Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

 Horizontal Virga    

  Whaam! -- Roy Lichtenstein (1963) Seed idea was a diary entry on 3/11/1998: "First line for novel: 'In the old days, there were so many regrets. It became a game to see how many we could get.', and a title idea I had on 3/11/2009: The Game of Regret.   In March 2003 the invasion of Iraq had begun, which was "Mission Accomplished" in 3 years in 2006, but went on for another 15 years.  The song is more historical than it is political, to wit: 8/31/2010: End of combat mission in Iraq. Obama gives his mile-stone speech ‘Mission Unaccomplished’. Hawks are asserting that our occupation of Iraq for its nation building somehow changed the world for the better, when conceivably, leaving Hussein in power could have preserved the extant Arab ecosystem; the tribal boundaries are still there. Is it possible for them to fade or devolve over generations? (They haven’t in other Islamic nations, e.g. Iran)... With AI music you have skimpy options on how a song gets produced. Th...

2393: Life Finds a Place. Life finds a place Where the roots might go It lets itself in Lets itself go Extremophiles Deeper than you know In the crushing darkness The red light shows To the far reaches In the depths of the sea Far below the surface Roots of the tree Either on the Earth Or on the Mars Life finds a place With a wish on a star It's reading the rocks From cover to cover Finding a place From under the tundra To the far reaches In the depths of the sea Far below the surface Roots of the tree  Copyright 2026 Lee Barry, Rights in lyrics reserved  

  If art never aged or wasn't judged by time How much would be left?  How much would survive? Aesthetic erosion of the coast by the sea If we just left, how much would there be? A picture is a sum of destruction Beauty as a form of reduction A picture is a frame of construction Beauty as a form and a function Art exists as a record of the world In cuneiform or figures on a mural A palimpsest, laid to rest Beauty is a pattern that connects A picture is a sum of destruction Beauty as a form of reduction A picture is a frame of construction Beauty as a form and a function  Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Rights in lyrics reserved.    *** 0260. Beauty is the pattern that connects. 0774. If beauty=form, then function follows form (art/design for its own sake). If beauty=function, then form follows function (things that ‘work beautifully’). If function follows form in a continuous loop you can have continuous beauty until function fails. What used to work beautifully would ...

More "human-in-the loop" transcriptions to Curios.  You can actually play these together to some degree if you can manage to start them together or in some kind of phase. 

 An extension of the original seed orchestration of a recording of civil defense sirens.    *** Seed Scores: *** ***

 

  3/30/2006   *** Sometimes my Chicago blues roots show in my music. I was a huge blues fan when I first started playing in the late 70s. The annual Blues Fest was a major event.  You can't deny Blues is where it all started in the 60s. With AI music anyone can use "Rock" and "Blues" in a prompt, but it might not resonate if you've never played blues. I still think that humans do blues better, but this is not bad.  Also, Cal's was what was left of Chicago's red-light district, bounded by and Wells at the west, State at the east, and Van Buren at the north, and Congress at the south.  3/30/2011 Even after 20 years of riding the El through the west side to the Loop, I’m still seeing new things. Today it was “New Drift Liquors” in Austiin-- a shuttered saloon. Would be a great photo.  [This actually was a photo I took of Cal’s at Wabash and Van Buren, now a Greek fast-food restaurant. There's a little window on the north side of the building where t...

  Curio 76 ("Sirens") is one of the pieces that has been extended to 7 minutes, and this is an extracted short . The painting is The Sirens and Ulysses by William Etty The audio is actually generated from the Morse Code  .-- .- .-. -. .. -. --. ... / .-.. --- ... . / - .... . .. .-. / .--. --- .-- . .-. / .-- .... . -. / - .... . -.-- / .- .-. . / .-. . .--. . .- - . -.. / - --- --- / --- ..-. - . -.   Decode    Score:   

  Back in the 70s, songwriters wrote about cities: Phoenix, Wichita, Galveston. This lyric wasn't a riff on that--only the rhythm of the phrase "Hotel in Carlsbad". But Baltimore and Galveston are more interesting for a potential narrative--and are 3-syllable words. I like that it remains ambiguous and suggests that it's about the devastating hurricane in 1900 and the aftermath, but it really isn't--but could be by associating images with it.   ***  When the rains returned Cloud after cloud I went back to the place  Where the waves made a sound The virga would fall But I wouldn't hear a thing I was welcomed to a world Where the rains would begin Hotel in Galveston Far from African dust A new atmosphere Of American lust Saw it in a noondream Of America's bloom It's embedded in a place From the bust to the boom A place tells a story Not erased by time It's in your hand In the feel of a rhyme Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Lyric rights reserved  

