Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Art: [Hash Art]   AI Music: 

2/6/1997 A Pollyanna projection: "By the year 2021, we'll colonize Mars and we'll be able to download all our entertainment from government servers..." Earth-Mars communications will be problematic as it takes four minutes for transmission. How long would it take to download our "entertainment"? Which begs the question: Do we want to spend our lives downloading Earth on Mars? "StarTrek-y" shows need to use more anachronisms, e.g. 78 records, Victorian-era clothing to offset the assumption that "in the future, the world will look like THIS." It would be more convincing if they used bits and pieces from different eras, which is what the real world is anyway 2/6/2010 Idea for performance: reverse the stage setup so the drummer is center-stage and the vocalist in the back or even off-stage sometimes, but put a camera there as well. [2/6/2026: Great treatment for Rush's Limelight on the 2026 tour with the new drummer replacing Peart, but ...

10/6/1988                 “Pickles” (A sketch on bass)        As s  Curio: 10/6/2004             Photographer Richard Avedon died. He was one of the first to admit that still photography is a “sin of omission”. It’s a cropping of time and context. Something always gets excluded and sometimes it’s the part that’s true.             [10/6/2025: These diary revisitations are an interesting way to see how art has evolved. The collage he made of Audrey Hepburn in 1967 is not unlike something that would be generated by AI. AI is essentially a collage technique without scissors and glue].     10/6/2009 Finished latest grid painting. Possible titles: 'On the Grid', 'Plan of Chicago', "Hundreds of Arbitrary Decisions Made By Design"                            10/6/201...

9/25/1999             On the future of music listening: Now that we have the capability to compile songs and make our own collections, we need to weed out all this similar-sounding material: “Techno with samples of monks—already have one of those”. This will put the onus on the composers to come up with new and exciting material that will stand the test of time.             [9/25/2024: I realized at popular tourist locations millions (or perhaps billions) of people take pictures of the same things, and I had the idea for a camera app that would automatically delete photos that had already been taken, or would apply an effect of some kind to make them different. This is probably very easy now with AI. But the current data sets are full of cliches and they would all be removed if you made the instruction to do so.] [9/25/2025: If you generate a song with your words, then replace the words, and use those words to re-gene...

9/16/2000 Film: Girl on the Bridge . I think the moral is: In order to get lucky (or delude yourself that you are), you have to confront your mortality. If you see yourself as that girl on the bridge, you need to see this movie. Life will always provide lucky moments, and in order to seize the day, we have to let go of fear and trust that the blind knife thrower will also be lucky.  9/16/2001             While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or “collisions of context”. You’d be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon’s “Instant Karma”, followed by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”—I’ll stand my ground. (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.)             [9/16/2025: Lyrics are now hugely important in AI generation because their musicality wil...

9/14/2004             Idea: a photo blog.     9/14/2005  The Katrina catastrophe also makes you think about the ultimate demise of modern civilization. This makes you believe we are heading inexorably towards it. [9/14/2026: Perhaps humans are naturally wired for doom and gloom, The transhumanist David Pearce asserts that most of us have a bias towards being depressed, and is that way by design, so as to keep us on the hedonic treadmill. If we were optimistic all the time we wouldn't be vigilant]. 9/14/2011             It is seldom the case that ideas continue to belong to the progenitor. And why would we want them to? Beethoven might be considered a person whose ideas were epochal, but he was merely following the rule book or ‘Best Practices’ of composition, built on compositional methods blazed by Mozart and his elders. After Beethoven died, his music endured, and the supporting theories continue...

  13th History Overlay 9/13/1914, Sunday  Wittgenstein notebook: Russians advancing and has witnessed terrible scenes. He has not slept in 20 hours and feels a sense of hopelessness. He clings to his sense of self. 9/13/1998             The musician converts mental states into a pattern that evokes the same (or different) mental states in the listener. If we want to understand the Beatles, we have to concentrate on what led to that sound, the distillation of spirit and inspiration, which eventually results in sound that listeners hear and convert to exformation.             German physicist Peter Richter said that in his studies of chaos theory and fractals he came to the analysis that people tend to be drawn to boundaries, coasts, rivers, mountain chains...Because they are transitions from one element to another. “The beauty of boundaries comes about because it is a place where something complicated and int...

