Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

January 31sts 7/31/1997 It’s interesting to talk to 20-somethings because they look at Woodstock like a bunch of old people playing shuffleboard. Some even like big band—which means that you aren’t necessarily bound to your own age group in terms of art appreciation. There comes a time when you break away from the comfort of being with peers to explore. [7/31/2025: I suspect there's going to be a revival of older genres but the musical armatures won't be there--the instruments, the skill, the pedagogy...]     7/31/2021 7/31/2022 Every Boomer and older Gen-Xer knows of Joni Mitchell because her hits were in rotation on AM radio in the 1970s, but it’s only until later that we begin to really know the depth of her artistry. Sometimes there are other things that happen in the flow of events that intersect or trigger a memory of music you like, such as the recent unveiling of the statue of Amelia Earhart at the Capitol. Amelia is a song I first heard on the Shadows a...

January 30ths 7/30/2003             Interesting: A motion picture of a particle called a kaon will show when played backwards , that the particle does not end up as it started , or begin in its original state, and will be something else entirely.      NotAItions:     7/30/2004 Segment on [60 Minutes?] about musical savants. Everyone is capable of being a savant, but reasoning gets in the way. They also found that music somehow rewires the brain. The brain can be “rearranged” in lots of different ways. Music is different in that it has a transcendental quality (if you let it), which goes back to the problem in the paradox of reason: music can develop the capability to reason, but in the process can make music too analytical. The best composers were able to work around this paradox.  [7/30/2024: 20 years later I’m even more convinced of the connection between the tactility of musical instruments (as opposed to computer...

Black-out lyric and the rhythms in the words:  7/29/2023        7/29/2024  

January 29ths   7/29/2009 On alternate tunings: When you play in strange tunings over long periods, standard tuning becomes strange, and seems new again when you come back to it. The notion of something being ‘standard’ implies that it was once abandoned and returned to with a new perspective. It reminds me of something Brian Eno once said about going to an extreme then retreating to a more traditional approach. That’s the payoff of experimentation.  [The musical equivalent is the polyrhythm such as 2 against 3 or 3 against 4, or isomelodies and isorhythms] .     Black-out lyric and the rhythms in the words:  7/29/2023        7/29/2023    7/29/2024 7/29/2025 If you do both manual creativity and AI-assisted creativity, it’s probably a better idea to make something manually first, and then run it through AI and see what it can come up with. The problem I’ve had, especially with music, is that the AI-generated music tends to creat...

 Pink Prison  

7/27/1997             Idea: Video of guitar solos/performances.             [7/27/2024: At the time I had the idea of producing a series of videotapes, but YouTube made this possible 10 years later. We knew what the internet was, and some people had crude dial-up, but it was beyond our ken that you could watch TV on it. To some degree, music instruction videos have made music education unserious entertainment. No one could possibly want to do things like voice-leading exercises, practicing rhythms, and sight-reading. Every new technology steals something away and sometimes re-integrates older ones: Radio stole time away from books, TV stole time away from radio and books, the internet stole time away from rigorous activities, but looped in radio (podcasts) and TV (streaming video), social media stole time away from everything: what it does mostly is to share things we’ll never have time for, AI steals time away from b...

  AI songs based on this entry: 7/19/2012 Art is said to die sometimes. But it is not the series of marks or gestures displayed on a surface; it is the ideas behind the marks that die. Painting is alive in the caves of Lascaux, but the stories of impaling a bison are long dead.      As with all AI-generated music, the lyrics are tweaked along the way, so even if you use a "seed," the songwriter becomes the "genetic engineer". The images are both by Richard Prince from his Cowboy series, where he, as well as a cadre of other artists, known as the Pictures Generation in the 70s, appropriated existing images from magazines, such as Marlboro advertisements, and used them as readymades. They both seemed to go well with the music and lyrics, as contemporary art, being a kind of stunt, or "ideas behind the marks". Some of the Prince prints exceed $1M on the secondary market. _   ***   A lead sheet (Version 1). It's interesting to transcribe some of these and ...

The black-out lyric of the day:   Finally splurged and got the Finale music notation program, which is supposed to be state of the art. I am cutting my teeth on two piano fantasias by PL. Also re-copying the string quartet I did when I was in college, in hopes that a cello player friend of mine will take an interest. Anything beats copying music by hand. (In most cases.) [7/25/2025: Alas, Finale is now defunct, superseded by Dorico].  7/25/2015             Park Piano, Washington Square Park, Bughouse Square [with field audio ]                       [7/25/2026: Alas, they no longer have the debates. Telling of our current age]. 7/25/2016 Jazz sounds like an art, but it’s really more like a science. The problem now is that it can sometimes sound too much like a science. I’d make the same comment about visual art, even though I love using procedures borrowed from science.  7/25...

