I keep coming back to what Bowie said about creating a new system for creating music, building the infrastructure for canoes, instead of making canoes (songs). This is what I want to do with Sum II and Sum III albums. The longer songs on Sum II can be shortened for Sum III and vice versa. The 2 albums are an "ecosystem" of creativity. For example, if I have a song that is 60 seconds long that I composed for a short video, that would go on Sum III. The extended version would go on Sum II.
0 Comments
The internet makes creativity too easy. In the early days of the internet, it was seen as a library of free information and has continued on with that mental model.
If we understand creativity as being a combinatorial process, whereby fragments are combined/recombined and shaped into a final form, then the internet becomes the material supplier of prefabricated elements. Perhaps some aspect of creativity dies there because it eliminates manual craft. So rather than creating verses and choruses for a song from scratch, or emulating the styles of other writers, samples are used as the building blocks. I'm not saying that it's not creative in itself, as those samples have a cultural meaning that gets inherited and is a form of homage. Personally, I prefer a synthesis of pre-existing work and my own ideas. This way emulation is a driving force, rather than copying/downloading and using it instead. Using AI to generate ideas is sometimes interesting, but I couldn't fathom the permutations being a final product. I would feel I had done nothing creative in the traditional sense. But if it was you (rather than someone else) that pushed the buttons, then I suppose you created it. The Internet may have eroded creativity by shifting the intentions from doing things for the sake of itself and doing things because the medium dictates it. An example would be the new YouTube where creators are encouraged to create content that gets the most engagement rather than creating things because they are compelling to the creator. Here is an experiment using just the diary entries from a particular day--in this case, today, March 16. First I go through the entries sequentially and extract words and phrases that are musical and begin to form verses and choruses. The "from time to time" line became a repeating phrase, perhaps sung as a background voice, or sung antiphonally. Then I choose other lines based on the established groove. You can play around with the order, and eventually, it begins to gather meaning. Once you have the song structure, you can swap out lines with other words; you don't ultimately have to use the original text at all. You can also use ChatGPT to find other words and phrases to complete the lyric. In essence what you're doing is using your own algorithm for writing lyrics and songs, which to me is more interesting and satisfying.
From Time To Time Sometimes I try To map out the sequence of the on-screen portrayal of reality We are suffused in the space of the past Cloud travel encourages discovery Original order of extracted lines with the same rhythms in the words: i t was designed to map out the sequence of the on-screen portrayal of reality encourages discovery To Garfield Park The boundary of the tropical and a Chicago March critical mass and begins to decline we are also suffused in the space of the past from time to time A generative treatment run against the loop sometimes I try Cloud Travel Japanese Emperor makes a rare appearance. The world must be ending the power of nature always wins settle the score Stadium Tower in New Orleans zipping past the windows Brian Eno: Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing, which it isn't after several long days' work.
Is there ever a "fire" in composition? A rule of thumb for completing a symphony would be to write a minute of music a day. That can be hard on some days when you might have lots of 16th notes at fast tempos. Old Master composers needed a different kind of fire to get through those days scratching with a calligraphy pen into a score--including the staves. This is dated in the early aughts probably. Music became more visual with MTV, or we made the connection that multi-track recording is similar to film editing. Lately I have been creating videos for album sides as a virtualization of listening to a record while looking at the album art, which is so much better than playlists.
Music without limits can be boring. It's more exciting to make constraints and create resourcefully rather than to play with the net down. Free-form music can also seem arrogant as it doesn't always invite the listener in or compel them to want to connect with it. The success of free music depends on its ability to connect at the "fourth dimension" (level of the conceptual), and the surface elements (how it sounds) are not as important. (Rev. 1/2014: Marina Abramovic talks about it in this video.
Using axis formulae, you can control audience response by "swinging the pendulum" from stasis to dynamism.
