Structure and Essence

Vibrations along a spider's web might be measured, quantified, and reproduced.

Or, such phenomena, among others in boundless variety, might be imagined, and given form in musical compositions.   

Retention of Image

Listen within memory.

Seized in the moment, sensory impressions remain over time and distance.

Summon the total effect through idea, emotion, state of mind, and artistic medium.

Heightened Clarity

Acute observation is critical to to the manipulation of ideas as well as artistic media.  Perceptions combine, patterns emerge, and possibilities suggest themselves to those who extend the reach of their understanding and awareness.

While the sciences require accuracy and precision, the arts call for honesty and reflection.  Both order and arrange information and concepts by methods that challenge and transform their meanings with the intent of illuminating connections and realizing possibilities. 

Given their differences, the rigor of science and the imaginative intensity of the arts also include processes involving uncertainty and risk.  Yet every outcome, whether it reaches a desirable conclusion or not, is a refinement of vision.

Passages

Auditory perception functions on primary and secondary levels of awareness.

Consider the nature of listening as active, and primary, and hearing may be regarded as passive, or secondary in character.  The former implies focus on specifics, the latter suggests generalized sensory involvement with the whole of the environment.  Both are natural experiences of varying intensities.

From a composer's perspective it is clear that music and musical perceptions are centered on the act of listening, in ways that dominate the attention, while the function of hearing is of no particular moment in the course of a performance or recording.

Transformation ambient music, in contrast, like ambient music in its original sense, is designed to accommodate both levels of engagement with sound, with the composer taking an active, if reserved, role in the arrangement and production of the works. 

Atmospherics. Permutations.

Change is a constant throughout diverse environments, whether sudden and bold in nature or subtle, unobtrusive, or mysterious.

Transformation ambient music, that is, ambient music manipulated by the composer's intent, may capture the essential aural qualities of these nuanced changes and contrasts in the context of musical atmospheres, and, in doing so, conjure both attractive sound environments and settings conducive to reflective thought.

These concepts and processes may appear to be somewhat abstract, but the resulting works are anything but cold and cerebral, reflecting sound phenomena as they are experienced in the course of everyday life, yet given musical and artistic forms.

Line, Curve, Motion, Time

Regard like types of imagery in visual, verbal, and auditory modes.

Each appeals to the senses, reflecting color, shape, sound, texture and representations of experience.  In juxtaposition, each suggests the others in complementary nature.

Who desires this understanding will apprehend it in its simplicity; who contemplates it as such will breathe deeply of its complexities.

The future makes its presence felt in the past as well as in the moment.

Minimal, Singular

Refer to Poe.  Every word contributes to desired total effect; those failing to do so must be excised.

Originality is more often a matter of removing, rather than adding content.  With sounds, one also manipulates imagery in the way of words, as connections to the imagination. 

Through ideas, juxtapositions, archetypes, emotions, tones, that is to say, all the systems and structures in the continuum of creative force, visions conveyed become visions inspired.

Shapes in Near Distance

In the moment, or now, if you prefer, and over the course of time, ideas and their expressions retain their force.

Certain perspectives have for centuries retained their visionary nature, while others, apparently revolutionary at first bloom, are ultimately revealed to be base, absurd, pointless, or worse.

Time past and time future, as revealed in the arts, are ever laden with possibilities.

Reason and Emotion

Impressions lend themselves to both sentiment and calculation.

Encountering the total effect of a work, the observer or listener will reference personal sensibilities as well.  This may involve emotional excitement or detatchment, intellectual interpretation, and varying degrees of perceptivity.

The composer-- or poet, musician, painter, sculptor, dancer, performer-- conveys thought and feeling to the medium of expression and brings into being a representation of experience, and by such means innumerable connections are made possible in the transmission of culture.

Sound and Word, Vision and Belief

Art moves inexorably in the direction of philosophy.

As reality is expressed, so it must be lived.

Heightened Awareness

Acutely developed senses detect subtle variations in the external world, including those reflecting nuance of mood.

