thinking about playing music, description/explanation (see below**) http://www.alansondheim.org/digiorgio1949-1.jpg http://www.alansondheim.org/cool.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/zendo.mp3 http://www.alansondheim.org/digiorgio1949-2.jpg *//produced through the KDATE program which is a catalyst for thought and rearrangement.//* "I create music because I find music a problem. I play thinking about that problem, that set of problems. For example, embodiment and sound. For example, thought and sound." in any case i haven't abandoned music, i play with a sleight-of-hand, i fake fake books, i work around chords and tend towards confusions which resolve through repetition, i move from one to another instrument, always on the go, always correcting, working fundamentally on fundamental speed, i remain within the bounds of the instrument, i study those bounds and their history, i persevere. and for me, the bottom always dropping out, no one could possibly like this stuff, my explanations forms of false props holding up lies and empty air, really a kind of bewilderment - and then of course bewilderment that anyone would want to listen to this stuff, listen to the 'problem' -their movements bringing the rest of the body into alignment and sorrow, turning away, a shade too soon or late - as well as the problems of music's physicality, beckoning from another more perfect realm, a kind of physical metaphysics of music entangled with minkowski space, helmholtz's researches, current neurophysiologies - what the issue is with music, an inability to hear pitch correctly, tinnitus as well, no musical training, no ability to read notes, confusion over harmony, inability to sing or match pitch - every instrument, every moment is a new one, a new resolution and new problem, something soon forgotten as i move on - i attempt new scales which i insist on in spite of any resolutions, i work around them, circumnavigate, circumambulate, they're in my blood -it remains within my fingers and their prowess, fighting against repetitions and familiar phrasing, punishing myself when they occur, finding them problems somewhat like the major scale, preferring the minor with its intense slippages at the upper and lower ends of the octaves, acting theatrically as if i could channel the amazing slowly moving repetitions of so many cultures and their care of their intervals - so i'm tunneling through music rather than reading the notes, hearing the surfaces to which i might as well be deaf, which is why my music circulates within me in untoward ways, a form of fetishization i think, always returning to, expanding and curtailing, the body and its musculature, its breathing, its tremors, its tremblings, jouissance - returning always to holding my breathing within the tsunami of notes and consonances, furiously presenting dissonance as if irrationally descending, using repetitions to establish those dissonances, they upwell from beneath - all of this foreground the problem of music, problem of sound, within and without my register - always mindful, always within a mindfulness and yes, a sense of shame as well, something that doesn't cohere with me, almost an embarrassment, anxiety, as if i'm always an imposter, insistent on that, ignoring or beneath my judgment, as if, 'what have we here' as if, 'what do we hear' - a problem related to the body, the mind, the very physicality of the fingers, the mouth, often without rhythm, without rhyme or reason, a kind of shameful debris of the body as if it were closed off to any sound, as if it realized it was impossible to play any sound, in relation to any other sound, whatsoever - my life, my music, filling, fills me with regrets, why did i ever begin something i'm incapable of doing, bringing to any sort of completion, something, this music, which transforms me into trash, these fingers which continue and continue, swiftly and with a life of their own - or a tending through these to the sound itself, always back to the sound, although to be honest, often when i play my consciousness splits, and splits several times over, thinking of other things while being transported, a kind of self-consciousness and otherwise thought as well - which i bring back to the sounds and movements literally at hand - as if there were a kind of control at work somewhere in the depths of my mind - another fiction - Sun Apr 8 02:42:13 EDT 2018 ** The Music Problem Manifesto Revisited: "I create music because I find music a problem. I play thinking about that problem, that set of problems. For example, embodiment and sound. For example, thought and sound. Or the obdurate in music, or what constitutes attention. Or the withdrawal of attention, and then, procedures. Or not procedures but unconscious choice. Which then returns to procedures and a kind of exhaustion. Or the instrument itself, instruments themselves. And what constitutes the tending of these instruments. What constitutes their embodiment and sound. And what of the thinking of these instruments. Their obdurate. The attentiveness necessary for the production of sound. And what are the channels of sound through and around them. What of their relation to us, their beings to us. The semiotics of sound which is always already behind us. The semiotics of silence which is always before us. The sound which is yet to be produced. The memory of sound which has been produced. The memory of structure and of structures of structures. The attentiveness to that memory. The withdrawal of attentiveness from that memory. And the unwieldiness of this situation. Or these situations. And the obdurate or dynamics of that unwieldiness. So there is this set of problems and pleasure plays no part. Or pleasure or unpleasure surrounds this set. Surrounds this set as forgotten or as a diacritical mark. The mark which tethers the music to the social or example. Or to accomplishment for example. Or the lack of accomplishment. Or the aegis of failure or success. So that I am not a musician or am a faux musician. Or am a musician manque or a failed musician. Or someone walking near a parapet in the fog. The walkway along the bank of a nighttime river. The sound of the water moving slowly. The lights by which I insist this is not a program. Nor programmatic music nor a lyric. It is a walk by the Thames on a rainy night. It is March 1824 and the moon is new." +++ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@lists.netbehaviour.org https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
