August 20ths

8/20/1823 

Anne Lister’s journal quoting Rousseau: “I am an enigma even to myself and do excite my own curiosity”

8/20/1998

Interview with Milton Babbitt. He was talking about academics in music and how he hated it.

[8/20/2025: As much as I use theory, I’m always wary of getting into jousting matches about it on social media. All domains have their theory and it’s nice shop-talk, but you don’t want to be a theoritician. I’m a parallel octaves scofflaw and who really cares when no one notices it as a listener? It was one of the reasons that I stopped writing songs in the 90s. I wanted it to have no theory, or as Eno says, “leave the music out”. I’ve been putting it back in lately. I might leave it out again in the future. One of the good things about knowing music theory is that you can leave it out for artistic effect, and do something postmodern. I think ambient music is a postmodern phenomenon].     

8/20/2016       

Jazz seems to be more popular among people in science, not music. Jazz interfaces with science in many ways, especially in harmony and rhythm. There are many aspects to jazz, and many other things in life that require some intellectual rigor, or at least curiosity.

 8/20/2022

Lately I have been focusing more on music because art can generate too many objects, and music exists inertly until it is played and takes up almost no room now that it is mostly digital. Also, I think music is enhanced by art and vice versa. To have a binary preference would make them less than they could be.

[8/20/2026: Data can also become clutter if it's not neatly organized. I've always used the year-month-day system with my photographs going back 25 years, and I've used it for other things such as the Songdays. It's essentially PKM, with software like Obsidian and a CMS like a blog. This way volume isn't an issue. But if you made a piece of art every day, within a few years you'd have thousands of objects, both physical or digital. This is why art eventually gains administrative weight. For me, I use the YMD (or MDY) system].

8/20/2023 

A song a month is a good way of working. This way it gives me ample time to explore the possibilities of an idea and to reflect on the creative process. 

I have ideas for the Sum II album, which will be a song for specific days of the year based on both my diary, and diaries of others. Sum III could potentially be songs for specific hours/minutes (on specific days).