May 28ths
5/28/2005
Sat down at the piano and improvised the most stunningly beautiful piece.( You wonder why people need religion when you have these kinds of experiences—creating straight from the ether...)
[5/28/2025: I wish I had saved this, or perhaps it was used in something else. It’s difficult to “bottle” these kinds of moments, with “bottling” meaning capturing their essence a second time. Even if you managed to have a recording of it, recreating it, or notating it is always a second-generation. The right hemisphere is dominant while improvising, and the bottling is a function of the left. Several days ago, I attempted to play an improvised piano piece as orthopedic surgeon Anthony Cicoria had after having been struck by lightning, and I can see his process–reacting to each moment as it arises, following where it leads without thinking. If you did this for 5 minutes, you could have some riffs you could use. This was the idea on Rifts, where I freely improvised in the Lydian mode, then later went back and used the riffs on something else.]
5/28/2010
Interesting: The Seventh Generation philosophy of the Iroquois. They thought it was appropriate to think seven generations ahead (a couple hundred years into the future) and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their children seven generations into the future.
5/28/2015
In his interview on the On Being podcast, composer Gustavo Santaolalla talked about how young tango musicians are very good technically, but lack knowledge of the deeper personal and cultural meanings in the art form. This should be no surprise given that we learn through emulation and imitation, primarily through recordings instead of teachers and mentors. It poses an interesting facet of emulation that demotes direct experience over copying and remixing.
Rhythmic styles such as tango, leave many things implied. It is a music that has a pulse that you can dance to, but is high context, i.e. there is a tacit understanding that doesn’t have to be explicitly restated with a repeating groove or beats. One could sample a tango, but the sample is disconnected from its essence.
“...no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.”
5/28/2024
Gathering Stones from Eno's 5/28 diary entry: “Sat reading, walked on beach collecting stones", using "gathering" instead as a more musical and singable word--two eighths and two quarters. "Collecting" is too consonant-heavy and awkward. Language is in the service of music in music, which is why you can write lyrics that seem awkward, incoherent, or not grammatically correct. Writing music to poetry is difficult (the art song) because you can't change words, so the music is in service of language.
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