June 11ths

6/11/1886

[AI-Generated--with embellishments. He's now Thomas Sullivan, 30 years old living in Chicago]

Blood has been scrubbed from the cobblestones, but memory stains deeper. Stockyards are a “red horizon”, not unlike a memory of violence.We are becoming something unprecedented. The question remains whether we'll recognize ourselves when the transformation completes. [More]    

Inspires a new song idea: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/11/2001            
    
Older jazz musician playing in the subway. He had several different thumb pianos with a pick up attached going through a cheesy amp. The sound was a cross between distorted guitar and Rhodes piano.

6/11/2004

Ray Charles died at 73.

Reagan: “quiet faith” is what I believe in.

6/11/2023

On being a DIY composer: Anyone can string together what they think is a logical sequence of sonic events. This has been the case ever since there was media that allowed people to make these sequences (film, video, samples, software). But writing for acoustic instruments is a different animal. An untrained musician could rough it out in a DAW, but a trained orchestrator/arranger will be necessary. The nice thing is that ultimately you’ll still be the Composer. 

[6/11/2025: It was the DAW that radically changed how we approached composition. I realized this when I had to switch to Dorico from Finale. Finale was still like writing on manuscript paper, but Dorico seems more like CAD commands–which is interesting because there is a bit of overlap on the Venn diagram between music and architecture].

6/11/2025

RIP Brian Wilson. Dead at 82. Once the inluencer and the influences pass on so does the power of the influences. Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper can't cross-pollinate forever. What does endure is the album of songs with a concept or thread that holds them together. Cross-pollinations between artists typically happen within a 20--year window. He had dementia and you wonder if the music remained.