September 23rds

9/23/2001

In music, what we need now are challenges, not cultural fluff.

[9/23/2025: Immediately after 9/11 people were re-thinking their lives, as we did post-COVID. It’s as if they were clues to the next move. But we can go wrong if we change direction just because everyone is doing the wave. In 2001, I personally didn’t change direction as if turning over a new leaf. Metamodernism was just beginning to be discussed].

9/23/2017

Jimi Hendrix didn’t operate at the level of skill. His contribution to the instrument was more driven by the time in which he lived, and the extra-musical sounds that the instrument could make. Perhaps if he had lived, future albums may have focused more on musicianship, but given his popularity, would he have pursued it for the sake of the art form? Perhaps.            

[9/23/2025: Knowing when to use skill is a skill]

9/23/2019            

Chicago-henge:  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9/23/2024

If we intimately know how something works, is it more scientific or is it more artistic? When we say something is “intimate” it means it’s something more connected to the heart than it is to the mind. If a musician knows music theory thoroughly does that mean that they’re not as good an artist as they could be? This is why there’s a fear of music theory because there’s this feeling that it’s going to take the magic out of something. So if you study science you are eliminating the magical qualities in life, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. All human beings have the same Umwelt, and there are certain things that we can’t sense collectively. It is in those things that we can’t sense where the magic lies. 

[2026. Music is mostly a mechanical process--at least in Classical music. If something is going to be performed, a score and parts has to be produced and put in fron of the musicians ready to go, but edits are always made, and is a very tedious process. With AI music, there is no work involved and msuic-making becomes a magical process, but no one is doing any work, except with writing and editing the lyrics and writing a prompt that guides the final work, There a no musicians practicing and rehearsing. People seem to prefer this but not willing to accept human flaws and flawed recordings and performances. It's because music is ideally a magical thing. 

Stephen Sondheim realized music was in fact a mechanical process:

"Hearing Robert Barrow speak about music in the precise, technical language of a mathematician made Sondheim fall in love with music composition and switch his focus from math to music. Throughout his career, Sondheim approached both lyric writing and music composition as puzzle-solving exercises—a mechanical process designed to construct logic and bring order out of the emotional chaos of his upbringing."

Music LLM: Discuss how Stephen Sondheim realized that making music was a mechanical process. 

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This is a good example of what I call a "wordrum" (word+drum), where the words form a repeating rhythm that can be used as the beat of riff of a song, and the lyrics are mapped over it in a symmetrical fashion. The technical term is either "strophic" or "isochronous":  "Isochronous rhythms induce a stable and veridical ‘locking-into’ the reference beat of the unfolding pattern whereas non-isochronous rhythms tend to induce reliance on a less stable and shifted reference beat".

9/23/2026

One thing I've realized as I've been working on the Songdays now in its third go-round is that it's like being on a merry-go-round and you're looking at the landscape as you're going around for years and decades. As you're going around, the landscape is changing. So buildings are gone; new buildings go up.  It's interesting to use an overlay of previous years and decades. It's like \a Zoetrope, where the cylinder is revolving and \creating new superimpositions.