The Melt

March 28, 2013

A number of years ago now I came across a copy of Andre Gedalge’s Treatise on the Fugue at a kind of “Boot” sale I snagged because of Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach. I was interested in how the text was structured and formatted, not nearly so much in the material itself. A couple of years go by and my Father, nearing retirement, has picked up his interest in music again, lending some creedence to something I’d heard about how a person will often find themselves returning to the interests of their youth later in life and resulting in me getting some very expensive music software as Pops worked through a number of options and I’ve been making crude attempts at writing out the main voices I hear after I got stung by your Silent Breeze piece in a piece on John Bonner and his work with slime molds out of Princeton here in the u.s. and though I know this isn’t an area I’ll ever “shine” in I felt you might care to know that I have somehow found myself with that copy of Gedalge off it’s shelf and back in my “office” but now the notes I scribble in the margins of those books I’m trying to “digest” as the saying goes are about the music, not the layout. I suppose what I’m reaching at with all this is something like; You have produced something that is one of those rare things in my life that came out of the blue in an unexpected way and affected me in a manner that has opened my experience to new areas I just wasn’t aware of before… I hear music in such a different way way now and want to know it in a way that wasn’t there before and I’m not trying to say that this hasn’t come without some amount of disconcertion or… well it can be a little unsettling to hear an old familiar tune with a new ear. I’ve come to feel that the very definition of “art” is to offer an audience a new way to view the world irregardless of any constraints on aesthetics requiring beauty or similar formal standards. That is craft, not beneath, or lesser than art, but very different in its goals and purpose as pleasing the audience is not the point of art yet a craftsman must do so if he is to make a living doing so and the best artists (IMHO) are the ones who do both art and craft and I suspect that you Sir are just such a soul.
“A pat on the back to an artist could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life.
Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.”
-Kevin Smith director of Clerks (and my personal fav Dogma)

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March 28, 2013

radiomovies

Dear Jay
I cannot tell you how much this means to me.
You’ve written some very kind things about what I do, but more importantly you’ve touched on something really important which I find so hard to articulate.
The GEB book was a critical thing for me when I was younger too – I was trying to find a way into playing Bach’s musical offering using multitracked cello.

I

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