Ambiguity

Perceptions are identified in the context of knowledge and experience.

It is the sound of the uncanny that mystifies; it seizes imagination and alters perspectives in ways the familiar, that is to say the musically generic and exceedingly common, can not.

Sustain

Respect for consciousness and being demands the transcendence of mundane attachments.

The arts do not exist to serve vanity or populist politics.  With vision, observe widely, feel deeply, express fully; with any media, elevate virtue and exalt vitality in gesture. With sound, particularly, convey perceptivity and clarity through tone, and give voice to the inexpressible.

Manner and the Thing Done

Observe, in the course of events, those things that are constant and those that are impermanent.

Custom and culture inform the arts, but the artist determines the extent to which their pressures influence the work of a lifetime.

Conditions for Perceptivity

Understanding, intuition, reason, perception, action.

Seeking virtue, observe the vitality of the virtuous, constantly enduring.  These are the arts that expand, fill, and elevate consciousness with idea, feeling, spirit, and ideal.

Thin Air

All that will be arises from all that came before.

It is foresight that envisions and creates the leading edge of theory and practice, called, in the arts, the avant-garde.  Yet regardless of perspective, it does not exist without foundation.  Eliot's poetry evokes by allusion as well as by juxtaposition; William Burroughs' fragmentary prose delineates classic themes of human conflict through the imagery of surrealistic film noir.  Andy Warhol's visual art frames a modern world view while encompassing artistic expressions of time past.  The unique experimental and ambient recordings of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno owe as much or more to the unexpected and under-appreciated minimalist response to atonality in classical music as to the history of pop and rock music.

Progress cannot allow itself to be bound and gagged by subjection to immediacy, or mere novelty, any more than by false sentimentality or nostalgia.

Horizon Lines

In the wake of dynamic changes in cultural perspective, obsolete ideas are abandoned.

At the forefront of such changes, understanding depends upon foresight; risks are taken, predictive analysis and experimentation are implemented, and clarity of reason yields possibilities.

Like any artist, the composer must weigh the known against the unknown, and act accordingly.  To do less is to act foolishly in a realm fraught with unintended consequences and, ultimately, failure. 

Nonetheless, to choose wisely is to illuminate, through vision as well as sound.

Design and Intent

The arts inform as well as entertain, and diverse media lend themselves to various purposes.

While there is nothing unusual about music as an enhancement to contemplative or introspective experience, its value and function as such is not as clearly evident as its roles in popular listening diversion, dance, or even in the contexts of religion and spirituality.  

As one may become lost in thought, so it is possible for sound to displace the ego and direct the attention towards a consciousness of things greater than oneself; and thus listener and composer aspire and strive together.