Created in the 90s, although I still add cards as I think of them. [More]
Last night I watched a few interviews with David Brooks about his new book How To Know A Person. He gives a good talk, but I think he's a bit scripted. The two interviews that I listened to were almost identical. But he's particularly interesting in that he's warmed up over the years, although still a centrist conservative at the core. I think that's a good thing. It keeps you grounded to come back to the things you value personally. Artists have gone through similar changes in their lives yet still have a consistency of always working on something that doesn't always involve introspection. The fact that I'm listening to David Brooks about his new book doesn't have anything to do with what I'm working on in music, but we can "code-switch": When you're with friends playing sports you're not having in-depth philosophical conversations, but when you're with your friends who you can have those conversations.
I know some guys who’ve been in a monthly basketball game together for years. They may never have had a deep conversation, but they’d lay down their lives for one another, so deep are the bonds between them—bonds that were formed by play. But it can also be the opposite: you're not veering towards small talk, or the conversation isn't meandering around to different things. Desultory conversations with no thread between them where one person is talking about what they want to talk about and the other is talking about what they want to talk about don't lead to good conversations because there's no thread between them. Conversations can bottom out when you don't have any shared talking points. As an artist, the things that you're doing are a form of constancy. The piece that you're working on doesn't necessarily have to reflect all the things that are going on in the world. Sometimes I let them fly in through the window, but I don't always have the window open, whereas some artists do. On October 7 I was working on something where I opened the window and reacted, but for me it's rare. I'm not reflexively going to pivot on current events. It seems more natural to always be reactive to the core elements of what one could possibly be reactive to, as opposed to major inflection points, e.g. the idea of endless wars as a facet of the human condition. This way it becomes thematic or conceptual to your individual way of working. It's helpful to have a script. It's a way of keeping your story straight as an artist. You can move from project to project and the fact that you're changing projects doesn't change you as a person. One thing I've now grown to appreciate is this idea of "rule drift" that allows you to switch the rules after you've made them. I noticed it happening the past year or so with the writing and recording of Nostalgia Galaxy. The original rule was that I would create a song a month and the month would be determined by the month that I started it. Then I switched the rules so it would be either in the month that I started it or in the month that I finished it. The month in which it was finished actually makes more sense because you're working on it in both months and you might as well use the month when you finished it.
As I've been going through some of my notes, I had been working on songs over the course of sometimes three months, so a song would have started in February and then finished in May. It's probably best that we use rule drift because you don't want to get too locked into rules. At some level being locked into rules as a stricture is probably a good idea if you're trying to do something that's minimal, for example, using only three colors, or in music using certain note values. When I was studying composition with jazz arranger Bill Russo in the 80s, one of his rules was that you couldn't use dots or ties in your rhythms. It was frustratingly restrictive but at some level that's probably a good idea because if you don't have any rules, or if you're always drifting the rules. then you might as well not have any rules at all. Apparently Pat Metheny has been keeping a road diary for decades. Stewart Copeland recently published his diary.
Diaries have been invaluable to me as well. When I revisit them, lots of the ideas that I jotted down have come to fruition, sometimes with very long lag times: It wasn't that I was going back to the diaries to get inspiration to finish the projects, the act of writing them down made it more possible for them to be finished. Now it's more interesting to read diaries and memoirs of other people. Keith Haring kept a fascinating diary. And I discovered Count Harry Kessler, an aesthete/flaneur/world traveler from the turn of the century. A 700-page tome was published about 10 years ago, with very detailed entries about his travels--hanging out with the likes of Stravinsky, Rodin, Rilke, and Matisse. I kept a paper diary for 15 years, and then stopped because I couldn't keep up with it. But I still keep an electronic diary which is the focal point for all creative activity. The interesting thing about electronic diaries accessible from a smartphone is that they can be endlessly re-shaped. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, as good ideas can be erased. Paper diaries are interesting in that they are the ‘dumbphone’ version, and can also have drawings and diagrams. |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|