01999-02-07 | Uncategorized
I am playing the ‘Neroli’ album by Brian Eno in the kitchen and another of his albums in the living room, and it sounds pretty amazing throughout the house. 16-18 years ago I was very interested in this sort of spatial composition. I designed, on paper only, complex systems with multiple amplifiers and many speakers surrounding the audience. One time I wrote a piece where the musicians where scattered throughout the theater. (Is this something we could make use of in a live-show?)
To do this right you would require a different breed of orchestra musician, somebody who has a wonderful tone, and yet is willing to play very little… and how to notate such music that wouldn’t even have a time keeper (unless one fed every musician a metronome via in-ear monitors)… also taking into account how far apart some of the musicians might be and the room delays involved.
I remember what a Japanese musician answered when I asked him about traditional Japanese notation? He said there is NO rhythm. Just notations like: play this sort of sequence of sounds a little while after you hear this other guy play that sequence of sounds – or something to that effect.
01999-02-06 | Uncategorized
Is there an Internet Service out there, that can act like the curator of a museum? People who listen to music all day long and wade through thousands of releases per month and let us know what we might like? Somebody who correlates the parameters of the music we love and compiles new music for us? (What parameters? How would a parameter for emotional content work?) And I am not talking about the way amazon.com tells us: ‘If you love this, you might like this…’ their method seems crude, unsophisticated, unimaginative, and their secondary choices are uninspired and seem to never relate to the first choice very well.
I also think we’ll buy more compilation CDs in the near future. A compilation is one way to accomplish what I am thinking about. But an Internet Curator Service for music would be nice. Somebody, who might charge a person half a dollar per month to introduce them to lots of new music. If that service had 10,000 subscribers they would already earn $5,000/month… one could listen to the new selections via Real Audio before making a decision… then the site could refer the prospective buyer to a large Internet CD store, whether it be Amazon.com, Borders or Virgin or whatever. The curator-site could also set up a deal with thestores to collect a few pennies per sale referred. And they could also sell their own compilations online.
01999-02-05 | Uncategorized
From 9:00am until 10:15am this Morning I conducted 5 phone-interviews with Greek journalists. The magazines ranged from Mainstream, to Music, to Fashion. I think they all liked the new album ‘INNAMORARE’ a lot. But, maybe that was a Trojan horse and they’ll write what a jerk I am. I came up with a couple of good thoughts and said a bunch of stupid shit. It would be so nice to conduct these interviews via email, when one doesn’t have to think on the spot. Maybe, if this new album gets huge, I can become the reclusive artiste, who doesn’t want to talk to the Press and only conducts interviews via the Internet. Or, maybe, I should rather just accept that doing live-interviews always brings about a few gem-thoughts and a lot of trash-thought.
I listened to ‘Neroli’ by Brian Eno this Morning and thought that it reminds me of the Clarity, Texture and Light of the Architecture and Paintings I mentioned yesterday. Ah, but how to create this with acoustic instruments? With an orchestra maybe… the players sitting all around the theater, some on stage, some in the aisles, some in the walk-way in back of the audience… how to notate this music though, absent of a strong rhythm and with the players sitting so far apart…
Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the blank mind-canvas of music… so many possibilities… where to start…
01999-02-04 | Uncategorized
I was recently looking at photographs of modern architecture in a book by the architectural photographer Julius Shulman and a book about the works of the architect Pierre Koenig, when a thought occurred to me… why is it that in the 1930-1950s, while architects devised brilliant modern houses, especially the houses by Mies Van der Rohe, the above mentioned Pierre Koenig, Marcel Breuer etc., houses that created such beautiful relationships between inside and outside, between light and shadow, shape and form, that while artist like Paul Mondrian and Paul Klee created such exquisite paintings, the composers of Classical Music were creating A-tonal Music, 12 Tone Music, Serial Music, and such…
Where is the musical equivalent of Mies Van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion? Where is the musical equivalent of a Mondrian painting? I know there is so much music out there that this music may well exist, but who created it and where can I find it?
Is it because Music is constructed in our minds in time, by our memory? A musical phrase arrives at our ears note after note. Our brain remembers each note and thus creates a melody. The more complex the melody, and the longer the phrase,Ã the harder it is to piece together, and the more training a person must have to understand it. If we add harmony, especially very complex harmony to that it can get pretty hard to construct the music in ones mind. Swing was easy, but Be-bop is a different matter altogether. A Waltz is easy, but Stravinsky is a different matter.
I guess, I miss that immediacy of Architecture and Painting in the modern Classical Music I have heard. I could be wrong….
Another thought: Is it just me or is the art of music lagging behind? Marcel Duchamp created ‘Ready-Made’ art 50 years ago, then Pop Art with its imagery of everyday items like Warhol’s Campbell soup cans followed in the Sixties. In Jazz I have only heard one artist use a similar method so far: Charlie Haden has recorded three brilliant albums with his quartet, that all make use of samples from other material.
