Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

  Charles Sheeler - Industrial Study No. 2, 1935   8/19/2024  Abstracted lines from 8/19 diary entries: Function before form Start with a basic sound Think that they were art Looking at them close and far Roman or Egyptian art Brightly-colored African art Going back to nature Going back to the roots   ***  Orchestral:  8/19/2026 (AI Version):

  Cindy Sherman--Untitled #90 AI music gives you many options on what you can do with language. You'd never get a singer who would be willing to sing a lyric that was just a hold menu, and do it in 6 languages, including Esperanto.  Now that so many people are using AI-generators, the possibility of the same music accompanying different lyrics is more probable. So you have to attempt something different.  (The second verses switch languages: English in Spanish, Spanish in French, French in German, German in Italian, Italian in Esperanto)

The blackout poetry version and a nice juxtaposition of entries--from real life to "reel" life, the world of Anne Frank and the world of Marilyn Monroe. Inge Morath was the set photographer for the film The Misfits .      AI Version:   

 

Seed:       Curio No. 19 by meta4s

  Jealousy -- Edvard Munch  Seed:    

9/19/2001  Bill Moyers interviewed Julie Taymor on TV. She posited the idea of a “United Nations of Art”, and denounced “perverse uses of religion”.  Now technology can be our savior rather than our God. I think we’ll see lots of creativity and innovation. [9/19/2026: What a difference 25 years makes].   9/19/2005 Interview with Steve Reich on NPR. He was talking about “ voicetruments ”.  9/19/2012 Dynaxiom idea: To a large degree, the power of music is to compel you to listen to something repeatedly. [9/19/2025: Saturation is the key, but that saturation involves “soaking” which I think is about 3 times listening to something. As a writer and producer you are marinating in music, which can be an over-saturation]      9/19/2024 Idea: Frame this: 1600. Aphorisms are words in a frame.    And so it is...                                         ...

Function Before Form (August 19) by meta4s   The Songday "seed":      

 Pink Prison  

  January 19ths  7/19/2020 Usually I’ll understand something completely in retrospect. And the more I talk or write about it the more it becomes clear to me what the thinking process was (I dictated this as a first draft). When I say ‘thinking process’ I’m talking about the thinking process that happened subliminally and was not analytical. Improvisation is a good example of this (in speaking or in playing music): You simply cannot analyze as you are improvising, or, ideally, you want to stop yourself from doing that. In music, when I’m improvising the only thing I have to make a concerted effort to do is to listen to what’s going on around what I’m doing and react accordingly. Therefore, the hands-on process of making art is a kind of improvisation in which you have to remind yourself to be more mindful of the things on the periphery that can change the course of the work, as one would think of things as they speak.      7/19/2021  As I’ve been working wit...

5/19/2008  Made small painting based on the Arnold Newman photograph of Stravinsky at the piano, replaced with a silhouette profile of a cowboy. 5/19/2005 Light Escape. Sort of a May “henge” moment, where the sun angle is such that it casts interesting shadows. All seasons have their shadow moments].                                        5/19/2013 Masdar Strip , digital transparency in custom lightbox.                         An abstract elevation of a quarter mile of illuminated buildings along a boulevard as if seeing it from a distance, suggesting a street view illuminated with signage. The title is drawn from the planned city, Masdar in the UAE. If the city had a Strip, this is how it might look from a mile away. The lightbox display is in itself a Sign and a “Strip” (as in the Las Vegas Strip) and the apposite frame fo...

2/19/2002 Lyric: If it wasn't for the misery that we feel we'd be made of steel.             2/19/2016 What I realize when I see savants play music is that musical ability doesn’t necessarily arise from structured learning. All people probably have infinite potential, but some individuals have feedback loops in the brain that cause a piquancy in certain abilities. The musical genius has the ability to shorten the distance between sound memory/processing and the fingers. Musicians' ears are naturally attuned to ambient rhythms in the environment. City environments are particularly rich in pitched elements such as squeaking brakes, car horns, and at stoplights—a Cagean symphony of car stereos. Ambient sounds in rural environments, such as the sounds of fast trains, are well known to have influenced many rhythms in folk and pop music. I call it “Window Music” because sounds outside sometimes blend in with what you’re listening to inside, even if in your headph...