As music for ceremony and ritual of various forms increases a sense of community, so music designed to enhance contemplative states may heighten perception and elevate consciousness.

Patterns, Movements, Changes

Sounds, perspectives, and perceptions change when moving through diverse environments.

One becomes more highly aware of the auditory landscape, more acutely focused upon subtle alterations in the atmosphere.  Organization and connectivity become apparent.  Sounds are differentiated according to various qualities of pitch, tone, meaning, and repetition. 

Among recurrences of the mundane and expected, the beautiful and the strange emerge with the clarity of lucid dreaming.   Such as these are the elements to capture and combine in composition.

Temporal Synthesis

Historical forces shape present and future perspectives, attitudes, and events.

In terms of recording technology, sound formats no longer limit the length of compositions in any significant way.  Works may be brought into being that expand and evolve over a substantial course of time, making changes in perspective as to the duration of musical pieces and the desirability of extended listening (and immersion in sound environments) inevitable.

Sound and time are aspects of the total effect of an aural composition, both contributing to meaning through experience and perception.  Black Mountain School compositions and recordings are designed to enhance atmospheres and produce conditions conducive to contemplative, aesthetically pleasing states of mind while being interesting in themselves in the way of ambient tone poems. 

The extended length of these works is a fundamental part of their nature, and of the listener's experience as well.

Music of the Twenty-First Century

Various forms of expression generate debate and sometimes confusion, not because of what they are, but because of the ways in which they are perceived.

The less one knows by way of reliable information or direct experience, the more narrow and limited one's perspective remains.  Definitions are inflexible.  Expression must be created to conform to specific tastes and genres.  All else is vague, alien, at best only tenuously real.

Equally untenable is the undiscriminating point of view.  An aesthetic sense, a sense of judgement and an appreciation of subtlety are characteristics of reason, self-knowledge, and regard for the arts and sciences as well.

The nature of reality is change, and the modern composer brings ideas and imagination to that reality.

Origins

Ideas retain vitality as individuals breathe life into them.

The effortless and shallow are always robust, while the deep and difficult are easily ignored, easily cast aside, and remain ever daunting.  Yet even as they lie still, distant, and dark, those laden with challenge are the beginnings of visions, and of things yet to be seen and heard.

Constructs

The received wisdom is that popular music is successful by virtue of public acceptance and approval, while "serious music" is appreciated by the highly (or moderately) cultivated intellectual as "art".

Like many conventional assumptions given to be fact, these represent vague notions and broad generalities that overlook the individuality of both listeners and artists.  Neither popularity nor academic credibility will overcome the judgements of history.

The artist is ever left to act upon possibilities-- nothing more, but nothing less.

Patterns, Densities, Clusters and Textures

Postulate music that emerges in combinations of sound as they take place in the natural and human environment.  Sounds of activity, of living creatures, voices, the elements and machines.

Mere noise is not the object, but aesthetic combinations of such sounds as are made by human volition and insight.  Executed in the manner of auditory events as they take place naturally, these combinations are outside the frame of reference associated with standard concepts of musical arrangements. 

An atmosphere is thus created that reflects the apprehension of sound phenomena encountered in the physical world while sketching territories of the imagination.

Converging Flux

It is music of a different shape, shade, and substance.

What is heard depends upon who is listening.

Contemplation

Immersed in sound environments one may experience states both introspective and contemplative, uniting thought, feeling, and perceptivity.

This is not the same as "listening to music" for relaxation, excitement, entertainment or diversion; neither is it a focus solely for meditation, or merely "aural wallpaper", an element of decor, though it may rightly have aspects of any of these at any given time.

Yet it is an aesthetic, or one might say an artistic experience, to be enjoyed in distinctive ways according to the tastes and sensibilities of listeners in a variety of situations.

It is always the sound of a journey through imagination.

Surroundings

Impossible to enumerate all the elements of a single glance, all the sounds scattered about through an hour's wandering.  Attempts to represent these impressions can only be speculative, and imaginative.

One may as easily ask, "Do I make art and music?  Or do they make me?"