One of the most simple, yet striking realizations to come from the SEA theory is the fact that melody is a relationship. It’s so often talked of as all about the pitches, what they convey, and that’s not wrong. Many point to the value of rhythm – Ornette Coleman’s saying that rhythm is like oxygen… Continue reading Melody as relationship
Tag: sound
Musical Energy: Articulation
Articulation, the way sounds are started and stopped, is a very important transmitter of energy. The connection between speech and music is deep and multi-faceted, but for now I want to bring attention to the way we interpret another’s words as a result of how they are articulated, and suggest that the same sort of… Continue reading Musical Energy: Articulation
Roots
I recently wrote about meta-composing, a path combining many threads of my experience as a musical thinker, composer, and teacher. Funny how things settle into our minds. That seemed, and is, a major realization, a turning point in my compositional career and life. After I posted that, a college classmate and fellow Governor’s School of North Carolina… Continue reading Roots
Musical Energy: Dynamics
One of the most important means of altering the energy of music is by means of dynamics. Officially known as loudness, or sound pressure level, this acoustical fact can be measured accurately and expressed in decibels (dB): perception of loudness is a fundamental aspect of our hearing. Accomplished at the very first stage of the… Continue reading Musical Energy: Dynamics
Musical Energy: Harmony
By now, I’ve written in the blog rather often about the Sound-Energy Aggregate, or SEA theory. The basic premise is that many musical factors, or parameters, are involved in creating the acoustical information that our brains process. The theory holds that any musical factor can create energy that changes over time, and that all musical… Continue reading Musical Energy: Harmony
Meta-composing
I have had a rupture in my composing life that spans the pandemic, but I couldn’t say that the pandemic is the cause. On March 1 of 2020, I enacted a pre-premiere, a “dry run” of a piece whose premiere would end up being postponed for two years, Groundhog Night (the link here is to… Continue reading Meta-composing
The question of energy
The question of energy in music is vexing: easy to say, hard to define. One way of looking at energy is to bring forward traditional concepts from physics and everyday life. In physics, there are a number of categories of energy, some of which directly relate to music, some of which create interesting parallels to… Continue reading The question of energy
“How’s it going?”
How’s it going? It’s a simple question that needs a more complicated answer than “fine”. The more I live in this world, the more I realize that my life is full of opposites, and that both “fine” and “not so well” are credible answers to that familiar question on a given day. And I’m coming… Continue reading “How’s it going?”
Socrates and me
I just read a really great article by Paul Woodruff, “How I learned to heal my soul, with help from love and Socrates”, which describes Socrates’ thoughts on healing the soul. It makes me realize that Socrates has had a long-term effect on my soul, my thinking. His teaching method, the Socratic method, is well… Continue reading Socrates and me
Evolution of a practice
As I’ve begun this blog, I’ve had in mind sharing ideas on music facilitated by experience in meditation, thus the title, Contemplating Music. Regular readers and those who know me well will have noticed that there is a divide in my writing, between technical issues surrounding my SEA analysis technique and the more general, socially… Continue reading Evolution of a practice