  1/19/1967 (Beatles Studio Diary)   From little acorns...The song which was to become the stunning finale of the Beatles’ next album. “A Day In the Life”, started it out simply...as a stark bare recording… [1/19/2025: “Little acorns” is a variation on David Lynch’s "idea sparks"].  1/19/1999 Reading Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics . I like Boretz’s essays. He thinks like most musicians should always consider what music is for, but puts up roadblocks in your writing because you’re also playing the role of critic. Excerpt Library (Music) “Discuss the role of the critic” Interesting reference to what would become metamodernism:  Brian Eno (Interview Unknown) Interesting reference to what would become metamodernism:   "It's true: as soon as you drop that witty clown attitude, you expose yourself... because you're saying, 'This is actually what I really believe in.' Zappa is a paradigm of somebody who never takes that position. He writes beautiful tune...

12/19/2015             There are times when I think artists have had more interesting lives when you look at them in retrospect. At least from a museum perspective, you get to view an artist’s work in a wing in a museum, curated with other works in the same period. You can’t do that with music because you have to experience each separately.                     [12/19/2024: Musical artists who would qualify for being “art history” because they are “artier” artists: David Bowie, Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Bryan Ferry, David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters (for the music and controversy), Robert Fripp, many producers because they have to consider how to package the work as Art. Who else?]      12/19/2016             Dynaxiom: All creative people should keep lists (and work in series). If creative work is in the flow of your life, why not begin ...

 Interesting light leak on pano

 Milk weed seed pod bloom Fall Triptych

10/19/1998 There has to be an intimate connection between the music and lyrics, such that when the vocal is removed you can hear how it plugs into the music. ( Like hearing an inner harmony).         [10/19/2024: When I stopped singing my own songs around 2000, I kept writing them with lyrics, but they were left as instrumentals. I’m still doing it with the current music, driven by what I call “wordrums”, words that become the core rhythmic riff]. "Discuss lyric writing"   10/19/2003 Beauty finds itself and its beholder. [Became Dynaxiom 0408, and today’s Songday, Beauty Finds Itself] This is interesting because it was used as a Dynaxiom, which became a Songday, and also is music for a place, the Indiana Dunes, so it's cinematic in that way. They are also on Sundays.  Orchestral treatment: The AI-Generated version(s):    10/19/2009 First sunny day in weeks, 58 degrees  Drove out to the lake and climbed the dunes. Conversations with sev...

8/19/2004 Someone is making a CD that approximates the sounds that tinnitus sufferers hear. (Make something with no aesthetic value, yet has a use in a specific context— “function before form”). How do you approximate what someone else is hearing? It's an “audio POV”, “audio fiction”. The primary aim of the recording is that it helps break down the sense of isolation. It externalizes the internal “ambient music”. [8/19/2024: Re-invention, re-discovery, re-modernism, going back to nature, going back to the roots. This is the natural reaction to the effect of too much involvement with technology for the sake of itself–even language itself.] 8/19/2017            Neckers:                                      8/19/2019 Knickers:   8/19/2022 Either art is made manually or can be generative or cybernetic, created by rules. Even if we could make art using a brain-com...

Art Institute on lunch hour. Sargent in the background--foreground I'm not sure.   

December 19ths   6/19/1886 Quinn Chapel for freedom commemoration, freedom to gather. Then a bit of fishing on the breakwater—pulled in six before the sun touched the horizon. Something about the rhythm of casting and waiting settles the mind. Old timer at the pier claimed he'd seen Buffalo Bill's show. "Real cowboys," he said, "not like these city folk pretending. [ More ]  Song idea abstracted from this entry:         From the June 19, 1930 entry by Edward Weston in his Daybooks: Fog has lifted—brilliant sun . This provides the happy accident of shadows cast upon the work. After a walk on the beach , he begins a new series of photographs...   Short Strings:  Eventually became a Shortet. It's interesting how you go from a foggy Carmel California to a tornado in Kansas just by contextualizing it with an image. _  6/19/1998 Sitting by Turning Basin by river and lake, my favorite spot, soaking in the maximum sun on the eve...