  Writing lyrics in the AI era is a new form of writing. Obviously, lyrics are a form of poetry, but ultimately, music shapes the meaning--if it has any at all. With AI-generation, the process of idea to a final mix is very fast--too fast in fact--which drives forms of writing that could become lyrics. It's another form of "the medium is the message": the medium makes messages possible things that weren't possible before.  It also makes it more difficult to find relevance: It may mean something to you because you wrote them, but is it a song as relevant as The Streets of Minneapolis in 2026--or any protest song? An AI-generated protest song is actually a strange idea and highlights the difference between AI and humans, primarily an awareness of a galvanizing moment. It can generate a protest song and use Springsteen's voice as a model and might actually have the same emotional valence, but there aren't 10,000 people gathered in a park listening to someone perf...

  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...

This isn't about the film Project Hail Mary per se, but makes a reference to the age of stars (metaphor) and "astrophage" (star-killers), with the larger SciFi film trope of dynamos for space travel. My pic: #1, but they're all interesting in unique ways. Interstellar light Shines in the dark You''ll never notice The original spark We won't know What Interacts with the light Until it appears Right out of the night A middle-age star An energy dome How long it will live Is not something we know Light never ages It just fades away It travels farther Farther from today A planet's tides Forces at play Other things [That speed the decay] That drive the replay Astrophage Is dimming the sun With climate change The world is one Energy dome Far away from home The energy dome For the trip going home Copyright 2026 Lee Barry. Lyric rights reserved.

  Think the the jazz/funk scene circa 1970. Seed:    

  3/25/1997   I did a count of all the pieces I’ve written since approximately 1983, when I bought my first keyboard and 4-track, and I now have almost 300 songs and other compositions on about 150 cassettes, much of it jazz and experimental music.   I like guitar players who approach the instrument from lots of different angles, where you don’t have to always play it as if it were only a guitar. (Andy Summers, Robert Fripp come immediately to mind)—the “painting” approach, where you use different “brush” techniques. 3/25/1998 Black-out poetry About a Girl  He couldn’t get The right mood She explained That it was about a girl Waiting for her lover In a motel room She explained  That it was about a girl 3/25/2021   Musicians seem to like things that are really technical. I’m still surprised to see so many people getting into music theory and they want the real complex things with chord changes that are like mathematical formulas. But they’re not mathematic...

  Thomas Cole Over Rubens  4 against 3, with the drum part in 4.  Seed: The words "scatter" and "matter" alternating.  

  There was a photo exhibition at the Art Institute about 10 years ago that primarily featured Polaroids. In one of the works, the photos were flipped so that it showed just the backs of the photos with writing on them. As you read them, an image would appear in your imagination. The backs The backs  The backs of the photographs Turn around the phrase Turn around the beat The shifting of your gaze Your eyes are on the street Frame the caption card The only thing you see  You think you're seeing art It isn't what it means The backs The backs The fax/facts of the photographs 

An example of how one work can start to generate other pieces. The process for the Curios is to start the pieces as classical ensembles, then play other parts against them. This is a transcription of bass parts I played against it. It's a "caboose" on the end of it in what is turning out to be jazz--all based on civil defense sirens playing a Bmaj7(#11), The next step is to improvise on bass against this in B Lydian, so it's a kind of Rifts on bass. 

  A song about hunger, perhaps addiction, using a musical metaphor, with "firsts" as The One, or a unison.   Nice intro with the kick on the and of 1. Would a human think of that? The dialect is also interesting with "flats" pronounced as "flaits", and "dance" as "daints" *** Precious little seconds Precious little thirds Precious little fourths As you dance around the words Precious little fifths Precious little sixths Precious major sevenths As you take another first Take it all around  From the first bar to the last First you take the sharps And then you take the flats Precious minor seconds Precious minor thirds Precious perfect fourths As you dance around the words Precious flatted fifths Precious flatted sixths Precious minor sevenths As you dance around the firsts Ticking on a clock Looking at the score You say you're never hungry But you're really wanting more Precious minor seconds Precious minor thirds Precious perfect...

  Jealousy -- Edvard Munch  Seed: