Lee Barry Composition (And Photo) Diary

9/11/1906  William James letter to H.G. Wells: Dear Mr. Wells,—I’ve read your “Two Studies in Disappointment” in “Harper’s Weekly,” and must thank you from the bottom of my heart. Rem acu tetegisti! Exactly that callousness to abstract justice is the sinister feature and, to me as well as to you, the incomprehensible feature, of our U. S. civilization....”Scoundrelly, as you say,”but understandable, “from the point of view of parties interested”—but understandable in onlooking citizens only as a symptom of the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease...”  9/11/1968           John’s song for those despised people who dissected his lyrics for hidden - but almost always unintended - revelations and conundrums. One of two songs on The Beatles to give mention in its lyric to another Beatles song title (“Savoy Truffle” mentioned ...

 

9/10/1997             Watched program about I.M. Pei and Phillip Johnson.  Some interesting quotes by Pei:             The durability and the essence of things is the only thing that can last, otherwise, it’s transitory fashion; If you are true to yourself, your signature will come out; Once you’ve found the heart of the piece, then you have to make it work; The simpler the solution, the more powerful it is. The durability And the essence of things Is the only thing That can last– Otherwise, it’s transitory fashion If you are true to yourself And once you’ve found the heart  Your signature will come out– The simpler the solution The more powerful it is Run through AI:       A possible orchestral treatment:  *** It's nice how AI can suggest possible approaches to an idea. Here the guitar and percussion version can be a section in a Prog piece. Section 1 is 9-10 (day before). I would have n...

  9/9/2009 9-9-9. The entire Beatles music collection, digitally remastered, released by Apple Corps. (Number 9...) 9/9/2017             Music performance allows one to be intimately involved with the passing of time, although listening to music, or even composing it is untethered to time. If you are performing music, you would be distracted by clock time. It is a bit of a duck-rabbit phenomenon. Music is a good example of a ‘flow’ experience because tempo is the ultimate means for focus. 9/9/2024             There are some people who embrace new media and some who don’t. I totally embraced the internet. In the early days I couldn’t wait to design my own website because it was a way to promote my work. But I know lots of people who never got on board, so they don’t fully understand people who have. But once you’ve gotten through one generation of a new technology it’s totally burned in. People probably weren’t on...

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...

 Seed rhythm:   Seed melody and chords:     Result in an ultra-classical style but might get re-contextualized later:   First Map of the Sky (September 7) by meta4s

  Play it again Sam!!  

 

 Panton Chairs