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"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum." --Claes Oldenburg

Art & All That Jazz

This section of MusicWords includes some music that I've written and recorded, which you can download and enjoy. (Liner notes follow the links.) If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll also find links to some essays I wrote a few years back on the subject of creativity.

Currently I'm looking for Bay Area musicians to perform with. If you like the music on this page, and if you think you might have a use for a cello player or a computer jockey, email me. Ruminations on how ridiculously hard it is to find the right musicians to play with are located here.

"The Swan" (2:35, 2.5MB) A chestnut of the cello repertoire, written by Camille Saint-Saens as part of his Carnival of the Animals suite. What you'll hear here is real cello (played by yours truly) with my own all-electronic backing track. The backing track started out as a faithful orchestration of the original accompaniment, which was written for two pianos, but along the way I got a bit too enthusiastic and took a couple of liberties (notably the extra bar of 3/4 before the return of the theme). The recording was done in my not-acoustically-treated bedroom studio, using an old Audio Technica ATM21 mic. The current file (as of 10/28/07) is a slight remix of what was here before.

"The Wayfarer" (5:35, 5.3MB) Another pretty cello tune, this one brand new as of Oct. 30, 2007.

"Dark Passage" (4:57, 4.6MB) After flailing away at a couple of utilitarian arrangements (including "The Swan") in which the synthesizers are called on to support a cello melody, I decided to take a break and do a piece that I had no pre-ordained ideas about. Just start something and see where it goes. It turned out to be more beat-oriented than most of my music.

"Reassured" (5:45, 5.5MB) I don't remember why I took this down from the site, but I'm putting it back up. It's relentlessly cheerful, and I have very mixed feelings about that. Every time I do something pretty, I feel an urge to turn around and do something darker.

"On the Broad Highway to Nowhere" (5:50, 5.5MB) Quite a variety of software synthesizers was (were?) used in this piece, ranging from Spectrasonics Atmosphere (the breathy ostinato) to rgc audio Z3ta+ (the '80s-style lead in the fast section). Ultimately the choice of instruments may not matter -- except that in practice, it does matter. Choosing exactly the right sounds is an essential part of electronic orchestration.

"Peace in Palestine" (5:30, 13MB) In late 2005 I was editing a book called Power Tools for Reason 3.0. While working through the examples in the book, I happened to try running a drum pattern through Reason's vocoder. I liked the infectious rhythm, and developed it into this Middle-Eastern-sounding tune. All of the sounds originated in Reason except the finger cymbal loop, which is courtesy of Wizoo Darbuka.

"Desolation Dance" (6:40, 6MB) After writing "Reassured" (see above), I decided I was doing too much happy music. "Desolation Dance" tries to balance the scales. The shimmery drone at the beginning is Steinberg Xphraze, the breathy lead comes from NI Absynth, and most of the percussion is from Reason. The descending-thirds figure was played by a Korg Wavestation SR rackmount, which has since been retired in favor of the software version.

"Falling Away" (7:25, 7MB) By now I don't remember what instruments were used on this track. I had entirely forgotten writing it when I stumbled across the mp3, but I do remember what inspired it. I had been recruited to play the highly repetitive and not altogether scintillating cello part in Pachelbel's "Canon." "Falling Away" is a sort of passacaglia, a mournful piece on a ground bass, though in this case the bass turns a few corners along the way.

"Cooking with Gravity" (4:25, 5MB) Another all-you-need-is-Reason tune, this one created in Sept. 2003 when I was editing the version 2.5 edition of the same book. Restricting myself to Reason was a challenge, not because of the quality of the sounds, which are exceptional, but because of the program's less than gracious sequencer (which has finally been updated in version 4.0). My natural compositional style doesn't involve a lot of repeating patterns, so I had to subvert Reason's paradigm a bit.

"Have You Seen My Website?" (6:21, 8.5MB). This song is more or less an hommage to Laurie Anderson, and was recorded in 2001. The synth tracks are intentionally on the cheesy side, for reasons that I hope will become clear as you contemplate the lyrics. There's too much reverb on the vocal (yes, that's me singing), but I'll probably never get around to re-recording the tune, so what you hear is what you get.

