean: you could travel the world, crossing mountain ranges, arriving back home and perhaps feeling nothing had changed in some ways. It’s also Pinkphloydian: “Running over the same old ground, have we found the same old fears...” The music is extremely saccharine but works in an interesting way. “She” chokes up a bit on the word “change”—a nice happy accident. Throu...

Antipode: September 15ths  3/15/1944 (Naples 44) A bad raid last night with heavy civilian casualties, as usual, in the densely populated port areas. I was sent this morning to investigate the reports of panic, and frantic crowds running through the streets crying, ‘Give us peace,’ and ‘Out with all soldiers.’  3/15/2021 On being interested in things other than music: When Geddy Lee was writing his bass book he had interviewed Bill Wyman, who didn’t even want to talk about basses because he’s been into other things like archaeology and writing his own books. It’s natural to want to explore the world broadly; one thing is going to lead to another. It works the other way around as well:  Rock ‘n’ roll in the 60s was largely written by kids who were in art school. “Slashing” domains allows one to identify common elements which a singular focus may obscure or push away as being irrelevant. In fact, it may be a more efficient way to work because it may allow the hemispher...

 

 

 

3/14/1998 Stopped by Village Theater to see Tarantino's film Jackie Brown . (Such a deal at $2.75). Typical Tarantino, replete with scenes of blood splattering against windshields. But I do like his non-linear style. Cool score of funky 1970s jazz.  [I loved the Village. Apparently now demolished (2021)] Showing "0"                                       3/14/1999 The thing I’ve been learning about experimental procedures is that 50% of the time you have to abandon it because the results are disappointing. Every piece has a saturation point where the brain gets confused by what’s going on. but this can be interesting as well because it creates tension.  3/14/2023   I’ve always championed the idea of working in series, especially in art, and I thought that would transfer over to music but it hasn’t worked that way.   When you work on things that have a lot of different part...