Fundamental Vision

Every composer's work is predicated upon choices.

One need not make extraordinary personal efforts to keep the words and work of, say, John Cage, alive.  Technology will serve that purpose.

But how does one keep ideas alive?

By giving them form.

Originative Will

The independence of the creative imagination in inviolable.

The artist experiences, perceives, apprehends, chooses, and expresses.

All else is secondary to expression and total effect.

Displacement, Transformation

The unconscious mind conveys perception, emotion, and idea in symbolic forms.

These are the impressions of dreams and heightened states of consciousness, and may be at times absurd, portentous, and uncanny.

Artists who seek meaning will experience and express it in their chosen milieus, as will those only capable of meaninglessness.

Echo and Illusion

Not all sensory perceptions have clarity; not all artistic expressions convey an apprehension of the real.

Delusions persist about the nature of reality long after formative memories are forgotten.  Not all meaning is derived from material experience; abstract values are not scientifically measurable and quantifiable, but such things as honor and mercy exist, are perceived, understood, and comprise knowledge of life.  As conveyed through the visual arts, for instance, or through writing and poetry, music, and dance, moral reason is elevated.

To seek and express the ineffable with probity and lucidity is both philosophical challenge and artistic obligation for those who envision the unity of all things.

Listening with Care-- Pop and Other II

Many enjoy being constantly surrounded with music.

Others-- including numerous listeners, musicians, composers-- prefer to listen on their own terms.

Those in the latter group focus on sound differently and approach music consciously, for their own reasons.  Some have personal and emotional viewpoints, or listen contemplatively; the creative musician will often have an analytic ear for technique and style, the theorist for effect and insight.

While virtually everyone listens from time to time just for fun, it is the way of the artist to hear possibilities, to think ahead, and to reach for unique moments of perception and perspective.

Hearing, Not Hearing

In activity, following the motion of events, take notice of the limitations of perception.

Boundaries to sensory awareness are not always related to issues of concentration and distraction.

Consider lack of will, failure of intent, the self-absorbed mind and unrestrained emotions that cloud consciousness, given the changing conditions and flux of being common within everyday reality.

Every creative endeavor, whether in living well or in artistic expression, demands conscious, individual choice.

Déjà entendu

As memory and experience reference sound events in the context of immediate perception, a sense of ambiguity may arise.

Anticipation is confounded as expectations are defied by combinations of sounds and tones that imply familiarity yet go unrecognized.  This state of mind and emotion, merging the known and the utterly strange, evokes an awareness of the uncanny.

Such phenomena may endure until a sound or musical piece is recognized, whether within moments or over the course of years, and additionally in the form of sounds once experienced that are never again heard in the same way.