Josh McNeill

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Time travel.

March 10, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I’m obsessed with time. I’m very nostalgic, constantly afraid/excited about the future, and I get lost in reading about history, particularly personal histories. I like how time seems to stop, how it seems to pass so quickly. I like/hate how each new year feels shorter, how weird it is to compare how much time has really passed with how much time has really passed for people who are younger than me or older than me. I check my phone constantly and set alarms for all sorts of little things then I ignore them all day. For someone without a career or many obligations, I have a pretty elaborate calendar that has things scheduled for up to a year from now. Even my 2011 project is intimately tied up in how time is experienced: it both aims to condense a year into an hour or two and at the same time trap me in that year for probably the next decade. I like time.

I thought it would be interesting to play around with how music fits into this for me. I was going through my collection and came across Ben Folds’ Evaporated and just had to listen to it and immediately it was 2001 and I was walking down the street to the Wawa in Cape May, New Jersey on a sunny fall day on my break from Acrat, the head shop I was working at which was perpetually empty during the off season. I was listening to that album a lot at the time and that song would play in my head constantly on those walks. This sort of thing happens really often for me and I imagine it does for many others as well so I thought it would be interesting to put my whole collection on shuffle and post a few tracks that come up with a description of when and where they take me. I’m no narcissist, though, I’d really like others to do the same. So here, I’ll start off with the Ben Folds song:

The next is Che Gilda Manina from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. This is one of the first operas I ever watched. It brings me back to around 2006 or so, sitting in my bedroom at my mom’s house where I was unfortunately living at the time. There’s sort of a double time travel thing going on with this one for me because I’m both at my mom’s house and also in a run down apartment in Paris in the middle of the winter of 1890. For those who don’t speak Italian, Rodolfo just met this girl, his neighbor, and has fallen in love with her and is explaining his bohemian lifestyle. He’s saying how he doesn’t have a thing but he has everything he needs:

David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion brings me to 2011 in San Francisco. My ride to work included a bus trip (on the 28 for those who know, it’s a really nice route) that went up to the Golden Gate Bridge then along the bay to The Marina district where I’d walk another mile over hills which gave me great views of the Coit Tower and all the staggered and colorful houses of North Beach. I listened to this piece for the first time on one of those trips on a sunny day and I remember being transfixed. I hated going to work to begin with but this made me want to stop on one of those hills and just stare out and listen. To hell with work. (Incidentally, this performance is at the San Francisco Conservatory’s Hot Air Music Festival which I’ve been to before and even wrote a little review on. You should listen to other versions if you’re interested, though, as this one is pretty stripped down.)

Ironically, the next thing to come up was Philip Glass’s 5th String Quartet, which I first heard at that very festival in 2006. It was really a nice piece but it actually brings me back to a Missy Mazzoli piece that was also played there called Lies You Can Believe In. It’s a trio piece which was played by a high school group with such vigor and enthusiasm I could hardly believe they were just teenagers. Or maybe that’s why they could play it so well. I think I brought my friend Beryl to this event. These pieces remind me of nights at The Revolution Cafe in San Francisco, too, where you could drink sangria and listen to spontaneous open-mic style classical music: casual as all fuck. (The Mazzoli piece is near the bottom of the link underneath the Glass piece.)

Missy Mazzoli: Lies You Can Believe In

Ah, the Foo Fighters. I really love their first two albums but they sorta crashed into generic pop nonsense after Pat Smear left them. Good Grief isn’t my favorite song on the album but it came up. In this case, it’s really the whole album that transports me, not one particular song. I end up back in junior high in 1996 or so, listening to my friend Mike tell me about how the Foo Fighters are gonna be the new Nirvana. He was wrong, but that’s okay. I also associate it with fall. I associate a lot of music with fall.

This source is even broader than the Foo Fighters album. I started listening to the Mountain Goats after they had already released numerous albums so I just got all of them and listened straight through. I would always listen in the middle of the day, between classes at City College of San Francisco. I had to take a bus from the the Ocean campus to the Mission campus. I’d try to do homework on the way but the ride was so bumpy that I’d mostly just listen to music. It was fall, again, so of course it was always ridiculously hot (fall is summer in SF). I’d have to kill some time after the ride so I’d just wander around The Mission, taking in the people and sights. There was always something new to discover whether it be a cool looking house or some interesting plants or a mural that I never noticed. I really enjoyed those directionless hours.