Eero Saarinen’s Architectural Aptitude Test In my album of 12 solo piano pieces ("Rifts"), the only rule was that each piece would be in the Lydian mode--one for each key. It's "home" chord (Key of C): Here is an example of a similar set of simple rules applied to visual art, combining the rectilinear and curvilinear, and using a set of 12 colors. (Similar to the creativity tests they would give young architects).  The results are very simple and almost child-like, but in some ways, it is also like a Pollock drip painting, which also has a few simple rules, yet it is the aesthetic opposite. What does this have to do with music? Almost nothing, but the use of metaphor (Rifts, a breaking apart or using the metaphor of tectonic plates) allowed for something new to emerge (like mountains are pushed up at the edges of colliding plates). The "algorithm": Divide a square, then assign the color of an adjacent part, then rearrange rand...

9/8/1998 Jazz musicians had radical intentions but they still were fluent in the language of music. [9/8/2025: That is, jazz may sound like it’s completely free form, but the players are well-versed in jazz theory. Sometimes you don’t need, or want, to use it]. Historic day in baseball--McGuire hits 62 home runs. Studio: Mix on Saved By the Sunrise . [2026: How AI spins it ]  9/8/1999 Has anyone thought of, or is anyone doing classical/rap fusion? If not, I'd invent it. [9/8/2025: It probably had been done even in 1999–as Remix–but since rap is “meterless” the music would need to have no bar lines, or the music would be built around beats]. 9/8/2002 The Arts merge at the level of inspiration, but diverge at the level of craft. Painting can inspire music, but they use different tools.  9/8/2016             ACRONYMS , 9x27 inches, acrylic on cardboard, hardware, mounted on panel.  9/8/2024 Every generation has their “griots”: Silents had P...

December 22nds  6/22/1886 Always interesting to run the century scenarios. 1986: harmony between worker and owner, or deeper divisions? 2086?  My cousin Louis speaks of form following function. His philosophy, applied across decades, might reshape buildings and the character of urban life. Perhaps every street will have tracks.  [ More ] 6/22/1999 Idea: Music released like software, where you can “upgrade” albums or collections, a series of songs that continually develops and unfolds... [6/22/2025: The Songday series is essentially like this].  6/22/2002, Saturday  Damen El Stop:  6/22/2019 Black Marubozu , 20 X 10.75 inches, acrylic and pen on lotka paper. Third in the series inspired by candlestick charts.   6/22/2024 Interesting in passing: George Harrison: “You know what irritates me about modern music, it’s all based on ego. Look at a group like U2. Bono and his band are so egocentric. The more you jump around, the bigger your hat is, the ...

The “score” of Figured Basses  played with the “/” and “\” keys as a percussion instrument. The “|” character is the bar line.    

Interval Cubes Acrylic on panels (2013) P.O.R.    Inquire Download symbol (block) grid. (Adobe Illustrator) 12 cubes (6x6x2) for each interval in the chromatic scale using only black, white and red. Can be displayed on a shelf, or hung on a wall. Each cube is currently prepared for shelf display with felt on the back edges to prevent cubes from scraping. The cubes can also be tiled together in different ways like building blocks to teach chords and intervals. A very unique work done in the style of Josef Albers or Alexander Calder. Work is fully documented on its own website for information and archival purposes. Cube 1. Unison Cube 2. Minor Second Cube 3. Major Second Cube 4. Minor Third Cube 5. Major Third Cube 6. Perfect Fourth Cube 7. Diminished Fifth Cube 8. Perfect Fifth Cube 9. Minor Sixth Cube 10. Major Sixth Cube 11. Minor Seventh Cube 12. Major Seventh A symbol grid in Adobe Illustrator [Download .ai file] Drag symbols (blocks) and rearran...

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...

5/14/1898, Berlin  (Harry Kessler Diary)  Kessler lunches with Hofmannsthal. He ruminates on how aristocracies are out of touch with their own people and are only exalting their status by “stoking of ethnic hatred.”  5/14/1977 (Keith Haring Diary)  “I am in Miles City, Montana, sitting in the sun. Thinking about the Grateful Dead, ‘cause the last ride was 77 miles of AM Radio. 5/14/1998 Journal of Pop Culture article on slam dancing and modernity. I like the references to "flow" experiences described as "a state which exists between boredom and anxiety and requires that the participants skill neither exceeds or falls short of the task demands”, or “a loss of ego infusion with the world." The slam dancers always felt free and released, but with a "hangover"afterwards. Most said that it was the music that moved them, which I can't entirely believe. “Music” is something your parents listen to. Slammers go for the "numinous" cultural experience. ...

