Suppose you want to bring down the area
William Burroughs prophesies Twitter more than 30 years before it was invented: suppose you want to bring down the area go in and record...
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Jun 28, 20231 min read
The past never gives us direct access to the past
'Nevertheless, Early Music is potentially this kind of performance practice or listening experience which doesn't believe in the...
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May 12, 20232 min read
AI-assisted writing
What unsettles me about recent advancements in neural networks is AI-assisted writing. Not the student essays (students have always been...
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Apr 3, 20231 min read
Young Girl Singing into a Mirror
Mysterious, playful and a tad eerie. It almost seems like a subtle premonition of the sound recording and reproduction technology nearly...
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Nov 20, 20221 min read
Hypermeaning
One of the issues I've been dealing with in my practice is the production of spiritual meaning while neither resorting to religion nor...
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Oct 5, 20221 min read
Providence vs Contingency
My ear and the machine are acting up. The ear, weary after partial hearing loss years ago; the potentiometers, weary after years of use....
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Sep 4, 20221 min read
Graindelavoix in Utrecht
The sound crawls and clambers. It graces with weight the unlit suspended air. And then it flurries, scatters, disseminates. Only to...
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Feb 14, 20221 min read
You ass, why do you add ornamentation?
An entertaining story about Josquin Despres, the famous Franco-Flemish composer of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who by his...
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Feb 13, 20222 min read
Early music as a monad
In Time Regained I came across a quotation from Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, a critique of, among other things, objective...
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Feb 11, 20222 min read
Unpredictable universe
Order and chaos, determinism and indeterminism, tectonic and atectonic as formative dichotomies in music history. For generative or...
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Jan 30, 20221 min read
How to modulate from C maj to B sharp maj
Max Reger demonstrates how to modulate from C major to B sharp major. From the Twitter account of Threatening Music Notation.
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Jan 23, 20221 min read
Recipes against melancholy
Recipes against melancholy by Hildegard of Bingen and Constantine the African. From Nastasja Khrushcheva's 'Metamodern in and Around...
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Jan 20, 20221 min read
Inca wind instruments
The Incas were known to have complicated recording devices fashioned from strings of the wool of llamas and alpacas and a cyclical...
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Dec 23, 20211 min read
And al was conscience and tendre herte
It turns out that the image of the kind-hearted society lady with a doggie was known at least as far back as the fourteenth century....
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Dec 17, 20211 min read
Ghostly polyphony
Ghostly polyphony of Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian': 'In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange...
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Dec 11, 20211 min read
Tu Mano Seserėle
Lithuanian melody from a folk wedding song, with which Stravinsky, in The Sacred Spring, paints "pictures of pagan Russia":
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Dec 10, 20211 min read
The possibility of thinking sound before sound
Anatoly Ryasov on sound in silent films, 'Barely audible hum: an introduction to the philosophy of sound' (translated from Russian): 'In...
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Nov 23, 20211 min read
Sound as a phenomenon
Sound as a phenomenon, not the quality of an object, in a deafening passage from Faulkner's 'As I Lay Dying'. And the listener as the...
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