This one is a little more embarrassing, but what the hell. Elemeno P’s Urban Getaway brings me to 2004, when I was in the midst of an addiction to the MMO Dark Age of Camelot. I say addiction in all seriousness. I loved that game but it stole two years of my young life and I’m not happy about it. I would literally play whenever I wasn’t at work or school. I once spent the entire week between Christmas and New Years without leaving my studio because of that game. (Point is, don’t be like that. It’s bad.) Anyway, I would watch a lot of videos of other people playing the game at the time, for pointers I guess but they were also just entertaining. The one below I watched quite a bit and it’s where I first heard Urban Getaway (it’s the first song he uses). The song actually places me not in any particular physical space but in a digital space. It’s strange feeling such an attachment to a world that doesn’t really exist. (Incidentally, I just now realized that the second line in the song is “Feeling Shostakovich.” I like that.)

It’s kind of interesting to me that my associations don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the music is about. I could go on and on, and I will, but I’m not gonna share the rest. Seriously, though, share some of your own. I’d love to hear what other peoples’ associations are.

Making art into a science.

March 1, 2013 / / 1 Comment

I was recently reading an article in NeuroReport entitled Music in minor activates limbic structures: a relationship with dissonance?. My understanding of neuroscience is very minimal so there was almost nothing in this that I could really think critically about. My understanding of music, however, is pretty damn good, and the assumptions the article seems to make about music came across as very questionable to me.

One of the main suggestions was that the level of dissonance in a melody may play a role in which part of the brain is activated when listening to music. This was an attempt at explaining why minor melodies would have a greater effect in one part of the brain than major melodies. Minor was assumed to be more dissonant than major:

Musicologically, a main difference
between major and minor mode is that minor allows for
more dissonance than major mode (711).

I’m not sure how they came up with this idea. Here’s what a C major scale looks like:

C major

And here’s what an A minor scale looks like:

A minor

The only difference between these two scales is where you start. They literally consist of the same exact musical intervals. The article even refers to them as “modes,” a musical term that essentially refers to which note of a scale you will treat as your home base. The scale itself does not change between different modes, just one’s starting point. Somehow, the author knew enough to recognize that major and minor scales can actually be viewed simply as modes of one scale yet also came to the conclusion that minor allows more dissonance.

More vague is what’s considered dissonance. The article does mention minor 2nds as a dissonant interval at one point while talking about a chromatic scale but that’s the only mention of what is considered dissonant. We’re also talking about melodic dissonance here, too, not harmonic dissonance. Even a minor second, an interval that would sound extremely harsh if both notes were played simultaneously, sound completely innocent (to me) when played melodically. Maybe I overlooked a referenced study that they used as a basis for dissonance but I’m leery of anyone at all who claims to have scientific proof of what dissonance is. At one point in time, a perfect 4th was considered a dissonant interval to be avoided at all costs if one wished to compose beautiful music but today this interval is everywhere and no one bats an eyelash. How do we separate our cultural inclinations from empirical facts for something like this? (No really, if someone knows, please tell me.)

I think this is an inherent problem in attempting to treat art of any sort in a scientific manor. Art is extremely difficult to define and until that can be done in some sort of standardized way, science dealing with art will always have at least one foot sitting in a pool of broad assumptions.

Nationalistic international opera.

February 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I went to the New Orleans Opera to see The Barber of Seville this past fall and one thing in particular struck me: we sang the national anthem before the performance began.

I’ve never been to the New Orleans Opera, in fact I’ve only been to The Met once and the San Francisco Opera once, even though I’ve seen over a hundred operas on video. (They’re just too damn expensive for my poor soul and I’d rather dish out the money only if it’s a new opera, a rare creature these days.) At the other two performances, the national anthem was not played, though, and I assume it normally isn’t. I don’t know why, but it struck me as a bit odd to use it for such a European art form. I mean, we were all there to see an Italian opera. Nationalism is nothing new to opera, but I don’t think it’s ever been done in this way. It usually involves developing a style distinct from that of the operas composed in other countries, or simply using the language of one’s own country.

