Cultural Perceptivity

Moved by social and cultural forces, one encounters sounds that reflect diverse experiences.

Gravitating toward the most pleasurable aural forms that offer the greatest intellectual and emotional satisfaction, some find the sense of listening itself becomes enhanced, and consequently listener and composer develop the spirit of inquiry that leads to new, even as yet unknown, forms of artistic music-
or, given the nature of aesthetic experimental work, non-music.

Simple Elements

Complexity has its origins in the plain and clear.

In the perception of sound, unadorned beauty directs the listener to depth of experience.

Sense, Substance

Art is a constant consideration for its creators.  It is a term that is not used lightly.

There are poets, painters, authors, dancers and composers who demand everything of themselves. They expect nothing in return beyond the essence of their work.

Expression and gesture are ways of knowing and being; the artistic journey is one of significance and meaning. These are things that cannot be neglected, and are not set aside or forgotten.

Sounds Out of TIme

Subjective projection of emotion is an absurd imposition on works of art.

Yet music evokes nostalgia, particularly that of time, place, and personal experience.

Sound compositions designed to enhance atmosphere and state of mind are not contrived to bring about sentimental effects.  It is not "the moment" that is created or captured through art, but rather the perceptivity it evokes or restores.  This is art formed by aural imagery in the quest for heightened awareness-- elevation of mind and spirit-- not self-expression, cultural criticism, or political activism.

One Hand Clapping

Contemplation and stillness are their own rewards, yet they elevate perceptual acuity in active life.

Sound patterns stimulate and reflect emotions and ideas; thus the constancy of the popular musical genres with their attendant social and cultural phenomena. Yet this is not the entirety of the reality of sound and the profundity of its total effect.

For the composer and listener, sound imagery can be an expression of the fullness of being, a deep apprehension of a design greater than human understanding, and ultimately, a sense of mystery and possibility.

Apatheia

Give attention to the aural events of everyday surroundings.

Communication dominates attention. News, weather, opinion, entertainment, sports.

I want to communicate sounds to free consciousness, to bring states of mind into being through auditory imagery evoking equipoise, elevation, and equanimity.

Quiet Flux

Set aside preconceived ideas regarding "music".

Imagine sounds ordered to reflect elements and atmospheres of changing environments.

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.