Tradition and the Modern

Creative impulse intersects with past expression in terms of universality and the permanent things.

These permanent things retain their vigor and value beyond temporal boundaries. They are the ideas and values reflecting self-evident good in all cultures, and while time may alter their expression over generations, it does not erase them.

Every work of every composer and artist reveals a raw measurement of what they know against the vastness of what they do not know.  In the fullness of time, things that cannot now be perceived will become manifest, yielding more to be imagined.

Placing Noise at a Distance

Choose to listen.

This apparently simple suggestion is fraught with absurd complexity and indecision, neither of which is worthy of comment.  Suffice it to say that one should refuse to allow oneself to be subjected to the meaningless and contemptible, making time instead for those things of aesthetic value that reflect the virtues of beauty and moral reason.

Revolt

Unequivocally, the arts propel culture.

Media and its delivery systems are mere conveyances.  It is content that imparts the richness of human experience, or paucity thereof.

The artist must strive for the heights of consciousness and refinement of vision, indifferent to success or failure, else, even in the prime of age, suffocate in a miasma of subjection to immediacy, the ever-present puerility of mediocrity.

Painting with Sound

The setting begins in a silent way.

But the canvas is never completely blank.  Experience and reason suggest mood; tone color forms, brightens and shades the atmosphere; patterns move within limits, as do sound perceptions altered by movement.  Aural events emerge, evolve, and disperse over the course of the work, one of aural imagery, emotion, and imagination, enhanced by the individuality of the composer's palette and the listener's state of mind.

Without Expectations

Bring perception of the uncanny into being.

Combine sounds and the settings each suggests-- beach arcade, distant desert, and the breeze down an antique hallway, for example.  Separately they are heard and known; yet together they mingle to evoke a sense of simultaneous strangeness and familiarity.

While the mundane, that is to say, the generic, is instantly recognized, that which is not easily grasped awakens a sense of awe, and with it, curiosity and questions.

The way of the artist is to move in such directions.

The Moment and the Contemplative

The inner ear captures meaning and aural perception, absorbing these as knowledge and memory.

Reflection yields creativity, in both art and life; it enlivens and elevates the sensibilities of listener and composer alike.

Works in Development

The processes of perception, sound, and art are a constant with the composer.

Every engagement with the work calls for refinement, and every moment of understanding requires patience, moral reason, intuition, and clarity of consciousness.  There is neither gain nor loss, only the expansion and persistence of change.