Meanings, Objects, Actions

Expect the invention of new forms.

It is not necessary to abandon the old forms, and unwise to act as if the historical forces that shaped them no longer exist.  One must be prepared for the unexpected, take the measure of possibilities as they emerge, and create according to the means afforded reason. Regardless of the risks of failure, (and there will be many), the future will be come into being, renewed by perception and forged with daring, integrity, and sweat.

Sound and Appearances

Listening implies expectations, usually emotional and often motivated by impulse.

But there are other ways to listen, just as there are other ways to compose with sound.

Begin with reason; explore the contemplative and subtle, the objective atmospheres, as opposed to the common inventions of subjective imagination.

Critical Awareness

The brain is not the mind, any more than the organ of listening is the inner ear.

Studies conducted at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 2014 concluded that large numbers of people preferred pain, specifically an electric shock, to being alone with their thoughts.

Such conditions of mind, culturally reinforced, as they are, by everything that stigmatizes mysticism, spirituality, and the uncanny, are unnatural, even dangerous. Clearly, what is called transcendental vision, and even the simple daydream, reflect human perceptions and potentials, and not abnormal, morbid realities.

In contrast, sound art composed to enhance listening imagination can evoke the contemplative states, as described by Boethius, that illuminate consciousness and unburden perspective.

The composer will do well to remember the essential qualities and purposes of art, and especially their incalculable value to humanity.

Atmospheres d'art

These compositions evoke undistracted, extended, contemplative moments.

With sound, create the double, or mirror image, of auditory environmental settings and events.

Arc of Time

Events go unnoticed.

The brain filters perceptions, yet is influenced by focus and intent.  It becomes necessary to develop awareness by learning to perceive what is ignored in the everyday scheme of things.  This changes the nature of experience, opening the mind's eye and the inner ear.

Then the world represented by the artist is clarified in seeing, visualizing, listening, and by composition, whether with sound or the written word.  What once dominated is at a distance, and what seemed like a lifetime is a moment.

Stand By

Age of technocracy.

Unchecked, no curiosity or purpose, no belief in something greater, no aesthetic vision, no concept of the mystical or the uncanny.  And it falls to the artist to say: this is not living, not experience. No.

Unawareness and its Opposite

Intense focus and unnatural importance are attached to inconsequential events, people, and things.

One chooses aesthetic purpose, rather than meaningless cultural and social perspectives that focus on mundane diversions, not to disengage from experience, but to embrace reality.