March 11ths

3/11/2021

Book: For the Love of Music. Most people see art as entertainment, and most artists see art as an inner exploration. It's hard to understand with any clarity, the minds of thousands of people. But once an artist has a lot of followers and fans, it's easier to get an idea of what the fans want. And so an artist feels he has to pander to his audience.

Miscellaneous interesting bits:

• What we don't realize about the majesty and grandeur of cathedrals is the dogma that is within them that has caused such strife in human history. Cathedrals are a kind of "perfume" which covers up the nasty odor of hypocrisy.
• Re: Ravel's Bolero premiere in 1928, people got really annoyed by the repeats and begged for it to stop. They probably would have stormed the stage at a Glass performance.

(We naturally like to size things up before we decide to engage with them at all. In music, we might look at its duration. With books we can look at the number of pages, but with electronic books there's no way of having some visual clue as to how much time it's going to take).

3/11/2025

In music I have to be constantly vigilant that my technical skills aren't fading away because I'm spending too much time generating things with AI. There’s so much investment in that kind of thing now, as opposed to pre-internet when you’d get an idea, act on the idea and very few people would actually see it--if ever. The generation of art is designed to be shared. (The medium is the message)