April 24ths

4/24/2016

What I liked about Prince’s guitar playing was economy: He used only a few guitar sounds, mostly clean and overdriven, with very clean playing, as opposed to the 60s blues-influenced players (Clapton, Hendrix, Page) that had more ‘slop’ in their technique. 

4/25/2021, Sunday            

About five years ago I started a series that was called “15 Minutes”, a riff on Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes. It was supposed to be an album with 15 tracks on it with each one being one minute long. The last one I did was called Tessellation, a piece in 5/8 that's exactly one minute long. 

It's amazing how long it takes to write a piece of music that's just one minute long when you have to produce it and make a video, otherwise writing one minute of music perhaps doesn’t take a long time. 

A rule of thumb that I heard a long time ago was that you should write a minute’s worth of music a day. The difficulty will depend on the tempo and density of the music. If it's a slow piece, one minute might consist of whole and half notes and might take a half hour. Other days it might take 4 hours.

[The most recent minute works are the Shortets. The “Sum IV” series will all be a minute long]
 

4/24/2022

Music started dying beginning in the 1980s because of MTV, which shifted the focus from music to image, and that music needed packaging and marketing—which holds true to this day with social media and into the future with whatever comes after it, such as the Metaverse. The other inflection point was the PC which diffused attention in myriad directions. It’s ironic that even if music dies, sound doesn’t, and we can appreciate it (and create it) at that level. 

*** 

Using the hypothetical that the music of the 2040s is a repeat of the 1960s, then the music of the 2070s will be like the music of the aughts. People that will remember that period in their youth will be in their 80s, and perhaps not be nostalgic for it. You’d have to get in the headspace of those born in the 2060s, which is difficult to project. Then again we could go full retro and use music from 100 years prior, Ziggy Stardust, with futuristic “upgrades”. Most people will still be familiar with David Bowie in the 2070s and there will be celebrations of his birth in the 2040s and the 50th anniversary of his death in 2066. (You can’t go wrong with folk roots, or just roots music in general or any music that has withstood the test of time).