Macrophage V.1 , 24 x 24 inches, acrylic, stencil, seam tape, hardware and El wire on panel. (2025) POR Next in the Macrophage series, as an over-painting of Smoke No. 7 , as well as a continuation of Through the Dark City .     With El Wire On   Inverted      

 3/5/1998 Copying done well is an art in itself–The Japanese 3/5/1999 Idea: Composing by numbers–a program where you plug numbered samples into a numbered grid. You can take favorite classical pieces and popular songs and chop them up and put all the samples on a CD. [3/5/2025: Essentially music LLMs, although the numbers are text prompts]. You can't teach composition–Bela Bartok 3/5/2003 Article about neurologist who makes paintings out of brain waves while he thinks about the painting he's creating. He's got a show coming up at the Flatfile photo gallery. ( Dr. Andrius Plioplys)   3/5/2008 On iBand: Malcolm McLaren has been singing the praises of chip music for some time now, and it is catching on. McLaren is a proponent of the idea of music being the "sound of fashion" or the "look of music", which is an interesting cross-domain idea. 3/5/2010 What would Stravinsky have thought of Metal? He probably would have felt responsible. He would have hated scr...

2/22/1999 The most interesting thing about a piece of music is how it develops and how well it positions itself in the landscape of all other music. Music never had "salons" but it's that kind of effect. 2/22/2013  Finished Macrophage . It looked demonic a few days ago with the plain Red Cross in blood red but “white washing” it with a “Mondrian Stripe” "healed" it up.   2/22/2018 Working on Rings of Saturn track re: Dunwich. Apparently, a huge hurricane-like storm devastated the area in the 13th century: "On New Year's Eve 1285, a storm tide devastated the lower town and the portside so terribly that for months afterwards no one could tell where the land ended and the sea began..." https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-suffolk-35549952   2/22/2025 The more theory you know isn’t going to make the art better. I like my level of mastery in music, and it allows me to create art at that level. What’s the point of learning just for the sake of learning, ...

2/13/1999 Called typist about typing up this diary. She charges $25 an hour. That's quite pricey for just typing. Perhaps I'll just dictate it. [2/13/2025: Which is what I did ultimately. Nothing like speaking what you wrote 26 years ago]. 2/13/2018 Ideas On A Napkin 2/13/2024 I’m currently in a weird limbo between albums. The idea was that I was going to continue on with the In Sum series so I would be making Sum II which is the “songday” idea. I liked working on just one song a month and perhaps I should continue on with that because it’s a way of working efficiently rather than working on this and that, although that’s been my typical way of working all along where I just make things and then at some point I collect them, curate them, and assemble them into some kind of package. Songs can be created over the course of even decades and some of the old stuff will be on the new album. I suppose all artists go through these periods where one thing is finished and you’re thinkin...

2/8/1997 Saw Sling Blade . A great performance by Billy Bob. Largely based on "father" themes. [Became a Curio]  2/8/2015 My "Sky Frame" idea, with laser cuts made from pieces of sky between buildings as taken in photographs. In certain ways, they are an homage to Joseph Cornell's cut paper silhouettes as in "Varietes de Mineralogie".  2/8/2022 John Williams turns 90, still composing. (Can we ever stop?) Interesting he still uses paper and pen. I don’t miss those days other than the look and feel of pencils and pens cutting into score paper. Scores are “works on paper”. [Do it 'til you drop...] 2/8/2026 The morning sun angle around this time (7:30A) begins to change and presents some Kertesz-ish photographic moments. Song ideas are like this as well, where you take a "snapshot".   Fretless Sunrise

1/14/1969              Ninth day of the Get Back/Let It B e sessions was the second full one without George Harrison, who had walked out of Twickenham Film Studios on 1/10.  1/14/1999 Watched documentary about the collaboration between John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Cunningham’s work is brilliant, but Cage’s contribution detracts from the work as a whole. I like the idea of the wordless essay–like my idea of wordless poetry, where you get the dynamics in pitch fluctuation without any words. [1/14/2026: Essentially what I'm doing with the Songdays series, where the words suggest the rhythm, and the music is built from that schema--then later on mapping new words over it, or leave it as an instrumental].      Excerpt Library (Music I) : "Discuss John Cage's collaborations"  1/14/2003 Documentary on PBS about music scene in Iceland, the experimental band, Apparat. They use old antique synths and sound a lot like Kraftwerk. Their...