This might not be obvious to people who don’t listen to opera, but it was historically not composed in one’s native language. Italians had such a stranglehold on the form for so long that Mozart, for instance, wrote most of his operas to Italian language librettos, even if they were premiered in Vienna. It makes me wonder what audiences did to cope back then. Today, if you go to see an opera, you’ll be given supertitles somewhere so you can still understand what the singers are saying but I don’t think this technology existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This almost seems like it could explain why opera librettos are often so ridiculously bad: no one really cared about the story. For instance, Anthony Tommasini, writing about seeing Renata Tebaldi performing La Bohème in his youth says:

I had only the vaguest idea of what the opera was about. But listening to her uncannily sumptuous singing, I was overcome with indefinable feelings of longing, sadness, bliss and loss.

Before supertitles, people could enjoy opera purely for the music. Maybe this is part of the reason composers always get top billing in operas while the librettists are often so overlooked that only hardcore fans even know who they are. By contrast, musicals often give equal billing to the composer and the the writer (just look at Rodgers and Hammerstein or even teams that put together psuedo-musicals like Arthur and Sullivan). The difference between musicals and operas here is musicals are usually adapted to the language of their audience. Les Misérables was originally in French but it’s known in England and the US in English. In fact, it’s known in a number of languages as is made obvious by this special performance:

To my understanding, translation of operas is extremely rare, although The Met has begun doing it for works like Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The difficulty lies in how intertwined the words and music become in opera, as attested to in the linked to New York Times article. Translations of writing are difficult enough, let alone singing. There’s also the issue of how absurdly conservative opera audiences are (attested by the fact that there are many many opera houses who put on season after season of works all dated before 1900).

The extent to which this is about nationalism might be questionable, though. The premier of Wagner’s Lohengrin in Italy was actually performed in Italian, for instance. Of all people, Wagner, the pillar and effective founder of German opera, was performed in Italian while he was still alive. I’m fairly certain that he approved and wanted this to happen more often, too. I can’t find it now but I recall a tweet by @CosimaWagner that claimed Wagner expected his operas to be translated. Yet, Wagner was about as nationalistic as composers come.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I think my whole point is that this is simply an unusual way of asserting one’s nationality. I understand it for baseball games, it would even make sense to me if they were performing an American opera, but it’s just an unusual coupling with Rossini. Although this wouldn’t be the first time the United States National Anthem has found its way into an opera. I’ll leave you with American music in Italian by Giacomo Puccini, sung beautifully by a Swede:

Boys have penises, girls have vaginas.

February 8, 2013 / / 4 Comments

Apparently, CocoRosie discovered Antony Hegarty long before I did. Besides possessing a unique and powerful voice, Hegarty is widely known for being transgender. This term, in itself, is rather confusing. In Hegarty’s case, he’s biologically male and seems to have no intention of changing that but many people (or at least that’s my impression) who consider themselves transgender have a desire to change their biological sex. This has always been odd to me but not due to the reasons people tend to find it odd (disgust, mainly) but because it’s difficult for me to understand why someone who doesn’t believe in the confines of gender labels would have such strong feelings about what their genitalia looks like.

The basic idea, for those who don’t have friends steeped in human sexuality studies, is that sex is what you’re biologically born with, meaning which genitalia you have, but gender is defined by your culture and, I suppose, the role you play when interacting with others in your culture. For instance, maybe you’re born with a female genitalia but all your interests and mannerisms fit into the mold of the prototypical male in your culture. Your sex may be female, but your gender could then be considered male.

This is exactly what’s interesting to me about sex changes, though. If the hypothetical person I’m speaking of feels their gender is male, they may choose to make their sex match their gender. Why make such an extreme change when gender is simply an ephemeral quality anyway? This sounds strange, to me, because you could become part of a different culture and find that your gender suddenly matches your sex without physically changing anything. For instance, Conrad Phillip Kottak claims that in Brazil transsexuals (at least, biological males who live as females) are seen essentially the same as biological females that identify as female (Anthropology, 13th ed.). In fact, I recently had a conversation with a guy whose part Brazilian (close enough that he visits occasionally and speaks Portuguese) and he claimed that cheap “female” prostitutes in Brazil are often biologically male and yet their clients are often heterosexual males (in gender and biology) that simply don’t care about the genitalia of the prostitute. It seems that someone from my culture in the US, for instance, who is born with the sex of a female but identifies as male would be completely accepted as is in Brazil. Maybe this has something to do with why Hegarty doesn’t feel a need to change his sex either, because he may have become involved in a subculture that accepts his sex/gender combination as perfectly normal.

