Listen to "Heidegger, existential hermeneutics and Bill Clinton" on Spreaker.

The joke that defeated a presidency.

Robert Cogan's book "New Images of Musical Sound"  had an enormous impact on me as a graduate student, a composer and a human being who thinks about music.   

Listen to "the joy of music theory" on Spreaker.

More natural radio;  Transduction and sonicism;  the  meditative stillness as a precursor to death.   With a side of Alvin Lucier and John Cage?  Delicious episode.  

Listen to "sonicism and the precursor to mortality" on Spreaker.

I've written some music  called 'glory birds orange and gold'.   Sometimes I start a piece with an idea about how to use specific synthesis modules...like maybe I want to explore what happens if I use one signal as a controller for another source, or generate a sequence using some particular chain of commands.  Other times, there's a gesture or a sensation, something haptic.  I use the word haptic incorrectly.  Haptics used correctly means something related to the sense of touch.  Like a 'haptic controller' for Virtual reality is something that creates the sense of touch for the participant.  I first came across the word Haptics in a musicology journal to describe the specific physical mechanics required to play an instrument.  If I recall correctly then the article was about the haptics of playing the pipa, which is a chinese  instrument with 64 strings.  

I started to write about the haptics of the radio telescope.  What if we thought about the technical specifications of the telescope broadcast as the required technique to play the instrument.  I could imagine a series of exercise, similar to the scales and arpeggios that a pianist works through to gain fluidity at the keyboard.  

Then I thought about musical composition, where the seed idea of a piece is a sense without a corresponding physical motion.  The haptics of an imagined instrument.  The haptics of emptiness...not yet written music on a not there instrument.  

There's a poem written by Wallace Stevens that captures the mysterious sense of the mind, the space where this first gesture resides.  The music I wrote called Glory Birds Orange and Gold could be the sound of the fire-fangled feathers.  What a glorious turn of phrase:  'fire-fangled'.  I freaking love it.  They are bronze and golden, perhaps like the caged bird singing in byzantium?  What if there were a flock of these creatures, their lovely strangeness perched around the void, guiding us towards this magical annihilation.  Their song would wrench movement out of my gut, that's for sure.

 

And here's the Wallace Stevens poem...

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

 

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

 

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

 

The palm stands on the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Like so much of what I think, what I think about life in the universe I learned listening to Terrence McKenna.    There’s always a challenge to describe the provenance of these ideas.  Terrence McKenna spoke at workshops and gatherings for over a decade, and these sessions were often recorded onto cassette by the other attendees.  These tapes were passed around, with idiosyncratic names, sequences and collections.  Information about where and when the material was recorded rarely exists beyond a note  ( “Omega Institute, summer”).   McKenna wrote a couple of books, but all of the stuff I care about is etched in my mind from those original cassettes.  My ideas are marginalia around his spoken word.   The practice I’ve arrived at is to put in italics the notes that I have taken  that I think captures McKenna’s which then prompt my own responses, reactions, deliberations.   It is from McKenna that I developed my faith in the rap session, in the live recording of voice knowing that some muscle memory of thought will coalesce a phrase, and that the less I pay attention the better it will be.

Out of atomic systems come chemical systems.  Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond, the carbon bond, complex biology that is pre-biotic or organic.  out of that chemistry comes the macro-physics systems that we call membranes, gels, charge transfer complexes…this sort of thing.  these systems are the chemical pre-conditions for life.  Simple life, the life of the prokaryotes, the life naked un-nucleated DNA that characterized  primitive life on the planet. Out of that life come eukaryotes, nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells, and then cell specialization - leading to higher animals, leading to social animals, leading to complex social systems.

I experience that as a sense of precipitation.  Energy, matter, form, biology, culture all precipitate from this cooling entity we call the Universe.  I think this has deep implications for the evolution of biology and the evolution of culture across the universe.  Think of this.  An Ocean teeming with bits.  We  are some of those bits.  We fall asleep as a particle in suspension, surrounded by the blissful completion of the full ocean.  One day ( one cosmic aeon, choose your term) we wake up in a rock pool.  The ocean level has gradually settled and we are now in a discrete region.  Like a rock pool.

We float in the water, and perhaps climb on the walls a bit.  We’ve forgotten or don’t realize how we got there.   In a few more days some of us start to wonder how we got here.  What event caused us to be created in this pool?  We measure the parameters of this pool;  it is a wonderful pool, just fit for our habitation.  We build equations and discover numbers that must be constant. 

Some of our bravest swim all the way to the bottom of the pool and dig around.  They find strange, ancient material.  When they return with these artifacts we develop a theory that our biology grew from the bottom of the pool upwards.

Some of our craziest begin to wonder if there are other pools.  If there are other pools, are there also other beings like us?  Are the unique, possibly random events that led to our existence available in those other rock pools?  Did Beings like us also emerge from the bottom of the pools?  Would they look like us?

Others decide that if there are other pools then those pools are probably filled with cool valuable stuff so they better get there first.  They develop technology to see outside our pool and gradually build craft that can hop over the wall and send back messages.  We find other pools!

So you can see where this is going.  The emergence of life on Earth wasn’t the result of a unique event, building up from a set of specific environmental criteria leading to the current wave of genetic activity.  No, it’s the reverse of that.  We are living in a discrete pool of material, separated from  other similar pools only by time, space and gravity.  Because biology exists on earth, we can know for certain that it exists elsewhere, because we are no more than a port of the gradually cooling muck of the cosmic orogony.  

Certainly, I invoke some poetic license.