 January 24ths 7/24/2023 Interesting: How instrumentalists’ personalities affect how they play. I always thought Percy Jones was the better player than Jaco. Percy seemed more stable and interesting and never moved for hours on stage. 7/24/2024  John Mayall died at age 90. Right after I watched the Biden speech, I watched Eric Clapton’s elegy and was also very moving. I was also raised on the blues. One of my first albums was the Bluesbreakers “Beano” album. Looking back, my real roots in Chicago are the Blues. The first bass line I learned was a blues bass line. 7/24/2025 In terms of emotion in music, especially orchestral music, you want to work the orchestra for 3 minutes solid, like a rock band can work at a fast tempo. The assumption is that classical music is somehow fragile, and I must say, it has mostly lived up to that. It’s not macho enough. My ironworker father hated classical music: “First you hardly hear anything, then it gets really loud...” He didn’t like that i...

What's the Question? (3/3/2025) by meta4s  Groove: 

3/28/1987 (Keith Haring Journal) A continuing contemplation brings me to the conclusion that all of this problem of 'the surface' of painting stems from an inability to paint or to create an image of adequate strength .  Adequate Strength (3/28/2024) by meta4s

New Money (7/22/2005) by meta4s

The other side of the year  7/22/2005            “Meaning is the new money”.                           7/22/2010 Field audio: Farmer’s Market . 

January 21sts 2 studios, 26 years apart: 7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”.  7/21/1995 (Brian Eno Diary) Uninspired day in studio. Beautiful weather, and the last thing I want to do is make a piece of music for the Swarowski museum.  7/21/2015 Moonlight Cafe   7/21/2022 It is true that jazz is more “intellectual” as much as I want to avoid making it pejorative. But like the “Mozart Effect” it won’t make you smarter just by listening to it as a form of hypnosis. Perhaps there is something in the harmonic density that makes it sound smarter than other things. But it’s just plain old harmony. Culture has a way of over-complicating things that are otherwise prosaic.  7/21/2024 When I sit down to writ...

7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary)             John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”. 

The other side of the year   7/20/1993 Saw Todd Rundgren walking down Wacker Drive. I wasn’t sure it was him but by the time I realized it was (because of the glasses), it was too late and didn’t want to chase him down. Went to drop off clothes for flood victims. On way back down Michigan Avenue, here comes Todd again. Saw him walk into 111 East Wacker and followed him in. Lost him. He was wearing a blue and white striped shirt. Every time I saw those stripes I thought it was him. [This was the No World Order tour promoting one of the first interactive CDs, even when few people had PCs at home].     7/20/1997             I am at heart an instrumentalist, but it wasn’t until about ten years ago that I saw the importance of lyrics in good pop songs. Consequently, I spend lots of time writing them, trying to find interesting metaphors and rhymes. There is nothing more satisfying to me than to take an observation about life and turn i...

 

  January 19ths  7/19/2020 Usually I’ll understand something completely in retrospect. And the more I talk or write about it the more it becomes clear to me what the thinking process was (I dictated this as a first draft). When I say ‘thinking process’ I’m talking about the thinking process that happened subliminally and was not analytical. Improvisation is a good example of this (in speaking or in playing music): You simply cannot analyze as you are improvising, or, ideally, you want to stop yourself from doing that. In music, when I’m improvising the only thing I have to make a concerted effort to do is to listen to what’s going on around what I’m doing and react accordingly. Therefore, the hands-on process of making art is a kind of improvisation in which you have to remind yourself to be more mindful of the things on the periphery that can change the course of the work, as one would think of things as they speak.      7/19/2021  As I’ve been working wit...

What That Do? (7/17/2025) by meta4s Soul is the slang of music... What that do? What THAT do? What that do?  What THAT do? Salt peanuts Salt peanuts 

 Pompei 2003 CE  

 

January 16ths  7/16/1997 Interesting interview with Pete Townshend on XRT. I like the idea that music is storytelling, much like what the African Griots do. He said that he thought jazz was the highest musical form. 7/16/2004  Millennium Park finally open.                                       7/16/2006 “Uncanny Valley” was a term coined by Mashiro Mori to describe the emotional response of humans to robots. He theorized that as a robot became more human-like, the emotional response of humans became increasingly empathetic, until a boundary point where they looked more “zombified” (the perceptual boundary of real and fake). [7/16/2025: I’ve noticed that when I listen to TTS voices, especially in Google NotebookLM, I find myself “entraining” to its logic–thinking along the same lines. This also relates to whether AI music can have soul. I have been emotionally moved by some of the mus...

