Lee Barry's Blog, page 34

Creative Talk Therapy

I like this pic of David Lynch because I think he is pretty masterful at compartmentalizing. You wonder how he can reconcile often creepy subject matter with the real world.There is an unlimited number of "departments" available to you when you embark on some kind of project where the objectives are not fully clear, and connection points have to be made as you go along. (If you work from ideas

Sound As Information

Ice Core LayersHappy 10th anniversary of the World Listening Project!2010 was the first year that I got my first pair of ear mics and a portable recorder. What I was most interested in was finding places that had embedded Keynotes or Soundmarks (continuous pitched elements in a place) which I wanted to integrate into my ambient music. Field recordings are actually a great way to listen to the

Why We Like Black and White

After reading this article, I started thinking about what made Shostakovich a film composer of black and white films. His music had a "gray" quality to it, which is an attribute we assigned."When we hear Shostakovich, we seem to accompany it with semi-conscious visual narratives: it is as if a grainy black-and-white film of the siege of Leningrad itself is playing before our eyes as we listen to

The Music of Language (Cont.)

In the Wall Street Journal last week there was a piece about the history behind The Talking Heads' Burning Down the House track. This was a "music-first" situation, where the music drives the language, as well as the meanings (if any) that can emerge from it.When I write songs alone, I start with text fragments in the form of titles, single lines, phrases, or interesting couplets. If I have a

Echt American

'Echt' is a German word that means authentic. I first heard it used in a lecture by the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe in his excellent Pictures of Nothing series (and book) on post-Pollock art. (Art history is much more interesting than music history in many ways--and it has affected the music world)."...The French critics were the ones who read abstract expressionism as being echt American.

Heading West

This is a collection of works by Picasso which feature a guitar in some form. Most of them were done in the cubist period, between 1910 and 1920. 






As I was looking at the pieces, in particular the cardboard sculpture, I was inspired to pick up my guitar and write some music. What I wrote was "cubist" in nature--a piece with all minor chords which had the working title of Maquette--a

Keys to Collaboration

Left-hand stencils, Perito Moreno, Argentina(3,000–9,000 BC)What are the essential keys to collaboration?This started as an answer to a Quora question, and I’ve started another running list similar to The Work of Playing, which can also apply to design thinking/innovation in groups. The question relates to business-related contexts, but still apply because the same dynamics are at play.A good

Father's Day in the DNA

How would your grandfather (or even great-grandfather) have remembered his father? For most in this country, it would have been the memory of another country. My grandfather was born in 1884 in east-central Italy, under the rule of King Emmanuel. He would have remembered a life of farming. His grandfather would have become a father around 1840, perhaps not in rural Italy, and perhaps served in

On the Future

Entries from Dynaxiom with the words "future" and "prediction".[It's interesting to look at the entries with "future" going forward. (The entries in the book are in reverse order with the most recent at the beginning.)]***0031. If you probed the future to find what's there, and then traveled there (or just arrived there) would you necessarily find what you'd thought you'd find?0076. Prediction:

Improvisition

Igor Stravinsky, New York, NY, 1946 by Arnold Newman(Not a typo, a portmanteau).When I was studying jazz in music school I would sometimes compose solos as a way of working out their possible form in real-time. It's a form of cheating at improvisation."Composition" in the loftiest, most exalted sense, implies that everything has been worked out down to the tiniest articulations. Now anyone can