May 29ths

5/29/2013

Centennial of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.  Interesting juxtaposition: This morning the Barnum circus train was on an adjacent track to the El, which I thought was symbolic of life on a different track, and The Rite, while not a “Petrushka”, was an alternate reality in the music world.   

5/29/2022

Life happens in layers: When you get to be in your 50s and 60s and you’ve been doing things for a long time, they become stratified layers—as one would see on a mountainside.

Once you start accumulating content in layers, you can always access those layers. They can get compressed or buried over time, or get squirreled away in closets and basements, but I like to have some kind of organizational system that I can apply. This way I can always grab an idea from years ago and start doing something with it if I don’t have any more recent ideas. 

5/29/2024

In the Tin Pan days, many songs would be based on the rhythms of the words in the chorus. Some words are inherently rhythmic and are kind of a drum, a word “drum”, a wordrum if you will. The word “editor” is typically spoken with 16th notes. There are other note values you can use but it is naturally a percussive word. If you displace the phrase by an eighth note and put it on an upbeat it's unintelligible.  (A 30-second song)