Sonic Sensibilities

The sounds of cultural life reveal both the inner and outer worlds.

Society and the individual create and move according to rhythms and patterns, some common and predictable, others obscure. The wise observer and participant understands the qualities of stillness and equanimity as also essential, being moderating and balancing forces.

These are conditions the composer and listener may directly influence in the course of events, both being percipients.

Other Dimensions

Aesthetic sound art is as accessible as listening, and hearing.

The composer may experiment, theorize, and speculate, exploring the range of possible aural forms while developing individual perspectives and methods over the course of decades.  Regardless, if the purpose and effect is that of the creation of the good and the beautiful, there can simply be no greater meaning than the integrity of work itself.

Each listening experience is its own.

Environmental Processes and Patterns

All atmospheres yield unique elements.

Rambling farmhouse surrounded by fields of broomstraw, ship's flight deck, midnight forest and urban marketplace all host sonic events that may soothe, shock, amuse, puzzle, or generate any number of responses in the listener's consciousness.

Separate, combine, juxtapose, evolve: these strategies and tactics create auditory imagery in the crucible of the inner ear, to be brought into being through the instrument of the studio using both primitive and highly technological sound production sources.

Expression into Experiences

Art begins with a percipient, then evolves through myriad processes to engages others' awareness.

For the composer, the art of sound offers the peculiar qualities of precisely conveying sound imagery while, paradoxically, providing the listener with an aural field of experiences open to a broad range of associations, ideas, and emotions, with which the composer cannot possibly be aware.

As listener, the composer enters the same field of sounds and becomes equally engaged, at times in unexpected and revealing ways.

Expansion

There is always the impulse to narrow perception of objects and events to superficial, subjective definitions.

Recognize, be receptive, or reject outright. But this is not aesthetic discrimination, the discernment of expression and meaning. For the listener, and composer as well, it is a matter of thought as well as experience. Mere openness or close-mindedness is not enough to contend with the complexities of reality and appearances, and is self-defeating.

To extend one's reach toward immersion in the good and the beautiful is to elevate awareness of the unity of being.

Mind and World at Large

Aesthetic pleasure is a function of intellect, feeling, and outwardly-directed perception.

Likewise, experience, heart, and mind inform introspection and reflection. The composer would do well whose works offer enhancements to both the inner and outer worlds of understanding.

There is no debate that these are faculties of a higher order than those of impulse and egocentric motivation, yet fullness of participation in human events is often reduced to superficiality and gross simplicity, and just as often this is the outcome of personal choice.

It is not the purpose of art to make wider, deeper experience effortless, but to make it possible.

Comparative Sound Structures

Music per se is brought into being in varied contexts of relationship to forms and formulas.

Rather than work in terms of standard methodologies and genre stylings, I develop and arrange aural compositions proportioned to those sounds occurring over the course of events in diverse natural and cultural environments.  Within these limitations atmospheres arise as reflections of real-world auditory phenomena.

Primal

Know sounds, distances, origins, enigmas.

Feel, and convey as percipient, sensation's tone and potentiality as living atmosphere.

Point and Overview

Awash in the trivial, one seeks a more fortifying perspective.

Transcendence of the mundane is not effortless.  One does not simply withdraw from something, but one withdraws to something else.  Seek the sounds of permanence, the sounds of the essences of things. There find reflections of the nature of reality in its abundance.

Ease of Knowing

Approach the perception of sound as a mystery to be revealed.

Mysterious is the expression of being, and everything it communicates.

Tone and Spirit

Out of surroundings, impressions.

Out of impressions, meaning. The objective and subjective combine; sounds emerge, and are directed to total effect.  Within aesthetic beauty, find recognition, perception of atmospheres, and in moments, strangeness, the uncanny.

Listening Range

Elevation of consciousness and the sensory perceptions are intimately linked.

But heightened awareness is dependent upon the spiritual faculties, those of reason and free will. If it is desirable to fully engage reality and enhance life and living, the parameters of one's understanding must be challenged and extended.  One does not simply say, "I will be more perceptive", and attain anything without knowledge and intent.

Clarity in thought and action is a choice, requiring reading the difficult works, grappling with greater ideas, contending with opinion and theory, and daring to listen, with the inner ear, beyond the given.

Once, Now: Modernism

Art does not change; perspectives do.

Those who fail to understand the modern lose connectivity to the origins and impulses of art.

The artist extends the reach of culture, as opposed to attempting to annihilate its aspects of meaning and permanence, those abstract elements of historical imagination clearly present in contemporary reality.

Aural Illuminations

Sound and setting contribute to sensory experience, state of mind, and emotional attitude.

Though artist and composer may strive for detachment and objectivity, the individual and personal will inevitably be part of process and outcome.  Reflections of the self will be brought to light with the work, yet they need not be motivation or focus of the work's tone and total effect.

Culture and Communication

The composer must be committed to the art and to the listener.

The listener begins with commitment to the art, with its cultural as well as personal connections. This is the engagement the composer shares.  One does not measure dedication and responsibility such as this in terms of gain and loss.

Eye, Ear, Mind

The inner ear of mind, like the eye of imagination, exists beyond temporal limits and conceives the extraordinary.

Yet refinement of the former rarely takes place, as the latter is given ascendancy of the senses. To envision a work of art in sound, one must listen, hear, and devise means to bring its elements into being.

Detail, Aural Sensation, Sensibility

Listening implies discernment.

In composition, do not fail to distinguish between the coarse and refined, the prominent and indistinct, and the plain in contrast to the subtle.  But do not fail to contemplate their presence as representative of natural reality, and thus, essential.

Hyperreality and Perspective

Consider creation and juxtaposition of aural imagery as imaginative reflection.

Clearly, observation of social norms indicates scenarios in which "perception is reality", when, in fact, no such reality exists, but rather one or another personal or cultural constructs that substitute for the objectively real world of phenomena and appearances.

What I am looking for, as an artist and aural composer, are representations, through sounds, of the real that are indicative of aesthetic perspective given to the world of humanity and nature, meant to open the imagination in ways that enhance, rather than falsify, experience and events.

Surrounding the Temporal

Sounds move in directions of openness and may be manipulated accordingly.

Time and space are aspects of the fabric of reality, but they need not define every perception, nor every form of artistic representation. Sound imagery, in particular, may elevate the imagination and the senses beyond temporal attachments.  Composer and listener do not make this happen, but allow it to take place.

Occurrences

Every event is multifaceted, the outcome of convergences of innumerable phenomena.

Meaning takes place individually, and selectively, as when witnesses respond to their perceptions of singular incidents.  Thus the composer chooses tones and sounds as poetic representations of sonic experiences, to be conveyed to the listener, laden with uncanny implications and possibilities.