Walk / Don't Walk

For artist as composer, choice is change involving gain and loss.

Essentially, gain and loss cannot be issues:  each sound will exist in juxtapositions of similarity and contrast, and each note, tone, line, or movement will alter the listening experience.  The total effect, therefore, is the prime consideration, and all choices and changes must contribute to that outcome, much in the same way as do each of the painter's strokes on canvas.

After Cage

Action without effort is a little understood virtue.

It remains a rarity in the composition of sounds.  It creates neither a musical event nor a concrete presentation of art, but rather formless dimensions of aural perception intersecting being.

The Air of Creation

Art does not cease to exist because it ceases to be valued and supported.

Creative expression is a foundational element of culture and civilization.  It bridges past, present, and future time.  There have been periods, recorded throughout history, when the arts of certain societies were diminished, repressed, looted, and devalued.

Without exception, these serve as warnings.

Imaginative Probity, Elevation and Decline

Perspective, like the arts, both engages and endures cultural change.

The artist does not steal fire from the gods to see it snuffed out, whether by thieves or princes.

Event, Percipience

Listening to sounds in a setting, consider what happened before and what is to come.

To observe is to know circumstance, and what can and can not be understood, or imagined.

The manifestation of mystery begins before the artist appears and continues ever afterwards.

Force and Substance

In art, as in life, emptiness will be filled.

As the novelist and film-maker envision narratives, as the visual artist sees concepts, so does the composer hear what approaches and is revealed in the imagination.  The creative insight must be brought into being.

Mass Media and Mass Mind

The artist as composer directs perceptions beyond appearances of things.

Modernity asserts the virtue of autonomous perspective, but rarely is it developed.

As if everything is known. As if there can be no more curiosity, no more questions or mysteries.