September 10ths

9/10/1997            

Watched program about I.M. Pei and Phillip Johnson. 

Some interesting quotes by Pei:            

The durability and the essence of things is the only thing that can last, otherwise, it’s transitory fashion; If you are true to yourself, your signature will come out; Once you’ve found the heart of the piece, then you have to make it work; The simpler the solution, the more powerful it is.

[Works as a poem. Sometime prose and poetry meet perfectly. But lyrics are harder. Very seldom is prose singable as a song. An art song perhaps--but not a pop song].

The durability
And the essence of things
Is the only thing
That can last–
Otherwise, it’s transitory fashion

If you are true to yourself
And once you’ve found the heart 
Your signature will come out–
The simpler the solution
The more powerful it is

 

 

9/10/2022

What is interesting about world music is that in many cases joyful music is produced under the most oppressive circumstances and becomes a form of liberation and escape. When you experience music as a “one world” phenomenon, as naive as it sounds now, you get the essence of music to have the capacity to be unifying, at least in the times it is created, performed and listened to....While I truly believe music can create unity, there are lots of cultural traditions and politics that get secularized (silenced) within that framework. We may think secularization is a panacea, or even music as a panacea, but those musicians have very different traditions that they bring to the table. For example, Ugandan musicians bring with them family traditions that may have been supporters of Idi Amin. We hear the cool 70s African vibe, but there is a subtext to it as well.

In the 50s viewers of I Love Lucy, and the signature theme of the show performed by Ricky Ricardo, never realized its roots in voodoo and the Santeria religion, a sect of Catholicism (“The Way Of the Saints”), conjuring the spirit of the Yoruban Gods, the Orishas.            
 

9/10/2024

Skill is an interesting concept in AI-generated content. Where is the skill? The skill is in finding the art in something. Mere generation of content isn’t art necessarily. For example, how can generated music have genres? What’s the avant-garde in AI music? How could a new movement arise from it? What’s “punk” and “grunge” in AI music, aside from using it in the text prompt? Piano improvisations are now easy by typing words on a computer keyboard, not a piano keyboard. If there was a 21st century John Cage who composed a 4’33” sitting in front of a computer, would the sounds we heard in our heads be generated by AI?