Well, as it stands, my last published blog entry should provide the back story, so let us go on with the front story. [editors note, this was actually written a little while ago, so its still back story]

I finally came around to “Ok, lets try this quarter tone thing.” Quarter tones.. it means you take what used to be the smallest musical interval.. which is to say.. take any instrument.. the notes that are right next to each other.. the different between one note and the next.. now divide that by 4.  That’s quarter tone tuning.

For me, quarter tone tuning is a little like going off the reservation without a map..  or its like all the stuff on the dash board, by which you normally drive the car, or perhaps fly the plane.. they all went and took acid on you without telling you about it: When you look at a keyboard.. its obvious what notes are where, and when you suddenly wack out the tuning..  well God only knows, right?

Yeah, I could sit down and actually figure out what the hell is going on.. make special maps, and move forward that way, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right to me. One of the thing that really appeals to my sense of adventure is.. being lost. It’s a little like Luke Skywalker turning off his targeting computer when he goes up against the Death Star.. where not going to rely on anything other then… I guess our own sense of things.

A challenge for the artist, always, is that you have a certain sense of taste.. you have habits.. you have all these things..  things you rely on.. and now we are pulling the rug out of all that… to go see what happens.

So I broke out my keyboard.. I’m no keyboard player, but I can noodle around on a keyboard.. and by doing that, I can kind of explore different possibilities as I go along. “What’s this harmony sound like” “how does this sound next to this.” What I find myself doing is just exploring this strange world.

A few latter:

The compositional process, for me, is a kind of dialog between.. myself and the canvas.. which in our case is a kind of sonic sculpture. I frequently call what I do with sound “sound art” as a pose to “making music” as… I think of it as more of an “artistic” process then “a musicians” process: I don’t think of my self as a great musician.. but a great artist I could be.

So what you’re doing is building this.. lets call it a “sound sculpture.” You’re putting stuff onto the sonic canvas, and in the end its what’s going on in the canvas that matters. All your skills, all you’re knowledge, all your musicianship.. all your abilities as a sound engineer, whatever it is.. in the end it comes down to that thing on the canvas.. 

Knowledge and skills amounts to language.. It’s a framework for understanding reality. Your framework for understanding reality.. has implications on the image of reality you behold. So for instance, my journey into quarter tone tuning.. is one of doing funny things with respect to your framework. For me its like “well I’ll just improvise inside of this context” so it’s a search for a context that will make magic happen.

The thing is, its not just about frameworks, its how you relate to that framework. The term “Dogma” comes to mind. I don’t know if religious people think this way.. but you could say.. on the one hand you have “the law” and on the other you have “your way of relating to the law,” and then you have a heretic like Jesus who comes along.. goes to the extreme of saying “yo, it’s just about loving God.” Jesus would tell you it doesn’t matter if you actually have that affair with your neighbors wife.. it’s did you do that in you heart. This, of course, was radical stuff.

Next Morning:

So I’m now trying to copy my Kontakt Sample library. Kontakt, of course, is a software sampler… Kontakt comes with an apparently incredible sample library… I say apparently because I’ve had a number of technical problems.. including defective DVDs, which has kept me from being able to explore said library. I still don’t have the damn thing working.. but now it looks like its simply a matter of copying the library from the DVDs..

The reason I’m doing this is because.. Well starting out with this piano.. just kind of the direction that was going.. It’s somewhat impressionistic.. and I had thought of throwing in some electronic sounds into the mix.. but I’m now thinking that what I want to do is.. keep thinking in the world of… kinda classical type orchestral stuff.. I mean just timber wise. And my understanding of the matter is that the Kontakt library stuff is the best library for this kind of thing… in my personal libraries anyway… So now its time to get that stuff working.

I do think having electronic stuff in the mix could be very cool.. if you’ve ever listened to OHM.. you hear electronic classical in action..  and I’d like to create that kind of a feel… where the work is basically orchestral.. but with electronic elements.. where the electronic elements function in a particular capacity.. but where the orchestral stuff is really the base of it all. I say this though I never know where my work is going to take me.

Back to the spiritual / relationship to law stuff:

My spiritual beliefs are clearly heretical. Jung has said that religion is a defense against religious experience..  which is to say that the church acts as an intercession between you and God. My sense of the.. way that religions roll in society has diminished.. and the kind of modern cultural climate surrounding it is.. I don’t always feel like religion is really doing a great job of serving the modern situation. There’s a reading of the Bible where you can say “Jesus didn’t come to bring people to the church, he came to bring the church to the people.” So I’d say that’s really the challenge for modern Christianity. 

My feeling is.. well I feel like.. do I even need the church? Couldn’t I just have a direct relationship with God? This is a somewhat dangerous idea.. but when I talk about our relationship to law, to conceptual frameworks, even to language.. I’m talking along these lines.. and so you can see how, on a process level in my work, my work explores this.

Hmm, how about we explore Ozzy’s take on this?

Always nice to have a little Randy Rhoads tribute, ha? (The boy could play!) 

I’ll end this entry here.. so.. I don’t know, what do you think? 

 

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Komplete & Kore, Microtonalism, Music Production, musical composition, philosophy, psychology, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.