Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

It's interesting to trace the evolution of a piece of music born 32 years ago, from the acoustic version to an AI  interpretation in 2026.  ***  In the eyes of a child The reflection of a mother's care Father so silent Yet so heartfully there A country's border There to keep out the danger There to cast out the strangers That storm the gates of heaven When there comes a time A babe needs your hand Open your arms and then Give them your land When they've come to conquer Your fortress so lame Infants will scream louder 'Til the bedside she came A light shines from her window Silhouette dance with impassioned grace We all seek the comfort In the bosom of her border Like war-weary men Their desire like the battlefield Are drawn into her light The salve to soothe their pain *** Ladies full-throttled Packaged and bottled For love we coddle In the babe's lonesome room Sweet handmaiden waddle Nightingale Street toddle Bedside manner lens Its eyes never staid Visions an...

 Horizontal Virga    

The original seed is a 1994 song using just some of the chord changes and scoring it out for strings, then adding keyboards and bass. It contrasts extremes of flood and drought, dissolving with Curio 76. As a pair, it's kind of an "EP". Footage is from Bergman's Seventh Seal .  Seed chords (All major):  

  If you’re a musician or artist for long enough various things will overlap with your music. What happened to me was that I studied jazz and classical then started exploring other areas: spirituality, psychology, and philosophy. Many of the electives I had taken in college were taking place at the same time as the music classes. For example, I’d have a harmony class in the morning and a philosophy class in the afternoon. So there was a slippage between the two and began to affect my lyric writing around 1990.  There was a piece that I wrote called Path of Salvation , partly inspired by the book Communion by Whitley Streiber which came out around 1989. I had not been interested in UFOs although I knew people who were interested in them, and I had drawn parallels between ufology and spirituality because I think they’re related in some ways. That was the first new influence that changed my approach to music. There were other things that happened along the way but fell by the way...

  A cut-up of various diary entries, in this case, April 28ths. It also references a passage from W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn , where he mentions sunken willows.  "Through Brundall, Buckenham and Cantley, where, at the end of a straight roadway, a sugar-beet refinery with a belching smokestack sits in a green field like a steamer at a wharf, the line follows the River Yare, till at Reedham it crosses the water and, in a wide curve, enters the vast flatland that stretches southeast down to the sea. Save for the odd solitary cottage there is nothing to be seen but the grass and the rippling reeds, one or two sunken willows, and some ruined conical brick buildings, like relics of an extinct civilization."  "It was on a grey, overcast day in August 1992 that I traveled down to the coast in one of the old diesel trains, grimed with oil and soot up to the windows, which ran from Norwich to Lowestoft at that time. The few passengers that there were sat in the half-light on th...

  There's an interesting "moisture border" on the edge of the roof line as well as under the window, which I never noticed before.  

 3 Views of a Tree    

9/28/2010  One thing instrumentalists understand is touch and feeling. [ Musing on Music LLM : “Discuss tactility in music”]     9/28/2019 Primary creative “access points” can sometimes lead toward more shallow depths of superficial interest, with no continued exploration of the ideas. Ideally what you should want is to follow through the various waypoints, even if how you began was clumsy or naive.  Creativity can have these kinds of “desire paths” but you have to have the desire to make them, or else you’re going around in the same circles thinking the scenery is somehow different, or that where you’ve come to a dead end.             There are departures but never complete arrivals in creativity.             [9/28/2024: Even though it’s a rare experience, I love it when the final result resembles the initial stages and access points. I’m reminded of Stephen Sondheim, who certainly didn’t fol...

3/28/1987 (Keith Haring Journal) A continuing contemplation brings me to the conclusion that all of this problem of 'the surface' of painting stems from an inability to paint or to create an image of adequate strength .  Adequate Strength (3/28/2024) by meta4s

Undersong (6/28/2025) by meta4s

5/28/2010 Interesting: The Seventh Generation philosophy of the Iroquois. They thought it was appropriate to think seven generations ahead (a couple hundred years into the future) and decide whether the decisions they make today would benefit their children seven generations into the future.  5/28/2015  In his interview on the On Being podcast, composer Gustavo Santaolalla talked about how young tango musicians are very good technically, but lack knowledge of the deeper personal and cultural meanings in the art form. This should be no surprise given that we learn through emulation and imitation, primarily through recordings instead of teachers and mentors. It poses an interesting facet of emulation that demotes direct experience over copying and remixing.  Rhythmic styles such as tango, leave many things implied. It is a music that has a pulse that you can dance to, but is high context, i.e. there is a tacit understanding that doesn’t have to be explicitly restated with a...

