June 27ths

 December 27ths

6/27/1943, Sunday

My father with Army bud, Buckroe Beach 

 

[6/27/2025: What would he have thought if someone from the future told him that the US might become a dictatorship in the 2020s?]

6/27/1944

(Diary of Anne Frank)

“...In the three weeks since D Day there hasn’t been a day without rain and storms, neither here nor in France, but this bad luck hasn’t kept the British and the Americans from displaying their might....Finland turned down a peace offer some time ago, and now the negotiations have been broken off again.

A short ditty for the entry:

 

 

 

 

 

6/27/2016

A philosophy of bass: A bass part can be “skeletal” in nature. Some songs don’t need a bass part per se, and rather can be contrapuntal and melodic in nature, rather than simply doubling the lower octave. How supportive the bass line or voice is really depends on the skill of the writer and/or performer, and the style of the music: In pop, a supportive bass part is married to the kick drum, but less so in jazz. I like to create parts that are pieces of music in themselves. 

6/27/2020

60s music was influenced by the recorded and broadcast music of previous generations (1910–1950) as that would have been what they had access to, unless they also learned from sheet music and scores, in which case classical works going back to the baroque.

60s music also was influenced by the art world, primarily Minimalism, where the pieces were more African-influenced (polyrhythms), more horizontal (less concerned with harmony and chord changes), and more likely to be pandiatonic in nature. I always thought that even though the roots of the Grateful Dead were folk, the jamming aspect of it came from jazz and minimalism. (Also consider the procedures used in aleatoric and electronic music which are also theoretical and had a huge influence on mid-60s experimentation). 

[6/27/2026: If all recordings are generated by AI, everything will become fungible. A prompt will generate something that has a 60s vibe, but there would be no identifiable musicians who were influenced by jazz, per se. One bar or riff might sound like someone, but the world might never definitively know. It might be a good thing to anonymize art, but then there are no influences beyond its digital tokenization. No one would be able cite influences other than the generated object. There's a big paradigm shift in art now].

6/27/2024

Per David Bowie, if songs are "canoes", AI music is all the plastic bottles, paper cups and other jetsam floating on the water. It's all manufactured, consumed, and tossed. Some people brand the OEM products with their name or pseudonym in order to sate their hunger for celebrity, just as some people put their name on buildings or other monuments to themselves. 

[6/27/2025: What a difference a year makes. I think AI music activity for real musicians is fine. As Duchamp said, it’s another “department” of creativity. So far it hasn’t diminished my other activities. In photography you can do both the rigorous craft and just taking fun snapshots].

6/27/2025

I like this AI summary of On Design: “The prediction is that the practitioners of this new form will not be musicians as we have known them but rather “musicists” or simply designers--people arranging, curating designing the experience rather than composing in the traditional sense, designing the output not necessarily originating the core idea, which raises that fundamental question who’s actually doing the [work].”