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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Material to Abstract

Sensory awareness confined to a limited palette grows dim and weakens.

For the artist as composer and listener there must be expansion of both experience and imagination.

The temporal, the mediocre, and the mundane do not represent alternatives, but the end of culture.

Range II

The integrity of the artist cannot abide by the status quo.

Established limits do not exist to be exploited for personal gain, but to be challenged by visions beyond their scope.

Open, Close, Open

Emerge into the real.

Express the good; act with right reason.  Do this in defiance of culture, and at personal cost.

Understand and come to grips with what is then revealed.

As Forge Demands Fire

Much is made, in contemporary terms, of the concept of progress.

But progress implies improvement.

Show me this improvement.  Reveal it, that I may believe it.

Otherwise it is only a word to obscure the consolidation of power of the status quo.  This much is plainly evident, everywhere, at all times.  Look and see directly.  Listen, and hear.

Resistance III

Neither oppression nor repression of the arts ever reach an end.

Whether imposed by historical traditions or through contemporary cultural imperatives, subjection to collectivist thinking in academic and political circles will always plague artists no less than historians and all those who strive for true representations of reality. The purpose is simple: to eliminate utterly the power and value of the individual.

And the artist is nothing if not an autonomous free agent.  Nothing more than a lackey, a bootlicker.

Evidence of this is plain and clear.  It is not hidden from sight; one need only look at it directly.

There is no end to it.  Yet even if there is no winning, there can be no surrender, or all-- and this means all that is essential to cultural reality itself-- is lost.

Miasma

Expression has meaning when it is fundamentally sound and well-reasoned.

A culture and society that conflates "revolution" and "art" will have neither.

Aural Tints and Reflections

Find sounds of light, of passing distances, of turning winds.

This is the sonic dynamic, representing the ebb and flow of life.

Invisible

Mass media directs mass mentality in every form.

This direction implies that attention is driven towards certain things and away from others. It is as true regarding the arts, especially those related to music, as it is for politics, culture, and everything else.

Hence, independent thought, and the independent artist, are equally essential to life, and rarely seen.

Spells

Those familiar with the cyclic nature of reality understand impermanence, gain, and loss.

History lends itself to foresight, science to progress, and the arts, to enlightenment, even more so than the philosophical perspectives with their degrees of specificity.  It is the individual whose senses are opened through artistic expression, and the individual who must grapple with the implications of the artistic work.

Setting and Psyche

Contemplative space is itself an artistic accomplishment, whether created or discovered.

Noise renders even the most comfortable and visually beautiful place squalid, burdened by intellectual and spiritual neglect.  Everyone has endured this, and it is far too common.

Composer and listener share common bonds, and first among them are goals of elevated experience.

Integrity of Potential

The arts survive.

Decline is a fact of culture.  Ideas originate, prevail, and find their final forms. The arts never reach a state of finality.  To be continually filled and continually emptied out is the nature of expression.

Culture Paradox

Observe the "information society".  Find knowledge ubiquitous, literacy merely functional.

When this plethora of information leads to the assumption that the possession of an internal fund of knowledge is unnecessary, the error is one of profound consequence. Consider only the implications of failed, archaic, totalitarian ideas impressed upon art, politics, and the social order because their outward appearances give the uninformed the specious impression of "novelty". Yet this is of very little moment in comparison to the mass abdication of critical reason it presupposes.

Thus the essential nature of the contemplative, and of atmospheric sound art to enhance reflection.

Wax, Wane

Attainment of intellectual expression is a goal and focus of art.  It is noble, and desirable.

This is because of lasting impact, the shaping of future events, and what might be called the transmission of cultural progress through evolving ideas.

As a perspective this is easily lost upon society, and the momentum of reason difficult to gain.

Observe, Then Question

At no time in human history has music so absolutely saturated culture.

Thus it is taken for granted, devalued, viewed as a "given", without consideration for the labor of the trained musician or the intellectual rigor demanded of the composer, arranger, and songwriter, who are themselves considered marginal figures.