1,791 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2023
  2. Feb 2023
  3. Jan 2023
    1. This seems to have an interesting relation to the tradition of wassailers and "luck visitors" traditions or The Christmas Mummers (1858). The song We Wish You a Merry Christmas (Roud Folk Song Index #230 and #9681) from the English West Country (Cornwall) was popularized by Arthur Warrell (1883-1939) in 1935. It contains lyrics "We won't go until we get some" in relation to figgy pudding and seems very similar in form to Mari Lwyd songs used to gain access to people's homes and hospitality. An 1830's version of the song had a "cellar full of beer" within the lyrics.

      I'm curious if the Roud Folk Song Index includes any Welsh songs or translations that have similar links? Perhaps other folk song indices (Child Ballads?) may provide clues as well?

    1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/18/1139783203/what-makes-songs-swing-physicists-unravel-jazz-mystery

      Spaces in both language, text, and music help to create the texture of what is being communicated (and/or not).


      Link to Edward Tufte's latest book in section entitled "Spacing enhances complex meaning, encourages slow, thoughtful reading":

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>KevinMarks</span> in #meta 2023-01-19 (<time class='dt-published'>01/19/2023 11:32:19</time>)</cite></small>


      Link to Indigenous astronomy example of negative spaces (like the Great Emu)

  4. Dec 2022
    1. HERE'S THE FIRST thing you should know about Grant McLennan: he wasn't a genius. Neither is his friend and songwriting partner Robert Forster, with whom he formed the Go-Betweens in late 1977. Rather, both were artisans of the first order: talented songwriters who worked diligently at their craft and believed completely in the value of what they were doing. Their aesthetics were finely tuned and they understood – first intuitively, then by experience – what it took to make great records.

      Maybe 'genius' is in the ability to keep going.

    1. Aleatoric music (also aleatory music or chance music; from the Latin word alea, meaning "dice") is music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). The term is most often associated with procedures in which the chance element involves a relatively limited number of possibilities.
    1. “I have a trick that I used in my studio, because I have these twenty-eight-hundred-odd pieces of unreleased music, and I have them all stored in iTunes,” Eno said during his talk at Red Bull. “When I’m cleaning up the studio, which I do quite often—and it’s quite a big studio—I just have it playing on random shuffle. And so, suddenly, I hear something and often I can’t even remember doing it. Or I have a very vague memory of it, because a lot of these pieces, they’re just something I started at half past eight one evening and then finished at quarter past ten, gave some kind of funny name to that doesn’t describe anything, and then completely forgot about, and then, years later, on the random shuffle, this thing comes up, and I think, Wow, I didn’t hear it when I was doing it. And I think that often happens—we don’t actually hear what we’re doing. . . . I often find pieces and I think, This is genius. Which me did that? Who was the me that did that?”

      Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.

    2. In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
    3. In 1978, he started to use the term “ambient music”: the concept stretched back to describe “Discreet Music” and the work of earlier composers, like Satie, who coined the term “furniture music,” for compositions that would be more functional than expressive.
    4. Eno’s strategies don’t always appeal to the musicians he works with. In Geeta Dayal’s book about the album, also titled “Another Green World,” the bassist Percy Jones recalls, “There was this one time when he gave everybody a piece of paper, and he said write down 1 to 100 or something like that, and then he gave us notes to play against specific numbers.” Phil Collins, who played drums on the album, reacted to these instructions by throwing beer cans across the room. “I think we got up to about 24 and then we gave up and did something else,” Jones said.

      Example of Brian Eno using combinatorial creativity using cards to generate music.

      This sounds similar to a process used by Austin Kleon which I've noted before.

    5. Eno was moving toward a music that changed your perception of the space around you. Geography could be as memorable as melody.

      ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?

    6. The band began rehearsing in Eno’s house, with Eno acting as “sound manipulator,” a cross between a live-sound engineer and a band member.

      Sound manipulator, what a great title for a business card.

    7. Behind Eno stand John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Erik Satie, but those guys didn’t make pop records.
    8. As he told Keyboard, in 1981, “Any constraint is part of the skeleton that you build the composition on—including your own incompetence.”
    9. Eno is widely known for coining the term “ambient music,”
    1. https://austinkleon.com/2018/03/04/card-games/

      I'm reminded of early French use of playing cards for note taking here...

    2. Then I remembered a little card game I came up with to make jam sessions more interesting: Have each band member list 10 musical acts they’d like to play in Write each musical act on an index card Shuffle the cards, and, without revealing the cars, deal one to each band member. Keep the cards secret — the game is no fun if you can see the cards before you play. Just like any other jam session, it helps to pick a key and start with the rhythm. Everyone has to pretend like they’re playing in the act written on their card. Jam until it gets boring. At the end, everybody gets to guess which card each person was dealt. Repeat until you’re out of cards

      A game by Austin Kleon for making jam sessions less boring using cards.

      Inspired by Oblique Strategies and The Creative Tarot.

  5. Nov 2022