Now, When, Where, Why

Consider those times and places that represent humanity's greatest cultural achievements.

Objectively, the elevation of culture, even at the most base levels, evolves in conditions that promote and defend the freedom of the individual and the merits of reason and work.  Without these, there is only the stasis of collective morbidity, held fast by the tyranny of small minds.

Over Mind

Not everyone views art as being more than personal, emotional, expression, of course.

So it is that the art that is a living connectivity between the earthly and the spiritual, contemplative imagination-- which is to say, between ordinary consciousness and the transcendent-- cannot be realized by those attached to the mediocre and the mundane.

Freeze in Conformity

Conditions in human societies, for good and ill, have reason and cause.

Those who accept sclerotic social and political perspectives deserve the art and culture that reflects them.

Digital Inferiority

The West does not lack in reason, spiritual enlightenment, or contemplative arts.

It is contemporary life that is wanting in broader, deeper perspectives than the ones most likely to be celebrated in the shallow confines of academia, populist politics, and mass media.

Unrevealing

Look for what cannot be seen, listen for what is not there.

Fellow artists understand the essential nature of this statement, with some, but very few, others.

Entitlement and Falsity

Reality demands the artist be self-reliant.

The alternative is obligation-- obligation to cultural norms or special interests, commercial investors, and any number of people generally who provide for the artist's well-being. Some creative types will not only find this acceptable, but desirable, and these are the people-- predators and parasites, in point of fact-- who give art a bad name.

The artistic "expressions" produced in these scenarios are inconsequential, impermanent, detestable, and vain-- like the society they reflect.

Affray

No narrative that contradicts objective reality is viable.

When the arts are used as a vehicle to call day night, and night, day, the culture subjected to this is no longer merely wasting energy and indulging in frivolity.  Freedom itself is absolutely endangered.

Unmoved and Unmoving

The imagination of the individual does not fail.

Cultural imagination, when it fails, is replaced by artifice and contrivance.

This failure is the direct result of the manipulation of media through which public acceptance of the superficial over the substantive is engineered by those with vested interests in "artistic productions".

The individual artist perseveres, nonetheless, in solitude, while the culture is the worse for it.

And those who are predisposed to equate individuality with the "evils" of conservatism are in the worst, that is to say, the most ignorant and benighted, cultural straits of all.

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.