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.
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1/23/1999
Interesting article in Tribune about entertainment following the path of politics and sports, i.e., polls and scores. There is such an emphasis on competitiveness and winning. You might think that since they are driven by statistics, they would be cold and mechanical, but actually, they have a direct connection with science and biology—as the flow of art is directly correlated with naturally occurring systems in nature. (A computer program could be written where ideas for music, film, books, etc., would be automatically generated based upon current or projected public opinion). [1/23/2024: It has indeed...What has happened is that politics has followed the path of entertainment. Not that it wasn't in 1999, but a shift happened around that time where the film celebrity as politician evolved into the TV/Sports celebrity as politician: Jesse Ventura, Sonny Bono, etc. The next step in that evolution is obviously the internet and social media and whatever follows them. There's this idea of an epistocracy, or a rule by experts--but even those experts would be suffused in media]. Nostalgia Galaxy release is finalized for tomorrow 1/19. There is always some superstition involved in selecting a release date. Apparently, there is some magic in Fridays as a release date, and I was trying to decide whether it would be in January or February. Reviewing the January 19ths and 26ths in the diary, I chose 1/19. 1/19/1967 in Beatles diary: "From little acorns...The song which was to become the stunning finale of the Beatles' next album. "A Day In the Life", started it out simply...as a stark bare recording..." The "acorn" planted in this case was last January.
1/15/2001
King Day. Interesting: TV was the engine for the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s—a national "morality teleplay" they called it. Football was also very big on TV at the time. [Since there were only a few channels, flipping through them would have exposed you to that programming]. Article on the web about how much web design is about lies. 1/15/2009 Bush farewell speech. Interesting how scripted speeches present the false Bush. In contrast with the final press conference, which was Bush "unplugged", this was essentially another contrived speech by Michael Gerson. If Bush had the intellect or the chutzpah that he exhibited a few days ago, we might have had a better president. 1/12/2003
Interesting: Theater and film metaphors applied to "war". The military often references a battle zone as a "theater", and now with the impending war with Iraq, the US has constructed " movie sets" where they can practice mock warfare. ("Stage", "arena" are other metaphors, as well "performance" and "surgical strike"--a medical, metaphor. (Interesting that the "war" metaphor is used in medicine). 1/12/2008 If indeed China is going through its own industrial revolution, it follows that the paradigm shift reshapes the culture to produce its own roaring 20s, liberal-conservative pendulum shifts, "the 60s" etc. (It's a natural by-product of growth and opportunity) The main difference is that in the West, the government has tried to stay out of the way. The 2000s: The age of glut, too much of little variety. 1/12/2010 Magnitude 7 earthquake hits Haiti. Strongest in 200 years. Diane Sawyer reporting directly from Afghanistan. This seems like the Vietnam War all over again, with the media (new media) letting people watch the war from their sofa. The drone attacks are easily done remotely, from bunkers in Nevada. Prediction: remote surveillance will be the "Tang" technology that is spun off from the current war, such that it will make it the eye in the sky that everyone knows is always on. 1/12/2011 Obama gives a cathartic speech (a national 'Sabbath') in Tucson to honor those involved in the shooting. I was watching a program prior to the event where historians were giving a summary of how former presidents had consoled the nation after horrific events. Apparently, it had started with Reagan after the Challenger disaster (media was more mature at that point—in the 50s not many people knew how to use TV as a communications medium—it was just another version of a radio). Reagan's speech was from the Oval Office, but Obama's speech seemed more like a political rally. 1/12/2016 We all know great artists who passed with little fanfare, but they didn't have the Midas Touch of David Bowie. Paul McCartney, even though a giant of music history might not have that same magic. 1/12/2022 Are individual instrumental parts tantamount to "writing"? Personally, Yes if it can be demonstrated that it has an effect on the success of the song. But at the same time, if someone gets an idea on a walk, writes down the chords and melody, it is their song. If someone else comes up with a counter-melody, you could technically call it a derivative work, and list the other writer on the new registration. Once the song is recorded and released, both would appear as writers, and you can set the percentage of ownership accordingly. #riff What would music have been like in the 1960s, say 1967, the Summer of Love, if music AI existed then? 1967-1969 was the pinnacle of spirituality in pop music, with the Finale the lunar landing. But it wasn't spiritual at all. It was something more precise: the US winning the moon race. The "spirituality" of the moment is more of a desire than a reality of what it was really about and yet lingers to this day.
AI is in some ways a desire for a Moon or Mars landing, and we read mystical things into it. But with the current AI, there's no spirituality in it at all--it's leaving the humans out of the loop. It's a form of self-deprecation--perhaps self-loathing. We've become so misanthropic that the music has to be equally deprecating, even to the level where machines have the ideas, and we're merely steering them. It now seems that having original ideas or even the desire to create something from an original idea is quaint and sentimental. There is a more compelling allure in artificial intelligence in that we're going to have a machine make our content for us and therefore there is no need for us to be intimately involved. We want things to be hands-off because we have gotten used to the precautions: It's safer to "glove and mask" in many things we do. Having ideas and manually shaping them is just this old thing that previous generations did: We don't necessarily have to be involved in idea creation. It is perhaps something that we want to avoid, to be post-modernist or do things with a feigned diffidence. So if ideas emanate from algorithms rather than from someone playing a guitar and singing a melody, we would never have had a David Bowie for example. 1/9/2022
Apparently, Clay Aiken of American Idol fame announced another bid for Congress in North Carolina. Reagan was about mixing politics with film acting. In 1999 when Jesse Ventura ran, it became the mixing of TV wrestling and politics. As I've listened to some of the Obama-Springsteen chats, I realized that politicians are really wanna-be rock stars. Politics always gets derailed by new media because media is the engine of popularity, or with guys, a penis pump. *** A "Dynaxiom Song" based on entry 1960: Everyone can be a revolution in themselves. Change your life and change the world. My first song of 2024, a silly Dada ditty. Somehow the first songs of the year are ditties, as was in 2022 with Paper Trampoline. An homage to both Brian and Kurt.
Do the do-si-do, do the mirror man, do the Boston crab, do the allemande.. |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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