September 1sts

9/1/1997            

Saw Pillow Book at Village Theater. Excellent. Story of the power of Japanese calligraphy to drive erotic fantasy and obsession. Interesting bit on keeping diaries.

[Interesting: When composer Gavin Bryars was told he was "beginning to sound more and more like Peter Greenaway," Bryars apologized, acknowledging that he "can get quite obsessive" and that his work at times could be "cryptic" and require every single note to be justified. Bryars suggested that he eventually found a "middle ground" beyond this approach.] Source: Music Articles and Book Excerpts 

9/1/2020

Emotions rely on our ability to surf over them. It's something that we have to do intuitively, and there are no shortcuts to getting there. This is where music has spiritual and philosophical elements.

As a bassist, I have learned that expressiveness can arise (or must arise, because of he nature of the instrument) from specific strategies, such as note duration, rest duration, and in what range to play certain passages. An example would be the creation of tension by playing in the upper register for a period. The listener expects that it's going to drop at some point, which is the release. Sometimes I premeditate it, but you want to be able to do that in the moment. You can't think about it too much, but you have to think about it at some point. Comedians use similar timing strategies, and probably rehearse it to the point where it can be done spontaneously--as well as those who can do public speaking almost without rehearsal, because it is coming from the "heart". I put that in quotes because we don't know where or what that is, but it's what we trust in the moment to be genuine.

The fact that you considered slowing down might be something you can say internally as you are playing (“Slow down!”), but obviously, when you are playing in a group, the person who is pushing the tempo is not an option. In that situation, it is a form of forced adaptation, which is, in any situation, not optimal—or you could make strategies for yourself as I have cited in relation to bass parts. 

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If you took raw speech and put it through some kind of a synthesizer [this] is the kind of music that would be created. This brings up an interesting point about the intersection between music and language. Language by itself isn’t inherently musical; It’s something that we have to add to it in order for it to make musical sense. In other words, language isn’t music right out of the box. But sometimes it is—but very rarely.

[9/1/2025: Music LLMs can find the music in text, but is it the music that you want? There have been times when it detected the natural rhythms in the words just as I had, but it’s rare. I think what it does is match stems to fit the words, which is mostly different from how humans sing because there is a vocal apparatus that determines elocution].