Detachment

Approach to creative action, whether inspired or contrived, concerns expression and representation.

Decisions regarding means and methods can be considered in terms of  "creating a reality", and by doing so, exploring what reality is and what it means. 

Ears to Hear

In the popular imagination, entertainment and diversion laden with visuals increasingly obscures direct personal experience.

The "pop mind" is necessarily one that is formed and focused through collective ideas, imagery, and subjection to immediacy, an authoritarian mass conformity of attention. Clearly, such a burden upon consciousness degrades contemplative reflection and gives rise to a host of social issues caused by mental and emotional impediments to existential freedom.

Neither engagement nor disengagement is the way of the artist. It is the integrity of the creative work that is the essential element.

Transmission VIII

All communications take place in the context of environment.

Culture, society, circumstance, and time cannot be set aside in order to convey meaning, regardless of the extent of its significance.  This is a fact of life that is no less true in the arts.

Even so, there remain expressions that cannot be brought into being under the burden of intellectual compromise, if artistic principles are are to have any value at all.  

Immensity

The greatest of rhythms are, in their depth, range, and temporal scope, beyond sensory experience.

Reality on this scale is comprehensible only in the abstract, yet it may be suggested through expressive art.

Pursuit

To know with the senses is to participate in the human experience.

Commitment to vision is commitment to audience.

Emergence, Convergence, and Dispersal

Historically, music sounds nothing like auditory phenomena in the world at large.

Rather than seeking to express the personal, I compose and create by listening to the surroundings, considering the various aural impressions within, then finding and combining sounds that re-imagine, reflect, and represent the experience.

Plainness and Intricacy

Find nature, find being.  This is simplicity.

But this presupposes "nature" to be outside awareness. It is not. Such an idea is, like many, only a delusion of subjectivity. Birds and wildlife enter and cross the grounds; outside the pull of the Earth's gravity, one is weightless. The extent to which analysis has meaning is valuable, and beyond that, it is a pointless exercise, an obstacle to discernment.  To lose consciousness of one's true nature is a failure of rationality.

Eliminate the excessive; broaden the focus, extend the senses, and understanding follows.

The composer would do well to begin creative endeavors with this thought in mind: out of the simple evolves the complex, yet complexity expands into simplicity.