Regard and Response

Experience of art entails engagement with its scope, content, detail, and meaning.

Perception encompasses wide ranges of attention, from general awareness to intense focus. For the artist as composer, this occasions a broad range of colors from the palette of sounds, transformative manipulation of diverse sonic elements, and designs to beguile the discriminating listener, one who has grown increasingly bored with bombast and orhwurm.

Presences

Sounds communicate the essences of reality.

Consciousness, perspective, sensory impressions, ideas, and emotions informed by sounds convey, in turn, experiences to the individual and the culture at large.  Always in flux, the myriad attributes of these experiences, both personal and social, reflect states of being and of civilization as well. For the artist as composer, every contribution is one of practically unlimited meaning,

Artificiality and Detachment

Pop culture, like any other, has periods of vitality and decline. Historically, prolonged decline foreshadows extensive change.

Conversely, at a distance from the vicissitudes of popular attention, music composed to enhance clarity of perception engages emotional balance and intellectual vigor.

Terra Incognita

Think in linear terms and move accordingly.

Predictability has its virtues, depending on outcomes and goals.  Methodologies and techniques, for example, are crafted to assure specific outcomes that can be reproduced.

If, on the other hand, it is necessary to set aside the given in order to reveal unknown possibilities, there will be no advancement without acceptance of risk, and linear thought is an obstacle to be overcome.  This is a choice among many the artist must make in pursuit of aesthetic integrity.

Projection of Imagining

Somewhere in time past, something is happening that directly impacts the moment now.

Even in the moment now, it can be heard in time future, with the will to listen to the inner ear.

Visual Sounds, Sonic Symbols

Imagery shares like qualities in visual and aural forms.

Subtlety, color, brightness, shading, and tone quality are important to both visual and auditory perception, enhancing clarity of understanding and experience of life as well as art.

Such appreciation cannot be overemphasized; to recognize and absorb aesthetic beauty is essentially human, and to lose sense of it tends toward individual and cultural decline.

Futurity: Evolving Perspectives

Music does not exhaust its essential qualities, but these may become superfluous to the discriminating listener.

But beyond the essential components-- instrumentation, tempo, rhythm, melody, harmony, percussion-- the listener no longer hears what can be called music, but undefined sounds in indeterminate forms.

As nothing more than inarticulate outbursts, such sounds are of no consequence.

Wrought with aesthetic purpose, however, they are of far-reaching impact and will ultimately have profound significance, rendering what is now the common fare obsolete.