I guess, in a way, this is a discrepancy in definition. It’s actually difficult to write about this topic because I feel like I have to constantly specify if I’m talking about sex or gender because we link these two so closely that there aren’t separate words for male sex and male gender, etc (that I know of). It’s so confusing to me that I don’t even know what someone means when they say they feel as if they were born as a male in a female’s body, a description I’ve read a lot when learning about sex changes. Does this really mean anything when talking about such a transient idea? It’s like there’s some sort of psuedo-Whorfian thing going on here where even transgender people end up with confused ideas because of the terminology available to them. If your culture uses the same terms when speaking about gender and sex, are you more likely to want a sex change when your sex and gender don’t match up with cultural expectations? I bet there are studies on this that I will never have enough time to read so anyone in the know should comment and clear the matter up.

Update: Coincidentally, today my Japanese professor asked us what gender/sex we’d want to be reincarnated as. We’re gonna have a discussion next week; maybe I’ll post about it.

How models work.

February 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was reading this article a couple weeks ago and seeing yet another prediction of sea level rise that goes beyond IPCC expectations reminded me of my family. Well, mainly my dad and my cousin-in-law, who both asserted their denial of climate change to me a couple years ago based on the idea that models are completely meaningless. I didn’t know as much about how models are put together at the time as I’ve never needed to know, so I understand what their confusion was about (although I was particularly shocked about my cousin-in-law as I’ve always seen him as a really smart dude [not that my dad’s stupid, but he’s not really into science]).

So their idea was that scientific models are like like model airplanes, essentially. They’re just programs that someone puts together with whatever information they and constraints that they want and some nutjobs take it as fact. They could put anything they want in these models, they just get tailored to whatever outcome these “scientists” want to see. If this were the case, clearly, models would suck. Scientific models are not model airplanes, though.

Scientific modeling involves taking two or more known pieces of information, first of all, and drawing a line between them. This idea was best impressed upon me when I took an astronomy class (I don’t even know if linguistics really uses modeling; maybe historical linguistics? Someone tell me). Models are constantly used in astronomy, particularly cosmology, because it involves changes over enormous amounts of time and areas that stretch enormous distances in every direction. So basically, an astronomer can take a point in the past which is widely understood, documented, and even observed (ya know looking into space is looking back in time, right?), then take a point closer to the present that is equally understood, documented, and observed, and attempt to figure out how to get from one point to the other. This involves building a model filled with theories that could possibly explain how this change occurred. That’s the model airplane part of this, in a way, but even the steps taken so far involve known information that’s difficult to debate and usually theories that have be refined over long periods of time. The next step is what makes scientific models much different from model airplanes, though: every bit of observed information that can be obtained that falls between the two end points of this model get injected into the model to see if it still works.

Imagine you’re doing a connect-the-dots puzzle and there are all sorts of ways you can connect some of these dots but when you try out some of the paths you end up skipping over dots that you need to include so you know that path wasn’t the way to go. It’s just like that. The dots are all the empirically understood bits of information and the lines you draw are the theories that you hope explain the relationships between these dots. So, when a climate expert predicts that the ice on Greenland is melting very quickly and they base this on a model they created, that means it’s also based on mounds of empirical evidence that was injected into that model to ensure that it’s as accurate as possible. These things are never perfect, as no science is perfect, but they’re far from being the same as the hobby your weird uncle partakes in.

There could actually be a linguistic issue involved in this whole misunderstanding. To laymen, “model” involves designs and, possibly, a sense of creativity. Science, on the other hand, I’d wager doesn’t evoke the idea of creativity for most people at all (it is creative, though, they just like to test their creative ideas afterward). What you end up with is something that appears to be trying to prove how a complex system works using painting. Maybe this is also an instance of nerdview, where the disparity between the needs of those involved in a field to refer to complex ideas quickly and easily and the needs of your average Joe who doesn’t know what those complex ideas are to begin with is just exceptionally great. Have you ever tried to read a peer-reviewed study on the minutiae of a subject you’ve never really studied before? It’s difficult. Every two sentences or so usually require a trip to Wikipedia to keep up. For the researchers involved, though, they need these technical terms to avoid having to use extremely long descriptions of phenomena that all their peers should be aware of anyway. Maybe the failure with “model,” in this case, is that they chose a rather common word. It could help to call this something stranger, maybe a connectogram… or something.

This difference in needs also reminds me of the Japanese kanji debate that I’ve written about before. It’s all about the target audience I guess.

Prosody and Janacek.