January 15ths  7/15/2006 Architecture, especially in older cities like Chicago, compress into “geological” layers. One can look down various streets, such as Adams looking west, and see these strata: late 19th century (Marquette Building), Art Deco (135 S. LaSalle, FDR), Postmodernism (190 S. LaSalle, Reagan/Bush), then modernist 80s green-glassed towers with zero personality (Reagan/Bush)—until viewed from 40 years into the future, when it gains “coolness”.                                     7/15/2010 One of the primary objectives of good songwriting is to create a good structure that can generate new arrangements and variations. You should never get tired of playing it.  “Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average l...

January 14ths  7/14/2019 Using loops and samples in music is a small aspect of music composition. You are a musician (musicist) in the sense that you are constructing logical sequences within temporal structures. Proceeding in that fashion could make you a composer and is no different than a child’s first explorations at the piano, that are essentially “drag and drop”, i.e. playing by ear. Being a true musician always entails the development of knowledge and skill, which you wouldn’t attain by playing around with software. [7/14/2024: I was watching a video about an 8 year-old boy who was writing songs in a home studio as if he was 28, playing all the instruments and using DAWs and other software. He had knowledge and skill with all of it in only a few years. But even people who are 28 can attain similar skills in the same amount of time, 3-4 years. This seems to suggest that high levels of knowledge and skill can start in the first decade of life for everyone at some level. The qu...

January 13ths 7/13/2016 David Bowie wasn’t poisoned by cynicism or sour grapes, even when he knew he was dying. Arguably, his last experimental works were not as finely experimental as, say, Outside . But that is not the point. ***  This song , written by Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, was recorded at RCA Victor Studio B in Hollywood on July 25, 1966. Can’t get any more “summer” than this. ( Sondheim using the summer season )  7/13/2021 Back in the early aughts I had this idea that was called “Video 45s” because very often I would go see films and there would be certain scenes that I really liked and my idea was that instead of watching the movie over and over again in its entirety, we’d watch scenes as “singles”. When you played the single or “watched the single” it would remind you of the entire film so it would save you time from watching the entire film again. That was almost 30 years ago and now we have Shorts... [7/2024: What’s interesting about creating music that is exact...

  Antipode: January 12ths 7/12/1998 My definition of improvisation: taking set structures and using developed skills in rhythm, harmony and melody to create organized sounds that comport with the set structures in a listener’s brain. 7/12/2022 Ever since the Meddle album, much of Pink Floyd was a possible soundtrack for documentaries about environmental degradation and the collapse of civilizations. That’s interesting because the unease we feel is somehow vitiated by the media by letting us contemplate these topics from places of comfort.     What I find most compelling about Waters as a songwriter is his “sincere profanity” mixed with a big-hearted “spirituality”. He really does care about people, minus the political rants. In some ways, stadium rock spectacles made political rally spectacles possible with all the visual bling. Roger Waters can have “constituents” just as much as politicians can have fans, and it’s all saying the same thing: “the world sucks and thi...

January 10ths   7/10/1960 Inge Morath: “In the early morning, a straight road. Green enough country, small towns and villages string along like glass beads of different shapes and colors picked up carelessly by a little girl. Then, suddenly, at Adrian the country changes, spreads out endlessly, pale green flat, hemmed in by the clear cut blue shapes of rock formations: the desert begins....” [ More ] [This entry used as an image prompt...meh…]                                       A soundtrack that gives context: Morath was the photographer for the film The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. This was probably when she was traveling to the film set.         7/10/2004 Band photo shoot                                       7/10/2021 A few weeks ago, Sh...

   Songs are danced speech.--Alan Lomax [Updated 4/18/2026, Essay 5) Chat with the LLM  The Music of Language is a compilation of writings over the past decade on the connection between language and music. I'm in the camp of musicians who believe that music preceded language. I always understood it intuitively, and then later on it became more of a passionate intellectual pursuit. At the back of the book, as the appendix are what I’m calling “wordrums” (a portmanteau of “word” and “drum”), where the inherent rhythms in natural speech become musical and become seeds for the music. In the past, it was customary for songwriters to start with a title, and the title would have some kind of a rhythmic pattern to it, which would be the basis for the entire song. I still like to work this way. An AI-generated summary/analysis: *** *** Playlist of Examples:  *** Footnotes: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut      2. Ivo Popasov, “Bulchen...