Myth and Legend

Predictability yields excess as well as ennui.

As genre loses individually, it is re-framed in bombast, as no amount of subtlety can disguise the banal. Evidence of this failure of imagination is everywhere plentiful, and opposition to it, in terms of the art of sound, is the responsibility of both composer and listener.

Promoveo, promovi, promotum.

Increase

Expansion of experience enlarges the capacity for perceptual awareness.

As engagement with the art of sound grows, it becomes possible to move beyond personal bias into wider appreciation of diversity, discernment of fullness of expression in addition to proficiency of technique, and respect for the conceptual and philosophical as well as the affective and energetic.

The opening of the mind's eye and inner ear of imagination heralds the arrival of what is yet to be.

Sound and Reasoning

The art of listening recognizes beauty in a combination of elements, including thought and feeling as well as environmental acoustical processes and properties.

Moving through the public square the listener encounters myriad sonic atmospheres, some static and confined to particular areas, others relatively unfettered, and all perceived within the dynamic of the listener's activities. Within the personal environment, the listener may exercise greater influence over the listening experience, yet various aspects of the quality of sound, as well as movement within the more intimate setting, similarly engage the mind and emotions.

If the composer's aims are finely delineated and artistic sound works, it is absolutely essential to give consideration to the perceptivity, desirable state of mind, and consciousness of the potential listener with the same attention given to that of the fabrication of the creative auditory environment.

Continuance

Within the atmosphere, the listener moves and participates.

Giving attention to sound means fully experiencing its effects, which may evoke emotions, ideas, reflection, and reverie.  The challenge for the composer is to bring about and sustain these effects in ways that enhance, rather than dominate consciousness, providing listeners a mood of equanimity as well as heightened sensory awareness.

Movement, Inward and Outward

Sound events link perception to memory.

Every element of experience contributes to intellectual and emotional response, and every individual completes a unique perspective within the listening experience.

Like the musician, the composer may choose to project and interpret feeling and attitude; even so, it is possible, on the other hand, to encompass, through reason, art, and act, a worldview to engage and contemplate.

Shadings II

Perception ignites idea.

Idea and action converge.

The idea is to capture the atmosphere of an event, real or imaginary, and give it form through sound that represents the content of that aural setting, the diversity of its sonic elements, and the dynamic manner in which it enters the listener's awareness. In terms of action, aesthetic choices applied to design, structure, and manipulation of sound technology and production are brought to bear in the creation of the total effect of the work.

Ambiguity

Perceptions are identified in the context of knowledge and experience.

It is the sound of the uncanny that mystifies; it seizes imagination and alters perspectives in ways the familiar, that is to say the musically generic and exceedingly common, can not.

Sustain

Respect for consciousness and being demands the transcendence of mundane attachments.

The arts do not exist to serve vanity or populist politics.  With vision, observe widely, feel deeply, express fully; with any media, elevate virtue and exalt vitality in gesture. With sound, particularly, convey perceptivity and clarity through tone, and give voice to the inexpressible.

Manner and the Thing Done

Observe, in the course of events, those things that are constant and those that are impermanent.

Custom and culture inform the arts, but the artist determines the extent to which their pressures influence the work of a lifetime.

Conditions for Perceptivity

Understanding, intuition, reason, perception, action.

Seeking virtue, observe the vitality of the virtuous, constantly enduring.  These are the arts that expand, fill, and elevate consciousness with idea, feeling, spirit, and ideal.

Thin Air

All that will be arises from all that came before.

It is foresight that envisions and creates the leading edge of theory and practice, called, in the arts, the avant-garde.  Yet regardless of perspective, it does not exist without foundation.  Eliot's poetry evokes by allusion as well as by juxtaposition; William Burroughs' fragmentary prose delineates classic themes of human conflict through the imagery of surrealistic film noir.  Andy Warhol's visual art frames a modern world view while encompassing artistic expressions of time past.  The unique experimental and ambient recordings of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno owe as much or more to the unexpected and under-appreciated minimalist response to atonality in classical music as to the history of pop and rock music.

Progress cannot allow itself to be bound and gagged by subjection to immediacy, or mere novelty, any more than by false sentimentality or nostalgia.

Horizon Lines

In the wake of dynamic changes in cultural perspective, obsolete ideas are abandoned.

At the forefront of such changes, understanding depends upon foresight; risks are taken, predictive analysis and experimentation are implemented, and clarity of reason yields possibilities.

Like any artist, the composer must weigh the known against the unknown, and act accordingly.  To do less is to act foolishly in a realm fraught with unintended consequences and, ultimately, failure. 

Nonetheless, to choose wisely is to illuminate, through vision as well as sound.

Design and Intent

The arts inform as well as entertain, and diverse media lend themselves to various purposes.

While there is nothing unusual about music as an enhancement to contemplative or introspective experience, its value and function as such is not as clearly evident as its roles in popular listening diversion, dance, or even in the contexts of religion and spirituality.  

As one may become lost in thought, so it is possible for sound to displace the ego and direct the attention towards a consciousness of things greater than oneself; and thus listener and composer aspire and strive together.

Luminosity of Sound

Consider the imaginative moment, when the creative idea takes form and begins its progress to expression.

Inspiration and intuition take hold, the burden of the temporal and impermanent is cast off; thought unites with action to bring a perspective into being that may be shared with anyone.

The peculiar art of sound is a contemplative one, and unlike music that only serves, for the most part, as cultural entertainment, it exists to elevate and expand the consciousness of both composer and listener through insight and the aesthetic experience.

Setting and Story

All forms of imagery travel with the imagination.

Where the mind reaches, so does narrative and sound.  Every event brings forth music shaped by the surroundings and their myriad elements, whether dramatic or subtle, while the merest moment holds an overabundance of sonic meaning.

Sense, Mind, Knowing

Life as it is experienced is beyond its representations.

The best of its representations make that clearly understood.

Tone and Temperament

Reach the deep.

When extending perception outwardly or contemplating consciousness inwardly, follow the sounds of life wherever they lead. 

Moon Rising, Approaching Shadows

The art of metaphor speaks through aural imagery as it does through verbal imagery.

Fix moments to sounds within them:  Pacific sunset, canyon rim, pine woods in autumn rain, eclipse over Maryland, subway in Budapest, dim and foggy night through a window. These are the sounds of blood, bone, nerve and consciousness, discovered through instrument and studio, experience and the inner ear. Brought into being, they emerge, converge, and are scattered, their meanings to be formed again in every listening setting.

Regarding the Experimental

Identify the diverse sounds encountered in the routine order of the day; observe tone, duration, and patterns over extended periods.

Consider what music would be like if, rather than existing as an expression of idea and emotion, its origins were in the re-creations of atmospheres through a conscious stylization of perceived auditory phenomena.

Unstopping

Superficially, art is omnipresent.

But art that inspires vision, and sounds that evoke the unheard, will be nonetheless, and will be unexpected.