May 7ths

5/7/1998

Book: Margaret Boden’s The Creative Mind. She said that tonality in music contains the seeds of its own destruction (referring to serial music). It’s interesting to compare books about creativity. Those who focus on the psychological aspects infer that the act of creation is predicated on the playing out of
conscious elements, and those who focus on the workings of the brain featuring the conscious elements. I prefer the latter, but five years ago I would have leaned more towards the former.  Constraints on thinking...make certain mental structures possible.” Discover a process or way of working and have it generate the product, then start breaking the rules. This is like making a meal from a recipe, but changing measurements, spicing, and so on to fit your taste. 

5/7/2021

If in fact we are now just scoring for sound and not scoring for orchestra, the whole canon of classical music will just be reduced to sound because people probably will never associate it with notation–they’ll never look at the score–and if they do it’ll just be on the internet as a small image or maybe a PDF. It won’t be like the paper score where you can easily follow along. So the sound is becoming deracinated from the notation. People might listen to classical music but there’ll be no association with it as notation as was conceived by the composer. Classical music as sound will be co-mingled with everything else. And if it’s used it’ll just be used as a sample in a sonic universe with no linkage back. Perhaps in the future there won’t be a young person who will hear a piece by Stravinsky or Debussy and be able to link it with the score or learn from the score because they’re not being published anymore–at least not in book form, which I think is more efficient–you can just grab it off your shelf without having to dial it up. There’s a whole universe of learning that’s going to fall as it happens in all the arts. Music is moving towards being about sound and it’s where composition is going. You might have a detailed analysis of scores in a YouTube video but that’s not the same as you yourself studying it. 

[5/7/2025: There actually might be more detailed information digitally, and now with AI in the loop. The bigger issue is attention and where we’re placing our focus. I’ve noticed more generally that musicians are spending more time with video production than studying music. If they’re teaching, there are no exercises for the student, so they’re basically getting overviews]. 

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Needless to say, sound is hugely important to the success of a song. The way that songwriters seem to be creating content these days is with cloud software or phone apps. They starts with a sound or beat and they build it up from there perhaps with some lyrics, and then that spins out the content–to the extent that that can be rearranged in some way to where it’s just chords and melody (if you can reduce it to that) or just simply play it on a guitar or piano then I think you’ve done it. I can work both ways, but I tend to work the old way where I just sit down with a guitar and write down the melody and chords, and then start production. Perhaps that’s the wrong way these days, but for me the creativity is at the compositional level. For a lot of people the creativity is at the production level. I haven’t bridged that gap. What I need is an assistant to actually do that. Doing the writing, the tracking, as well as overall production is too much multitasking for me. To the extent that they can happen simultaneously then that’s magic. I’m less concerned about what the guitars sound like and I’m less likely to approach it from that aspect. I don’t like endless tweaking. #riff 

5/7/2024

Sleep My Love (Improv) While developing another idea, I thought I'd use the old MC-300 sequencer. I selected the first file on the floppy disc and chose the patch "Sleep My Love". 

Another idea based on some random lyrics:

Sleep my love
A movement of air
Which doesn't care
About where it goes
Or what's in its way 

(Interesting that it's a 9-bar phrase and still works)