January 25, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I posted a long time ago about a study that tried to apply both linguistic analysis and musical analysis to the composer Leos Janacek’s notations of speech melodies. Janacek transcribed the speech of those around him for some 30 years at a time when prosody in speech was barely even considered by linguists. The field itself was still relatively young at the time and it seems that prosody is one aspect of phonetics that is still poorly understood today.

Initially, this interested me greatly as the intersections of music and linguistics are what I plan on focusing my studies on, but half way through reading the study I was sort of wishing it would just end. The thing is, this wasn’t so much as a scientific study as it was a whimsical look at Janacek’s pet habit. Occasionally, Jonathan Secora Pearl, the author, compares what Janacek notated to how the phrase in question might actually be said based on our modern understanding of Czech prosody, but more often then not he simply describes what was notated. These descriptions are complete with tonal analyses as if they were literally musical scores in A minor, or whatever.

What was more troubling was that, even though Pearl acknowledged multiple times that we have no recordings of what Janacek heard to determine the accuracy of the transcriptions, he still attempts to draw conclusions. At one point, he describes an oddly placed rest in the middle of a phrase, stating that this could actually happen but would be very difficult to notice. This was meant to be some sort of remark on Janacek’s keen ear but, really, we don’t know what Janacek was actually notating. Even if he wrote down something that was in every way possible and even common, we don’t know if notated the phrase accurately or just coincidentally notated something that’s possible.

The paper reads as if the author is desperately searching for ways to connect music and linguistics via Janacek’s speech melodies but, ultimately, none of his attempts make any sense specifically because there’s no way to be certain of the accuracy of the transcriptions. Maybe my expectations were too high because I also would’ve liked to connect the two fields but it seems this is the wrong way to go about it.

I’m still hopeful, though. My own attempt at analyzing speech through software was fairly eye opening. One thing I’ve done is taken my own speech and converted the first three formants of all the vowels into musical pitches to create chords. The results were pretty dissonant for the most part, or simply full of octaves. I was hoping they would align with chords found on tonal harmony in a fairly regular way but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Of course, I also used an equal tempered tuning system for reference, which is probably not the best way to do this. I’ll be reworking the comparison using just intonation soon enough to see if the results are still the same and, either way, I think I might just make some music out of the chords I do get. Because, ya know, why not?

No one is ever the bad guy.

January 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

… From their perspective that is. I was having a back and forth with a friend about various political/historical junk and it got into the merits or lack of for using the atomic bombs during World War II. I’ve always been under the assumption that they ended the war but he pointed me to a source that doubted that theory. The discussion kinda moved me away from being secure in my assumption but the alternative theory still wasn’t as convincing. In any case, the conversation ended with him talking about how he loves history because it changes and how it would be interesting to look into textbooks from other countries to see how slanted their descriptions of the same events are.

So I recently went to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, just because it seems like I should at least visit all the tourist sites in the city while living here. I didn’t actually have any particular interest in it but it turned out to be a propos to the conversation I had with my friend.

There was a large section devoted to racist propaganda between the Japanese and Americans. For instance, there was this comic which was from the New York Times:

New York Times comic during WWII

I’m glad this sort of material was available because reflection on this sort of thing in hindsight seems like one of the most beneficial aspects of such a museum. I’m not personally as interested in what kind of guns were used as I am in what the social climate was at the time. What was a bit frustrating was their attempt to place equal claims of racism on both sides. Certainly, there was racism in Japan at the time but their example of such was the following:

Anti-American manga during WWII

It’s really hard to draw comparisons between the two. The first seems to be promoting extermination of a lower race while the other seems to be saying the people we’re at war with are mean. Should we really be claiming that the Japanese were just as racist as Americans at the time? They did terrible things to prisoners, sure, but we probably did, too. But such actions are not necessarily based on racism so it seems more appropriate to go by what we find in their media to determine the level of racism, which is notably weaker than American racism judging by these images. Let’s not kid ourselves about this; it does no one any good.

Speaking of doing terrible things to prisoners, also absent was any mention of Japanese-American internment camps whatsoever. I don’t know why we have such trouble talking about this subject in the US. We did it, it was terrible, we admitted that when reparations were authorized in the 80s, yet I still don’t remember being taught about this part of our history at all during my high school years in the 90s. And you would think the one place where this could be openly discussed would be a museum dedicated to the war. What better forum could there be for bringing this out in the open? Instead, there was one newspaper clip that gave directions to Japanese-Americans to go to a specific location on a specific date and that was it. The clip didn’t say what they were going there for and never used the word “internment.” There was also no caption explaining what the clip was a reference to. It’s like we’re willing to hint at the idea that we did something bad but no more than that.

