Lee Barry's Blog, page 16

Art Was Always Trendy

 The interesting thing about the so-called New Aesthetic movement was that it wasn't necessarily concerned with Aesthetics per se, but rather how aesthetics (as an aspect of cognition) affect behaviors. As artists typically give us alternate ways of seeing, contemporary artists give us new ways of awareness of all things as being subject for artistic treatment. Art can still be simply about

The Overdriven Future

One Brian Eno quote that I keep coming back to is “Go to an extreme and retreat to a more useful position”. It’s important to think about the possibilities in the imagination phase, including all the silly experimental ones, because it serves to refine what is practical. But the practical solution without first exploring the extremes is (arguably) less satisfying. But going to extremes and using

Algorithmism

 A belief in algorithms.If we had the ability to write our own algorithms, we'd realize it's essentially the same as making an ordinary choice. Why do we need automation and why do we feel the need to have previous choices repeated?The internet had a lot to do with how making choices has evolved. My usual film-watching routine pre-internet was to read the reviews on Friday and see films on the

Music For Palaces

 Back in 2001 flutist Paul Horn released an album recorded in the Taj Mahal. When he was interviewed by NPR the interviewer asked, "How is this different from all the other thousands of new age recordings?" "It has a sense of place", he said. If you don't know the context that which it was recorded in India, you wouldn't know the difference. A stereo recording obviously captures an immersive

What If Mozart Played Blues?

  Composers must have discovered blue notes by accident, but dismissed them as dissonant or wrong. Major 7th chords were dissonant in the sense that the 7th degree resolved to the tonic. The tritone in the baroque and classical periods was always an interval that required a resolution to a more stable chord. But pianists must have found it and used it on its own as a standalone sonority, and it

What You Wanted To Do-- And What You Eventually Did

 Weber's Cafe at Rue Royale, Paris, April 1932. Art is always the process of squaring what you initially wanted to do and what you eventually did. I find that's always the case. For the piece that I'm working on now what I'm envisioning is 1930s Paris, and I'm scoring a scene in a movie that doesn't exist yet. One of the scenes is in a bar in Paris in 1932. Everybody understands what that could

Bunker Mentality

 The more successful Mars missions eventually become, the idea that the earth is uninhabitable becomes a more (seemingly) viable idea. The fact that we have to have colonies even on the Earth, and perhaps if there's been some kind of nuclear exchange and the climate becomes unadaptable, the people with the wherewithal will be creating subterranean colonies. They will be able to survive on the

Design Thinking In Music

 To determine a set of characteristics you want to construct some kind of axis, where there is less and more of something. For example, the axis could be "Tradition" with a range 0 to 100. In order for something to be truly new, we'd want to set that fairly low.Music that doesn't use traditional melody, harmony, or rhythm would have a low tradition setting. Music that uses simple chords in a

Music As a Form Of Conceptual Art

 Sol LeWitt: The Music CollectionPopular music is really a form of conceptual art because some people will get it and some won't. It's "coded" in some respects. But as you get older you get to interact with more conceptual art and don't always need new concepts. You might try out the new concept and you can say that's sort of like the old concept—I don't need more concepts. But when you're

Understanding History Through Songwriting

Course of Empire (Destruction) - Thomas Cole (1830)Perhaps it's already been done, but what would be interesting is a history class that was based on songs written through the ages, which would correspond to actual history. The history of the recordings would be studied as well and perhaps people would write songs as class assignments and perform and record them. Each student would pick some part