March 21sts

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 film in post-production.]

 3/21/2013

Light Bass: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3/21/2021

The best improvisations in a band result from everybody listening intently while they're playing, and that usually doesn't happen. What’s happening now with communications generally is that people are riffing on their own ideas: the sax player is off their own playing outside, the bass player is not listening to the drummer, the drummer is filling too much, the keyboard player is trying to hold it all together, so what you get is what you get.  

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Yesterday, a book I was reading was talking about the consistency of composers, and he cited Stravinsky in his early period when he was writing the ballets. He wrote the Rite of Spring in 1913 and in 1917 wrote The Song of the Nightingale which is stylistically different. Here he was writing noisy music and three years later did something totally different. This is the way I work as well. I’m not considering consistency other than through serialization, which gives me a sense that there are constants you can return to–everything's not all over the place. Composers’ work can vary but they can still live within the same period as their contemporaries. What you want is for things to be contemporary, meaning the things that are in The Now. The Near Now is a period that you could occupy to find consistency as an equilibrium. #riff
 

 3/21/2025

 
3/21/2025

I think I’ve already adapted to AI-generated music, and I’m integrating it into the other things that I’m doing and not giving up the old ways of working. I think that’s a pretty good adaptation at this point. I don’t think I’ll ever stop doing any of the things that I’ve done before just because time marches on.

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What artists should strive for are complete ideas. It doesn’t matter how long they are or how big they are, it just matters that they’re integral and that it’s resolved and satisfied. There are expected lengths, such as albums expected to be 45 to 60 minutes long, EPs 10 to 20 minutes long, and singles about 3 minutes. But when you remove the media, you can play around more with those constraints. So if you release your music as videos, an album could be 12 minutes long, and it won’t matter if it’s an EP or an LP.
 
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Algorithms lack logic and common sense. This might be why people now also lack logic and common sense because we are obeying algorithms.
 
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From Zane Lowe’s interview with Eno: “Stubbornness as a crucial and increasingly important quality for artists. It’s the “secret ingredient” that enables creators to persevere in the face of constant criticism and the pressure to conform”.