This isn’t completely off-topic, however. Part of what I love about learning other languages is that it almost forces you to learn about other cultures and in a more direct way than just reading about them in your native language. For instance, one of my Spanish classes at City College of San Francisco spent one day a week where someone in the class would present a topic involving the country we were learning about at the time. This almost always turned into sort of guilt-ridden sessions about the evils of US activity in other countries but there was good reason for this: there was truth to it. And this was almost always buoyed by my Chilean professor who seemed to have a pretty robust knowledge of the history of all of Latin America. In fact, I really wanted to ask her personally why she came to the US because I later learned about how the US supported the takeover of her government by a pretty brutal dictator.

I never did work up the nerve to ask, but this is something I could only really get an inside perspective on by speaking the language. Likewise, my Spanish professor last semester was Cuban and even spent some time being locked up for his religious beliefs. I really wanted to ask him questions about Cuba but couldn’t work up the nerve either, unfortunately. But even the possibility of having that conversation is very unlikely to occur in monolingual situations. I even enjoy reading Wikipedia articles in both Spanish and English to see what changes from the other perspective. It’s interesting, to say the least.

Now that I’m learning Japanese, it will again be very tempting to ask my professor about her perspective on things like WWII. Maybe this time I’ll actually work up the nerve to take advantage of such an opportunity.

But anyway, for clarification for anyone who didn’t realize it: the US rounded up Japanese-Americans during WWII, especially on the west coast, and sent them to camps that they weren’t allowed to leave. Their property and possessions were often sold, etc. It was a pretty terrible thing and it happened.

(Sorta) new chamber piece.

January 12, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Today I tracked down another piece I did last Spring for school. This was supposed to be under the theme of “world music,” which for me just meant using a few Japanese instruments and employing a pentatonic scale. I’m never really satisfied just trying to mimic a style that already exists. Most people in my class composed straight Latin music or bossa nova or something along those lines. I like making statements so I tried to warp something that starts out sounding very traditional into something else entirely. There was a point in doing this that involved my perspective on Japan’s history as well as just how I was feeling at the time, but I won’t say more than that because I’d rather the music stand on its own.

I wasn’t even gonna post this for the longest time because I was dissatisfied with the synth sounds but I’ve come to the conclusion that I will probably never get around to fixing it up so keep in mind that the whole thing is rather rough and rushed. It’s No 4 in the Doodles for Chambers section of the music section (or just click on No 4 [to the left]).

You are where you speak.

January 11, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Continuing with posting papers I’ve done for school, here’s what I did for my phonetics class:

The Distance Between Acadiana and Cape May

This might be of more interest to my relatives than anyone else, really. I’ve taken out any reference to personal names since I didn’t get direct permission to publish this info but it’ll be obvious to those in the know.

I wish I had more time to devote to this paper but it took up probably more than 100 hours of work during the semester. There are definitely a lot of weaknesses in the analysis given that it’s the first thorough phonetic analysis I’ve ever done but I’m pretty satisfied with it given the constraints I did it under.

Also, I doubt I have anyone familiar with linguistic jargon (or even audio jargon) reading this blog so, if you’re actually taking the time to read the paper, you should totally ask about anything that’s not clear.

Meeting yourself.

January 4, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I was just trying to figure out where a particular song I was working on last year for school went so I could finish it up and I came across something with the filename “New.” “That can’t be true,” I thought. So I opened it up and found something I wrote, uh, I don’t know when. The whole thing was very mysterious. I listened to it and thought, “This person has good taste,” and decided it would be worth sharing.

But seriously, it’s kinda strange coming across work you’ve forgotten that you’ve done. I looked at the notes that I had put down–and there are many–and I can’t figure out how I decided to put just those notes down. I don’t even know what I was trying to accomplish because there wasn’t so much as a single dynamic marking let alone a title or tempo indication. It was just a bunch of notes on a page that played something sorta familiar and comforting but also strangely alien. There was probably one day when putting that music together consumed all my time and energy and focus and now it’s just this thing I discovered.

It’s No 16 in the music section (or just click on No 16 [to the left]).

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