"Sunshine Saturday Morning" (6:00, 5.6MB) and "Walk Away" (6:27, 6MB). In 1993 I released a CD of synthesizer music, Light's Broken Speech Revived, through a small East Coast label called Linden Music, which was founded by a talented keyboardist and composer named Kit Watkins. As far as I'm aware, the label no longer exists. In any event, the CD, which sold about 87 copies, has long been unavailable, and the probability that I'll ever want to re-release any of the tunes commercially is very small.

The nice thing about the Internet, though, is that nothing ever really disappears. So here are a couple of tunes from the CD. I'll attempt to resist the urge to tell you all the things I feel are wrong with "Sunshine Saturday Morning" and "Walk Away." Let's just say I know a lot more about technology (and mixing) now than I did then. The tunes and arrangements, it seems to me, hold up better than the recordings.

These two tracks were done in my living room (not an acoustically qualified environment). The only instruments heard are MIDI synthesizers, which at the time meant hardware. The mix automation, such as it was, was done entirely with MIDI CC7 data, and the output of the board went directly to a DAT deck (16-bit, 44.1kHz). No mastering effects were applied. "Walk Away" is one of the very few pieces I've ever recorded that has a fadeout ending. (Hence the title.) Normally I view a final cadence as an opportunity to be creative, and a fadeout as a form of laziness.

At this remove, I have only a dim recollection of which instruments were used in these tracks. For one thing, instruments I never owned tended to wander home from the office for a few months, get used, and return whence they came. The bass line in "Walk Away" definitely came from some sort of Ensoniq, probably a VFX. The main melody in "Sunshine" was played by a Yamaha TX802 module, and the rhythm in the intro came from a Korg Wavestation.

If you enjoy the tracks, please email me and let me know. Frankly, in the isolated world of the home studio/website operator, a little feedback can do wonders for morale!

Between January 1992 and August 1995 I wrote a column on creativity for Keyboard. The column was called Other Windows. Why "Other Windows"? Among other things, it was an oblique reference to Truman Capote's novel Other Voices, Other Rooms, which I had read a few months before the column started. I was also trying, I suppose, to suggest that those rectangular apertures on your computer screen aren't the only way to organize, categorize, or perceive the universe.

If I had to do it over again, I think I'd call the column The Lost Wax Process. But not because I'm a collector of rare vinyl. The lost wax process was an early method of making metal sculpture. The artisan made a wax carving of the figure that was to be created. Clay was packed tightly around the wax figure, leaving only a tiny hole at the bottom. The clay mass was put in a hot oven, where, as the clay hardened, the wax melted and flowed out through the hole. Molten metal was then poured in through the hole. If the heat and weight of the metal didn't crack the clay, and if no air bubbles were trapped as the metal flowed in, when the metal had hardened and cooled the clay could be broken open and thrown away, leaving a cast metal figure in the shape of the original wax.

The lost wax process is inefficient, because you have to make a new wax carving and a new clay mold for each metal figure you want to create. Modern methods, or so I've read, work much better. Even so, it seems to me the lost wax process is a revealing metaphor for the creative process. What we start with isn't necessarily what we end up with. What we end up with is precious, and hard to produce, but what we started with is gone forever.

Eventually I plan to upload a few more Other Windows columns. In the process of preparing the online version of the first batch, however, I quickly discovered that far more than retyping is needed. Beyond correcting the odd infelicitous phrase -- in the first column, "Mysteries," I referred to the "hushed silence" of the concert hall, an obvious solecism; I should have written "hushed reverence" -- I've found that I really wanted to revisit certain topics. A few of the ideas that I was enamored of ten years ago appear, on more mature reflection, to be entirely wrong. More often, angles that I hadn't considered may be apparent now. Besides, what writer can resist tinkering a little when the opportunity presents itself?

So what you'll find on this site is not simply an online edition of Other Windows. It may even seem at times that the essays here are almost essays about Other Windows. Second-generation artifacts, if you will; rendered, one hopes, out of a more durable, but in any event a different, substance. Whether or not you read the originals, I hope you find the new versions thought-provoking.

• Mysteries (Jan. '92)
• Use a Synthesizer, Go to Jail (Feb. '92)
• One, Two, Three ... Many (Aug. '95)