Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

Panel detail of The Last Judgment --Hieronymus Bosch   5/13/1977  (Keith Haring Journal) Took a bus to 1-94 and caught a few little rides and then a truck ride all the way to the border of N. Dakota where we ate three cheeseburgers and drank some beers. It was all farmers and when I went to the bathroom they all talked about my hair...Rednecks! Then we got a ride from a pilot who likes Bachman Turner Overdrive and then a truck ride into N. Dakota."    The original song idea:  May 13, 1977 by meta4s The Shortet:  String Shortet No. 3 ("All The Way To North Dakota") by meta4s

  The Great Parade - Fernand Leger (1954)   Original song idea used words and phrases from May 27 diary entries from the Beatles studio diary and my entry of 5/27/2019.  May 27, 1966, Friday Long sequence involving Bob Dylan and John Lennon, filmed riding in the back of a limo driving into central London. No script or direction other than to themselves. The piece was long and incomprehensible, made worse by the fact that they were both on drugs. The sequence was intended to form part of Eat The Document, a chronicle of Dylan’s latest European concert tour.  May 27, 2019 Memorial Day. Went to the parade and was thinking about America’s soul. I had heard Bill Clinton use the term “trilemma” in an interview.  Original riff:   The arrangement for string quartet, a minute long. (All the tracks on Sum IV are a minute long)   _ String Shortet No. 4 ("At the Parade") by meta4s   While it would have no association with The Beatles per se (except for ...

Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?--Richard Hamilton    The Songday date is December 27, 2022, the day of the first draft.    The Shortet arrangement: Shortet No. 5 ("Heaven As Home") by meta4s

  Based on a June 30, 1930 diary (daybook) entry by Edward Weston in Carmel California: Fog has lifted—brilliant sun. This provides the happy accident of shadows cast upon the work. Played a Caesar Franck Symphony as well as a Bach Concerto, read, sunned, dreamed.  The early idea as a song:           The artwork: This is a photography of Carmel in 1930 but isn't "cinematic" enough for the music. The mood of this music is dark, due to the parallel minor chords. The still from the Wizard of Oz works well. Again, it shifts the location, in this case, Kansas (A Place Like Kansas)             The Shortet:   Shortet No. 6 ("Carmel") by meta4s

  Madame de Pompadour (as a gardener) -- Carle van Loo  6/28/1934 (Edward Weston Diary) I have often noted Sonya sitting in the little Mexican chair, knees crossed, and one leg twined around the other in a seemingly impossible way,—impossible to me at least—suggesting one vine twisting around another. Anyhow it had a dynamic flow which at once suggested new subject matter. With time, and a new idea, I get into action at once. So this morning I have a new negative before me. No doubt as to its value. It may start a whole series in a new vein. Maybe I’ll travel legwise up to other fragments. I have not done nudes for several years and methinks I am ready, and better able than ever before. There is something out of place in my back. This morning I could hardly move in bed with pain. Each day I have thought it would pass. I so dislike doctors—unknown ones—but I must find one to snap me together. The "lyric" Sonya sitting in a Mexican chair One vine, around another With time, I ge...

  The Last Judgment (Panel Detail) -- Hieronymus Bosch                                       Based on a June 25, 1986 Keith Haring diary entry:  " The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint . I'd like to pretend that I've never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything...and then make something. Every time I make something I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something I think about the person who made it. Nothing is important...so, everything is important." Original rhythmic idea from the phrase:     Shortet No. 9 ("June 25, 1986") by meta4s      

 Based on two diary entries made on July 2: 7/2/1907, Tuesday (Paris) (Harry Kessler Diary) Visited Renoir with Vollard this afternoon in Montmartre, rue Caulaincourt...Renoir sat on a rolling chair and painted a long, life-size blond nude, a replica of the nude at Gallimard’s. His black-haired model Gabrielle, in a loose yellow calico blouse, cleaned his brushes afterward. He had her bring out a nude of her, as she lay on the sofa with her mature, rather round form...  7/2/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) Studio 2, Golden Slumbers . Paul lives close to the studio so he arrives before everyone else and works on Her Majesty.  Extracted lyric: Verse 1 Renoir sat on a rolling chair And painted a life-size blond A replica of the nude at Gallimard’s His black-haired Gabrielle In a loose calico blouse Verse 2 Had her bring out a nude of her A painted life-size blond Paul lives close to the studio He arrives before everyone else His black-haired Gabrielle In a loose calico blouse Map...

This letter perfectly works as poetry, and perhaps a lyric, perhaps perfectly for Father's Day 6/16/1895, Springfield Centre, N.Y. (Letters of William James) To Mrs. Henry Whitman: "Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification—things which will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest..." Adirondack wilderness The breath of which I have sighed fo...