2/28/1976 From: "Bowie: Now I'm A Businessman" "...This time - boosted by the success of his Fame single all the attention he has received in the past four years - Bowie played the 14,000 seat Cow Palace (the city's largest rock hall) and the response was phenomenal. Though his 90-minute set started slowly as Bowie concentrated on new material, he worked up such an enthusiasm in the arena with his versions of such early, well-known works as Changes, Rebel Rebel and Jean Genie that a rare thing happened after the first, rather obligatory encore."        2/28/1999  There’s an invisible line between life and art.   2/28/2000 Interview on NPR with Bob Moog. He said that even though he spent most of his life in electronic music, it still feels good to play the piano. We need a tactile connection with music. Clara Rockmore: She was the only theremin virtuoso. Very often there will be only one person who will fully utilize a new invention and it’s usually never t...

Antipode: July 28ths   1/28/2004              In today’s art world, anyone who can click a mouse can call themselves an artist, which is something Microsoft has been pandering to and appealing to the knee-jerk responses of Americans who now think they can easily click their way to creativity and artistry.             [1/28/2025: It’s easy to call yourself an artist if it’s made easy to make. Now it just takes a bit of copy and paste of some words and a few mouse clicks to generate songs. The etymology of “art” is “to make”. Every time I look at ancient art I don’t see “easy”. It might have been something that took days to make, like an intricately filigreed vase–but it wasn’t for the enjoyment of the process, it was a nice luxury object made for the wealthy. Artisans were probably slaves, and to some degree we are still slaves to our own definitions (or ideals) of what art now may mean in a social media landscape. The...

 

 

12/28/1998 Re: marketing strategy for Secret Sphinx . I'd rather have some story to tell about it–just writing songs and arbitrarily sticking them on a CD is boring. We'll have to get the story straight.  12/28/2008 Incredibly warm for December, 60°, which created interesting fog conditions. Went out in the PM and took photos at park. I called them “Blackfrost” . 12/28/2010 Recordings in the age of mashups are ‘organic’, like fruit on a tree, free for the taking and consumed/enjoyed for its properties without knowing what produced it. [12/28/2024: “Not knowing what produced it”, or how it was made will be the mystery of the future when there will be seas of content created by AI, originally generated in 2024, then remixed and restyled generation after generation throughout the 21st century with no attribution at all. All a historian might have is a generic username]. 12/28/2014 A new photo series: Architectural Deconstruction . This particular series has to do with the “deconst...

Incredibly warm, 60°, which created interesting fog conditions. Went out in PM and took photos at park. I called them “Blackfrost” .

10/28/1998 Watched documentaries on PBS about John Glenn and Leonard Bernstein. Interestingly ironic that Glenn quit politics because of his age, but now is going up into space at age 77. I suppose when you have a passion for something you want to have immortality. Bernstein was the same way--he never wanted to let go of music because he loved it so much. I really admire this. This reminded me of what Susan said about music being just fluff. It's not just fluff.  The beauty and the passion always brings you Deception is a vehicle of survival. [Fate is a vehicle that gets you where you're going. Dynaxiom 0256] “Discuss age and involvement in the arts” The AI-generated version with added lyrics,     10/28/2005, Friday Warm, 65 degrees. White Sox Victory Parade on LaSalle Street. Throngs of people. Sports victories are very much like military victories. It was ironic that hardly anyone was at the Iraq war protest at Federal Plaza. (Been there done that)  10/28/2016...

8/28/1963  Field recording: March on Washington. (Audio Snapshot)   8/28/1999 My approach to music: Design a system that allows you to express ideas, rather than using a configured system and thinking of ideas based on prepackaged concepts. (Exploration rather than a guided tour).              [8/28/2024: 20 years later–the Songday system. I love working this way].    8/28/2002  Story idea: Set in Anytown, USA, where every character is a cliche (the old woman, the barber, the criminal, the crooked politician, the idiot savant), but we find out at the end of the film that the people are not ordinary at all. Possible title: “Everyone’s Got One”.                  8/28/2004 Baptismal: 8/28/2008 Obama is nominated at Dem convention and gives historic speech in Denver. His “Big Night” 4 years in the making, and 45 years after King’s “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Mem...

7/28/2012  Soapbox No. 2 (Bughouse Square)               7/28/2021 I get a certain cognitive lift from going back to writing things down manually. I prefer the old way of inputting the notes and then playing it. It's a really great way of recycling things that were just fine the way they were. They didn't need innovation.  7/28/2022 Tradition is epigenetic in many ways which is in constant conflict with modern life. There can be cultural traditions and individual traditions which arise from the arc of one’s life. Making music is a tradition for me but it wasn’t for my family. It’s traditional for Boomers to have grown up with both the family values of the 1950s and the individualistic cultural values of the 1960s. They have since become the tectonic plates of 21st century society, now with a reactivation of East versus West philosophies.  7/28/2024 Another AI book, AI Mirror . It’s the new self-help genre. I was thinking that AI art and ...