Saturday, September 19, 2015

Unmoved and Unmoving

The imagination of the individual does not fail.


Cultural imagination, when it fails, is replaced by artifice and contrivance.

This failure is the direct result of the manipulation of media through which public acceptance of the superficial over the substantive is engineered by those with vested interests in "artistic productions".

The individual artist perseveres, nonetheless, in solitude, while the culture is the worse for it.

And those who are predisposed to equate individuality with the "evils" of conservatism are in the worst, that is to say, the most ignorant and benighted, cultural straits of all.

Friday, September 18, 2015

L'Air du Temps

Sound imagery may mean more, or less, than it suggests.


Neither complexity nor simplicity imply merit in themselves.  What matters to listener and composer alike, upon final reflection, is total effect.  Therein lies balance, expansion, and elevation.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

There Are No Terms

Every artistic potential that becomes real does so because of choice and action.


Neither cultural attitudes nor the "preparedness" of "the public" can stop the artist. There is one thing of importance, and one thing only: the work.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Cultural Drift and Correction of Course

The convergence of cultural messages demands acceptance of the status quo.


One can expect nothing more from mass media, academia, and other purveyors of ideological cant.

Meaning is found through arduous exercise of reason and insight. Anything less is simply surrender to false appearances, error, and mediocrity.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Sources, Origins

Search memory, and aural impressions will reveal themselves.


These are unconscious sensory images, taken from the course of daily events and reaching back across the gulf of experience and consciousness to recognition of first and primal sound settings.

Some will call it impossible to realize such impressions in musical form.

The artist as composer will say music is not the sonic form by which these atmospheres may be brought into being.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Istigkeit

Witness the world in motion.


If the goal is to express the aesthetic, contemplative moment, the composer must hear what the visual artist sees, in both objective reality and in the inner ear of imagination.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Identity, Image, and Audacity

Typically, diversion and dance come to mind when discussing the purposes of music.


Further consideration suggests the use of music in ceremony and ritual, and for artistic expression of emotion and ideas. Enhancement of concentration and meditative focus, refinement of perception and the reinforcement of contemplative states of mind and being, however, are of far greater importance to those who practice these ways of engagement with reality through expansion of consciousness.

Certainly this is the position of one who composes works in sound to such ends as these.