September 15ths

9/15/1981            

Death of Bill Evans. A dedication by Metheny/Mays.

[9/15/2025: A piece I would cite as being emotional and elegiac. in the same way Barber's Adagio For Strings is, a bit maudlin at times., yet sincere]. 

9/15/1998

Every new technology creates new paradigms of thinking and spawns new kinds of art and ways of creating art. As Kevin Kelly says, “revolutions take place in what we make, how we make it, how we decide what to make in the nature of the economy that we make it in.”            

[9/15/2024: I have begun to use AI in my work, which is my choice, not one that has been foisted on me. I take parts that I like and leave the rest. When there is so much pressure for ratings and popularity, we reflexively move toward it and perhaps away from those things that are “of a piece” with our own lives, with an eye on “the nature of the economy that we make it in.”]

[9/15/2025: Why Do We Stop?] 

9/15/2001

The pop music of today will be the soundtrack to current world events in 20 years.

[9/15/2025: The Reaction Video is a manifestation of this, but it hasn’t reached the 90s or 00s yet].            

Art and music are anodyne. We are bound to see more “comfort art”, perhaps an interest in orchestral music will come back. People will want things built for strength and a greater sense of craft rather than of concept.            

Impressions: The girl who felt so fundamentally changed she changed her hairstyle. “I want to do something to show how different I am now.” Melodic folk music coming back: Song lyrics are more important now, as they can express abstract ideas about current events and life.

9/15/2009            

Interesting: How technology narrows the generation gap, e.g. how younger generations know about pop culture, former presidents, etc. Immersive media has not only closed the generation gaps, it has overlaid them, sometimes in perfect registration to where you can ‘see through’ one generation to the next.

[9/15/2025: Not really in retrospect. I see lots of people who seem to be Gen-Zs making “documentary” shorts about bands I was raised on. I don’t see both of our generations understanding it the same way. They focus on the factoids. Not that we didn’t, but it was more about the instruments they played, the amps, the strings, etc.. I recall Chris Squire saying that in the early days of Yes, even the young female fans were interested in the fact that he used Rotosound Swing Bass stings, medium gauge].    

9/15/2024 

Sometimes I’ll take a photo of cut-down trees to count the rings. This tree was planted in the early 90s, and is already felled. I would imagine that when cathedrals were built using trees in nearby forests the older people would be more aware of the passage of time. Certainly, people who cut down trees see it all the time and measure them up to the arc of their own lives. This is a theme that has been in stories throughout time.