Riffs

If music is architecture, the decoration on the exterior is what's now holding it up. Sound itself is the structure.

I never like looking at one thing--especially art on screens.

Thoughts on two somewhat connected books:

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Free_World/rrziDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World/xB2ZDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Imagination is a powerful tool, a sixth sense, a weapon. We must be careful how we use it, in life as on stage or screen https://aeon.co/essays/imagination-is-the-sixth-sense-be-careful-how-you-use-it

In our current climate of partisan paranoia, we’ve all ramped up imaginative demonisation of the other. This leaves us vulnerable to dark imaginings. The Chinese American philosophical geographer Yi-Fu Tuan states it plainly in his book Landscapes of Fear (2013): ‘If we had less imagination, we would feel more secure.’ Yes, there are real threats and enemies out there, but not as many as our active imagination produces. Alas, we can’t stop fantasticating if it’s the root of human cognition, and we wouldn’t want to give it up if we could. But can we turn that awesome power of imagination toward humanising ourselves and others?

Disaster movies

Bridge metaphors are always useful in the creative process, and in songwriting, literally useful.

In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next.

If you work in more than one discipline, you'll have to problem-solve in all of them.

My thoughts on this book.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/They_Are_Already_Here/lvUPzgEACAAJ?hl=en

"People I've interviewed have called UFOs various versions of the ultimate problem to solve. Many of them don't believe UFOs, a term that just means something in the sky that the viewer can't understand and we're forged in alien furnaces, but they do believe these sites are something. Maybe there's something in our heads. Maybe there's a secret military craft. Misinterpreted planets, blimps, wavering stars, atmospheric phenomena. Swamp gas. Our collective ignorance all of the above organized into sky lights. But whatever they are or are not, people undoubtedly see these things that they can explain, talk about them, write about them, wonder about them. Sometimes people sing about them. Plenty have wrote lyrics about UFOs such as Ella Fitzgerald, two little men in a flying saucer."

As a continuation of the "Containers of Music" idea, I'm revisiting recorded music's intimate connection with cinema, and how it encodes memory.

If we think about improvisation as a type of control, we can increase or decrease improvisation as if it were a knob or slider. If we define a range of possibilities, these can be assigned to values, 0-100, for example. Turning up the volume of the improvisation means it's looser, turning it down makes it more scored/orchestrated. What we want ideally is arounf 45-55%