Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

    

 Seed:    Score:  Audio, including AI versions. It's interesting how it develops them, but nothing I would ever do. They sound like marching band arrangements that would never be easily played. No one would want to make a score and parts for it. It words as sesquicentennial music.

  12/4/2025 Song about city artists decamping to Marfa, alluding to Donald Judd (or James Turrell), an "artrepreneur" before it was a term. Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art Leaving for a small town That cowboy-smart Confident and secure Is what you are Open up to people And what they are But you're just a cowboy That cowboy's smart Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art Concrete and glass Art in the Plexiglas Summer nights Watching the Marfa lights The artrepreneur As a local archetype Stopping at the Prada Is just the start Art cowboy Cowboy art Places for a cowboy To make his art  *** The riff for the riff: Documentary on the Perspective channel about Donald Judd, one of the most interesting artists of the 20th century in my view, in the sense that his philosophy involved the power of place, and the ability to negotiate artistic ideals with locals, i.e. the sense that a New York liberal whose art we don't understan...

 Seed:   

  At a shallow pond On a shallow shore On a shallow lake Never seen before The water clear The sound of the sea The ocean tide Tsunami near Shine the light On a larger stone It's a place You've never known We want to go Where we've gone before But where we land Is what we settle for Bitter taste  The inner show The Interstate A metaphor I love the spooky "Wichita Lineman" vibe in context with Robert Adams' 1968 "Eden" photo and ironic juxtaposition of ponds, lakes, and shores appearing in a dream, and a dry barren landscape. His quote: “After people live awhile in a place to which they’ve laid waste, it gets to be easy to hate a great many things. Including themselves. And anything green that tries to rise again.”  This is one of the instances where the harmony is less cliche and uses 2 Mixolydian modes (C and F), with the key center in F--an odd guitar key--or the stems used were an acoustic guitar with a capo on the first fret.  Would I write a son...

A noir-ish vibe on this Curio, but might not be in the final mix and video. Footage I used: "Un Chien Andalou" (Bunuel), A Maya Deren clip, clip from "Kansas City Confidential", clip montage from Lost Highway. Is also the "pilot" for how the scored music is contrasted with more electronic treatments. ***

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"Lyricized"  prose using Yi-Fu Tuan's Passing Strange and Wonderful .   "Humans may be primarily visual, but hearing enjoys temporal priority. Infants in the womb can hear their mother's breathing and heartbeat, digestive processes, and muscle and joint movements.They also register messages from the external world, such as loud conversation; even before birth they may become accustomed to their parents' voices! Thus infants acquire their earliest awareness of the external world through organic and human sound rather than through sight. The steady sounds of organic life, especially the heartbeat, provide comfort. Even a left -handed mother tends to hold her infant in her left arm, apparently from the instinctual nowledge that the baby appreciates the rhythmic throb of the heart. Adults retain this preference. "Wherever you find insecurity," Desmond Morris asserts, "you are liable to find the comforting heartbeat rhythm in one kind of disguise or...

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

Groove for the phrase "Where do all the things we forgot go?" (Dynaxiom 0498 ). Anything can have a rhytmicity if you work with it, and supports the idea that music is a bottom-up phenomenon from drumming and the vocalizations that may have accompanied it in the ancient world. This could be used for a jazz piece of some kind, with horns doing the "stabs". 

  A stroll down Michigan Avenue and through Grant Park from Roosevelt, through the roaring 20s (19 and 20) (Equestrian Events. Luxury Hotels), 1968 (the Democratic Convention protests), The Art Institute, Millennium Park. Each lyric line is associated with a location or "snapshot"--as if I had taken a picture of it. Perhaps it's the wrong style (90s soft metal like Stone Temple Pilots or perhaps Rush, given the original idea of the Mnemonic Walk , but it's not something I would have turned off on 90s radio. It would be a track you'd hear in rotation on WXRT. The artists are 2 fake "Spinal Taps", The Mnemonics and Flip & The Switch, in the style of "Artist and The Band", like "Elvis Costello and The Attractions"   ***

    An idea heard in a dream--an oom-pah thing with embellishment (confabulation). This may or may not be on Sum V --perhaps too early 20th century.

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   Scale:   Go ahead, forget me, I’ll survive-- but will the gods forget the vow you made and let you off so easily? *** wasuraruru mi wo ba omowazu chikaite shi hito no inochi no oshiku mo aru kana    AI-generated using the Japanese verse: 

  12/12/1998  Web article on composers using scientific principles to create music: Phil Thompson does work with fractal music and Susan Alexander makes sound out of DNA. Both were interviewed by BBC science editor David Whitehouse.              [12/12/2024: This was the early days of what became to be known as sci-art. AI is now in the equation but seems to be too much in the mainstream with its use to create all kinds of music based on text prompts, not DNA chains or other data inputs. Esoterica was interesting then at the beginning of the internet, and not so much now. If you made an album of ambient music made from DNA now it wouldn’t be very interesting to people. It wouldn’t get any Likes, even though it did back in 1998. The other day Andrew Keen interviewed the author of the new book The Endless Refrain by David Rowell in which he argues that music runs only on nostalgia now. This is because experimentation in music is not popular at...

   12/7/2024 Seed:   *** 

    Uses the Japanese Hiro Joshi scale exclusively--essentially natural minor with no 4th or 7th degree.    A thousand thoughts that trouble me dissolving into sadness as 1 gaze upon the moon— but not to me alone does autumn finally come tsuki mireba chiji ni mono koso kanashi kere waga mi hitorsu no aki ni wa arañe do   ***  AI-generated version in Japanese. Since I don't speak Japanese I can't attest to its accuracy.

 Mies' 828 LSD and Hancock Building in double exposure with the Holga camera.