December 6ths (Wright Angles)

12/6/1999

At studio: Made disc of drum loops for Acid program. My fear is that this might lead to the “band in a box”, “music by numbers” approach. As technology makes it easier to make music by simply cutting and pasting sound files, it puts musicians who have studied and played music manually in a precarious position. While the cut and paste approach is a legitimate way of communicating a musical idea, there is a danger of slipping into artless amateurism. When things become too easy to make, as opposed to easy because of a conscious decision, you sacrifice a piece of the mind’s ability to visualize and follow through on seed ideas. As a composer, I don't want people to say he sold out to cheap prefabricated ideas.

[12/6/2024: 25 years later we have bands-in-a-box with AI music. One could see how selling out could be easy if the industry fully embraces AI. The culprit might be the idea of convenience: why scrub clothes on a rock by a river when an appliance had been invented? More than ever, moral hazards lurk around every corner when you're relying too much on technology. While I like listening to the songs that AI churns it's never what I would do. Artists have tough decisions to make, but that's what you want. You don't want the easy  way all the time. If you can have a completed song in an hour--with lyrics--and a mixed and mastered album in a day, what else is there to do but churn out more? Artists have to find the art, not just make it.Ask yourself after making something with AI: how is it that I did that?]

12/6/2002

I was in a store and they were playing a Christmas song to a Motown beat and I found that I could sing “You can’t hurry love” against it and fit in perfect counterpoint. 

What I thought was interesting was that eventually, people started to listen to lyrics, even years after hearing it for the first time. It adds another dimension to the whole listening experience.

I heard some Quranic verse set Arabic music on the radio that they were playing for Ramadan. It was beautiful. But what was its message, and how were people interpreting the message, or were they listening to the words at all? Sometimes just the cadence of music sends a clear message, e.g. Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie.

[Again, relates to the idea that it’s the music that washes over us first and we don’t always tune into the words, but if the words are coming first, the music is a result of them. The best songs tend to meet in the center of that process collectively. The nature of pop music is that if it’s in the same key and tempo you could superimpose them. I’ve always loved the idea of these kinds of “context collisions” as a form of synchronicity].

12/6/2004

Warm, 52 degrees 

Massive fire on 29th floor of 135 South LaSalle. Apparently, they had a venerated photography collection that was lost.

12/6/2015

“Wright Angles”. The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, looking northwest. Since I like a very high contrast image, I darkened the shadows and dodged the highlights in the upstairs window.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12/6/2023

Warm, 52 degrees