  Jim Nutt -- Plumb 7/10/2024 It's infrequent that I get musical ideas in dreams, but usually they are 2-4 bar loops, not unlike how we develop ear worms that are similarly short and repeat over and over.    

Gravitation -- Vasily Kandinsky   The rhythmic idea for this shortet is based on the phrase "Cult of creativity--idea to product, 2 random lines from a 6/24/2023 diary entry on a book I was reading at the time, Cult of Creativity . "The essence of creativity might be a winnowing process from idea to product" .   Shortet No. 15 ("Idea To Product") by meta4s

  The Death of Decius Mus -- Peter Paul Rubens The core rhythm is derived from the line in Martin Luther King's April 3, 1968 speech, "The nation is sick, trouble is in the land".    Shortet No. 13 ("April 3, 1968") by meta4s

My past few albums have been video albums and haven't been formal digital releases or on vinyl. But with any album release you have to think about the artwork at some point. For this album once I got to design stage I had to listen to each piece of music and try to match it with some kind of image. In the beginning of the process I was looking at paintings of Botero. They seemed to fit with the pieces but as I looked further there were different paintings and photographs that worked with them as well. It can take quite a while to match an image with music–similar to scoring music for a film but it's the reverse process: you’re the art director.  Matching visuals with music is less intuitive than you think. What you have to have is a sense of motion in a still image, as if it was a montage sequence in a film, or more accurately, the feeling of holding a record jacket, looking at the artwork, and listening to the music. If you were to use AI by simply typing in text prompts wit...

Release of the first volume in the "minute" series (Sum I--music for months; Sum II--music for days; Sum III--music an hour in length (field recordings); Sum IV--music a minute in length.  See the description in the video for titles of the art used and the songday for each.

Shortet No. 1 ("Figured Basses") by meta4s This shortet is derived from a bass etude I wrote in 1992 based on a compound time signature and cycles through 4 dominant 7th chords (or Mixolydian modes) a minor third apart: E7, C#7, Bb7, G7. The piece was supposed to be a kind of "jazz head" for alternating solos. Actual Songday is the day the shortet was started, 1/6/2025 *** The art: In The Omnibus , Honore Daumier 

Stage curtain painted by Picasso for Erik Satie's "Parade" ballet This has a somewhat odd history: The original version was a fast shuffle titled “Paper Trampoline”.  Paper Trampoline by meta4s  The second version was generated by AI and I made a music video on it:  The Shortet (1/19/2025) Shortet No. 2 ("Paper Trampoline") by meta4s

Shortet No. 12 ("Vintage of the Vinyl") by meta4s

  Guitao - Ed Paschke  A transcription and arrangement based on a piece originally generated by AI using the lyric: Songs are evergreen We tire of the bare trees Oceans of nostalgia On which we sail free The vintage of the vinyl Ancient reverie Over the horizon Memories of a dream    Shortet No. 12 ("Vintage of the Vinyl") by meta4s

  After looking at many images that would fit with the music, I decided on Andrew Wyeth's Christina Olson (1947), painted a year before the more famous painting Christina's World (1948). The painting was not painted in Kansas, but in Maine, but has a heartland Copelandesque vibe to it. [ More ] In terms of the Songday series, the diary entry I used to initially write the music was from June 30, 2001 when I was thinking about the Chicago journalist Bill Kurtis who had traveled the world and found that he resonated with a simple place like Kansas, and so "place like Kansas" sparked the initial rhythmic idea, then chords an melody:   In June 2024 I was thinking that a possible song narrative would be the returning home after a long journey and re-discovering anew the place you left. This could have been a Music For Places piece, with an atmospheric production, with peripheral references to "There's No Place Like Home", perhaps using a clip from The Wizard...

12/13/1999 On horizon: Caves, Access Grids, Active Murals.  [12/13/2024 @25 : Advent of VR]  12/13/2001               Program on NPR on music of Madagascar. They said one of the goals in their music is to make it sound like fast talking. Then you listen to their language and you can see the connection. [12/13/2025: I think the best bottom-up way to be musical is to start with rhythms, and language can supply it. See: The Singing Neanderthals    12/13/2016 The cashier at a Whole Foods, probably around 18, commented that she preferred 50s music over 70s music. What was appealing about them? Perhaps it’s not the song but what they represent in a nostalgic sense. Songs are evergreen in some ways when people tire of bare trees .    [12/2024: in The Endless Refrain by David Rowell he argues that music runs only on nostalgia now. This is because experimentation in music is not popular at the moment. You couldn’t have a mid-...