Lee Barry's Blog, page 24

Drumming and Language

I'm finally getting around to reading Neal Peart's Roadshow book, which I thought was going to be summer reading. The lag of the seasons.Since I'm generally interested in the connections between music language, I was looking for a possible connection between the physical rhythmic world that a drummer inhabits, and the more 'silent' rhythms that exist in language. Obviously, for Neil Peart, they

Music As 'Code'

The Hendrix Code   This was a T-shirt idea I had for the Hendrix Chord. When I created it, I was thinking about a comment by a friend that music notation is 'code'. It is, in fact, if you look at jazz chord symbols, like G7(#5,#9). But music notation is code no more than a paragraph is code. It is a simple base-12 system and rhythm is based on simple math. Most of music is not intellectual; It is

Aesthetic Erosion

 
Imagine you had a nice summer home on the west coast of Lake Michigan. You converted the coach house to an art studio, and over the course of a lifetime you created a large body of work. It also had a huge library and you were enriched by all the knowledge you acquired.Over the past decade, Social Change has created more storms, and the coastline has receded to the point where the coach house

Soothing the Savage

 One
of the bands I always thought was 'spiritual' was Sunn O))). But the
musicians really aren't doing much: The amps, effects, and PA are doing
all the work pushing air at high decibel levels, which has a massaging
effect on the body.Playing
challenging music will keep your brain busy in other ways than those of
the more ruminative kind. Even dancing or getting in rhythmic flows
changes

The Sound of 9/11

 In my diary entry of 9/11/2011 I wrote:Beautiful morning, as it was 10 years ago. [Watched the commemoration]. Things I liked: The power of names and how musically they are recited. Music performed at ceremonies is always immediately powerful and resonant: The sound of an airplane, the sound of memory...On the morning of 9/11/2001 I was on the El on the way to work. I recall that I was reading a

Some September

9/1/1997Princess Diana story all over the media. I feel obsessed wanting to read all the stories in the paper and watch the news. (A kind of "rubbernecking", which in this case actually involves a car crash).Saw Pillow Book at Village Theater. Excellent. Story of the power of Japanese calligraphy to drive erotic fantasy and obsession. Interesting bit on keeping diaries, which someone thought that

Stones 1966 (RIP Charlie Watts)

 
The passing of Charlie Watts prompted me to revisit live footage from 1966.1966 was my pet year at one point. I saw it as sea-change in American culture, and the sound of music itself, darker and more brooding. I always liked the English Folk/World Music side of the Stones rather than the blues borrowings. I liked how Watts always played what was rhythmically (and perhaps melodically)

September 20, 2005

 Went to Redmoon's fall spectacle event at Museum of Science & Industry, 'Loves Me--Loves Me Not'. Things I liked: natural ambient sounds w/o use of amplification, lots of things happening on the periphery and far off in the distance. In the context of Katrina, the play had to be re-worked. (Always consider what effect the future will have on your work.)

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On the advent of cell phone video: .

Spontaneous Cognitive Fluctuations (Pink Noise)

Hearing Things  In order to play or write music you have to cultivate the ability to translate sound you hear internally into the language of music. In my experience, this process results in something completely different that how I originally imagined it. Very often I'll "hear" 1, 2 or 4-bar loops (why not 3 or 5?) in dreams, and once I flesh it out on a guitar it is vastly different. As it is

Photography Trauma

 
 As I've been looking at photos for possible pieces of music for Music For Photographs, I was was reminded of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and was looking at images on Google as well as some of the shots by the more notable 9/11 photographers such as Steve McCurry and Joel Meyerowitz.Since all the photos are iconic, the piece should be titled "Ground Zero" and will be a