March 17ths

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 reverse-engineered. Very often even the artist can’t remember how it was made, or how it came together.

[3/2026: A prompt should be able to replicate it, but greatness be replicated?]

3/17/2020
 
What do modern songs need more of? Reverence for music history. Too much New for the sake of itself has led us to the point where even if we began to have reverence, the armatures (music education, pedagogy) would need sweeping infrastructure improvements. That said, more sophistication, cleverness of craft beyond wordplay and philosophical posturing. (I’ve done this too, and it has its place). Maybe we need more Revivals (not driven by nostalgia).

3/17/2021 

Take 50s pop icons like James Dean or Elvis: What can a 20-year-old glean from their lives? They might not even know who they are, but again, the web is brimming with content. It seems consistent in today’s culture to want to reflexively make a YouTube video, or even feature films about them. The recent Elvis movie is an example, as is Last Night in Soho whose soundtrack was based on the director’s parents’ record collection—not necessarily what we collectively understand about 60s pop. 

3/17/2022

Jazz was (and is) a futuristic music, and when electronics started to be used, even more so. It’s an example of an art form which is fairly centered on the Tradition axis and gets moved left and right to achieve different degrees of newness.

3/17/2024

As I’ve been experimenting with alternate tunings, there’s a strong tendency to revert back to standard tuning. There are two different worlds to juggle; I have to intentionally remind myself to keep the alternate way of looking at it instead of always doing a translation to standard tuning. If something sounds “wrong” we want to bring it back normal”. It’s a form of MAGA: “Make It Standard Again”. 

3/17/2025

Technology is always taking us down paths that we really shouldn’t take. Since the beginning of the internet we’ve been lured into the possibilities. I’ve always explored new tools as they came out, but if we’re not careful we’ll be spending all our time with the new tools and be diverted away from the things that we used to do. This is happening insidiously and we don’t notice it because it’s such a gradual process. Technology always requires a moment of discernment.

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An interesting musical metaphor for how we approach reusing information is orchestration for jazz orchestra. When I was studying jazz arranging in the 1980s with Bill Russo, we used his book Composing For the Jazz Orchestra, and there’s a chapter that relates to what’s called Identities, which are essentially melody lines in octaves or in fifths. What we seem to have now with information that’s being reused and reused is that it becomes too dense; it becomes a melody that’s harmonized in seconds and thirds. But we don’t always want that sound. I think it’s better if we create information that has an Identity, meaning that it’s clear, is original, and is not derivative of something else, like “particle board” of information. It’s the difference between fine furniture and a piece of pressboard.