Tableau
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On the Other Side of the Year
Summer is a plain A plateau of life Everything in full bloom In the maximum light The sun made marks On a window sill The angle changed It caused a chill The summer leaves The flowers a clock Antipode to a country road On the other side of the year If you play a movie backwards It won't end up as it started It tells a different story To follow it is harder It's that time of year You notice the night A fading of light Disappearing from sight Take a turn With the calendar birds Hope to see you near On the other side of the year A time for reading novels Obscured by clouds Seasonal tales Never read aloud Tilt and rotation Light/dark shift Shadows of the day Shift and drift The summer leaves The flowers a clock Antipode to a country road On the other side of the year *** My pics: Speedo, Alibi, Vapor Cone
Hold Music
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)
On the Other Side of the Year
It's at this time of year that you begin noticing a change in the light. In the Northern Hemisphere, the mornings are darkening and twilight comes earlier. Summer is a "plain" or "plateau" of anticipation: everything is in full bloom, and the leaves won't be changing for another 2 months, the days begin to get perceptibly shorter towards the end of July. But in March, there's an anticipation of Spring, and by the end of May, the anticipation of summer. September is a feeling of heading back down the hill. Changing of Light, Sun, and Moon 0179: Compares poetry to the moon rather than the sun , as it " reflects light rather than shines directly " . 0352: States that " Light never ages; it just travels farther " . 0522: Reflects on the " earthrise " captured during the 1969 moon landing as a compelling moment of perspective . 0570: Observes that looking at the sun makes one realize it is the force that " created yo...
Songs With Bridges
Sunken Bridge by RO&AD Worth re-posting. I haven't tested the links so some may be dead. 7/30/2011 At the theoretical level, song hooks are imbued with clever twists like harmonic modulations, chord 'borrowing' and turnarounds. Now these devices have devolved from the songwriter's toolkit in much the same way Cole Porter Moon-June rhyming schemes became obsolete by the 1960s in favor of new compositional devices that made them frumpy and old hat. The classic bridge is now in this category. Nonetheless I still love to put them in songs. Bridges (sometimes used synonymously with middle-eight ) are difficult to do well because not any musical transition can qualify as a bridge device. They typically appear only once in a composition: If a section is repeated, it technically is not a bridge. Some regard the "life is very short..." phrase in the Beatles' "We Can Work It Out" or the "why she had to go..." phrase in "Yesterday...
Distant Drone (0719)
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:
Sound As Information
Ice Core Layers 2010 was the first year that I got my first pair of ear mics and a portable recorder. What I was most interested in was finding places that had embedded Keynotes or Soundmarks (continuous pitched elements in a place) which I wanted to integrate into my ambient music. Field recordings are actually a great way to listen to the environment because the recording apparatus has done some of that listening for you: when you come back and listen to the recording, you hear things that you missed when you were there. It works the same way in photography, where you come back home and look at the images and you see other things that were outside the frame that you didn't notice when you were attempting to get the shot. Even before I was doing field recording myself, I was interested in using field recordings made by others. I had a friend that visited various parts of the globe, one of them Costa Rica. I had taken his field recordings and made an immersive sound environment to ...
Curio No. 46
From my old Music Ideas list from the 90s. This is #75 "She's A Star". The idea at the time was that the word "star" would have a dissonant interval in it. This would be the intro, a la You Can't Always Get You Want, but would be a fast EDM, not classic rock. In the end, both she (and he) are "diminished". Female Voices She's a star She's our star She's a star He's so glam She's a star She's our star! She's a star Male Voices He's our Tsar He's our man He's so glam He's a Tsar He's a star! He's a star Score: Art/Footage: The Ugly Duchess by Massys, various Kristin Wiig skits Upper Part of a Tabernacle For the Holy Sacrament (1465)
Sum III.2 (Sesquicentennial Soundwalk 7-4-2026)
A one-hour sound walk with binaural mics, Oak Park Wright District, Hemingway District, WWI Memorial, Lake Street, Marion Street, Pleasant Home, Holly Court. [Wear headphones]
Sum V.2: Curios (250s)
A series of brass miniatures, a minute or less in length, using the "history overlay "technique that I've used in photography where two photographs are superimposed with the older image in the background. But here I've also used American paintings from the 18th century and early photography and Daguerreotypes. The short transitional images between the pieces are mostly Jasper Johns flags, as a way to say that American cultural traditions are now mostly contemporary or appropriated. It's hard to interpret the occasion as being purely traditional 60 years after the advent of Pop art, but the music is completely traditional. The dates are the Songdays--the day where I had the riff idea. Scores:
Innovationism
The black-out idea: The AI had difficulty pronouncing the word "innovationism" at first and garbled it, sometimes making up words like "visionism" or "invasionism" which are both interesting. And not all "ism" words work. It has to be 6 syllables and start on the second beat of the bar. Other variants: A new religilism Indivigilism Winnovationism *** The Duds:
July 31sts
January 31sts 7/31/1997 It’s interesting to talk to 20-somethings because they look at Woodstock like a bunch of old people playing shuffleboard. Some even like big band—which means that you aren’t necessarily bound to your own age group in terms of art appreciation. There comes a time when you break away from the comfort of being with peers to explore. [7/31/2025: I suspect there's going to be a revival of older genres but the musical armatures won't be there--the instruments, the skill, the pedagogy...] 7/31/2021 7/31/2022 Every Boomer and older Gen-Xer knows of Joni Mitchell because her hits were in rotation on AM radio in the 1970s, but it’s only until later that we begin to really know the depth of her artistry. Sometimes there are other things that happen in the flow of events that intersect or trigger a memory of music you like, such as the recent unveiling of the statue of Amelia Earhart at the Capitol. Amelia is a song I first heard on the Shadows a...
July 30ths
January 30ths 7/30/2003 Interesting: A motion picture of a particle called a kaon will show when played backwards , that the particle does not end up as it started , or begin in its original state, and will be something else entirely. NotAItions: 7/30/2004 Segment on [60 Minutes?] about musical savants. Everyone is capable of being a savant, but reasoning gets in the way. They also found that music somehow rewires the brain. The brain can be “rearranged” in lots of different ways. Music is different in that it has a transcendental quality (if you let it), which goes back to the problem in the paradox of reason: music can develop the capability to reason, but in the process can make music too analytical. The best composers were able to work around this paradox. [7/30/2024: 20 years later I’m even more convinced of the connection between the tactility of musical instruments (as opposed to computer...
