still mastering tracks for "the time canvas"

you know how summer go, go, goes...

time canvas, chinese medicine

production on "the time canvas" is almost completed.

still reading up on traditional chinese healing techniques using hand therapy, qi gong principles, etc,.. i would like to read more advanced books on the subject, but i cannot find where an appropriate starting place would be. the books i have found are either very basic or ones you need to be in a teaching certificate course to understand. i am not interested in acupuncture, just the qi gong and massage aspects of it.

i would also like to read a general history book on the origins and development of chinese medicine. i have not really been interested in this before other than a little qi gong, but my curiosity is now piqued.

Tropic of Cancer

"How few the days are that hold the mind in place; like a tapestry hanging on four or five hooks. Especially the day you stop becoming; the day you merely are. I suppose it's when the principles dissolve, and instead of the general gray of what ought to be, you begin to see what is. Even the bench by the park seems alive, having held so many actual men. The word NOW is like a bmb thrown through a window, and it ticks." -Henry Miller

Sorry for the book descriptions and author's quotes. I will get back to developing real posts again shortly.

uncanny valley

What I have been reading recently:

"Mortal Engines" by Stanislaw Lem.

Bits & pieces from the introduction:

"Artificial men have traditionally been monsters, in our literature and in our imagination."

"Possibly in the Romantic horror of the artificial man there also lay the submerged feeling that man himself was a being in whom great evil slept, evil which could be controlled only by a soul; without the soul, this evil would run rampant."

"As the 19th century wore on, the concept of natural man became more objectified; man was considered less a being of spirit and soul, more a material thing and subject to the Laws of Nature (Darwin, Marx); and some writers began to look upon the growing ascendancy of Science as a potential threat to man's humanity."

"The anti-rationalist narrator in Dostoevksy's Notes from the Underground sees the scientifically defined man as a soulless mechanism, a creature devoid of individuality and independence. Dostoevsky's idea that the eventual scientific analysis and definition of men would turn man into a machine was taken up in the early 20th century by two opposing groups of writers; those for and those against - often termed the Utopians and the anti-Utopians."

Yet another lovely short-story collection by Lem revolving around artificiality. His works remind me of an updated, sci-fi/scientific version of Rabelais. The most difficult concepts incorporated into flawless writing (even despite the translations) with appropriate comedic effects mixed in.

Also reading a book on hand therapy:

Little book I picked up while wandering around Philadelphia's Chinatown a few hours prior to playing. Appropriate timing because just the weekend prior, I was wondering how to diagnose potential future health issues with the use of pain felt in the hand. Still looking into that whenever I get a free moment, which unfortunately isn't often enough, but I have been referring to this nice little diagram:

time canvas track info

1 minute of happiness
2 minutes of war
3 minutes of birds
4 minutes running
5 minutes on solaris
6 minutes in a japanese tea garden
7 minutes of shiva chanting
8 minutes of possibilities
9 minutes in the dreamtime
10 minutes on earth

music as situation in time - part 1, the beginning

i have been trying to create my own interpretation of an idea inspired by antheil.

most notably this, which is still in my mind over a month later:

"ballet mecanique, while utilizing (subconsiously, for at the time this work was written, 12 tone-ism was unknown as such) both systems, concentrated on what i then called "the time canvas." rather than to consider musical form as a series of tonalities, atonalities with a tonal center, or a tonal center at all, it supposed that music actually takes place in time; and that, therefore, are merely his crayons, his colors. the 'time-space' principle." -from the preface of "ballet mecanique"

which leads to the following from the nordic journal of music therapy (webpage of source cited below):

"Music itself is a kind of situation, with is particular materiality, syntax and semiotics. We need a music-focused musicology to describe some of the sonic differences, which give rise to our musical cognitions. However, to understand the pragmatics of the situation, i.e. the special effects, functions or consequences of music, one has to go beyond the analysis and out into the world, into the specific situation and its concomitant experience."

for the latest cd i am working on (6 completely finished, a 7th i need to completely do over and 3 others which keep on changing in content) i have taken the title "the time canvas" as a way in which to musically the explore the idea of music as a situation in time. intellectually, i am trying to work out the idea on this page. i hope the beginning posts in this blog have laid a steady foundation for me to work on and for you to understand as i continue this process. at this point i even hesitate to consider them songs, because i hope they will be able to evocate a moment in time which one could experience fully.

i will go into examples in the next post. i was writing out the elements expressed in song #2, "2 minutes of war" as can be heard on my myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/adititahiti until i realized one problem with the piece. it can be heard distinctly as a moment in the past. perhaps the 1910s, but most certainly not what we are used to experiencing now. so what does it mean to "create" a situation only to find that it does fit within a past time period? should the musical situation fit within our known linear period of time or should it be a period of itself, existing outside of time? does it make a difference? is it enough to mimic life within one framework of reference, i.e. music? does it have to be purified, existing purely as its own as a universal element as opposed to an identifiable period of time? i will try to address these questions over the course of the next few posts.


(http://www.njmt.no/artikkelruudnewmusic.html)

Utopia & The Way

"I have put belief in Utopias afar from me. Either this world is a sort of incubator out of which we hatch into some other better or worse state of being, or it is not." (48, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

"One wants to find out what sort of things endure, and what sort of things are transient; what sort of things recur; what propagandas profit a man or his race; to learn upon what the forces, constructive and dispersive, of social order, move; to learn what rules and axioms hold firm, and what sort fade, and what sort are durable but permutable, what sort hold in letter, and what sort by analogy only, what sort by close analogy, and what sort by rough parallel alone." (48, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

"The artist paints the thing as he sees it, real or unreal, he gives his interpretation or he makes his more fervent statement. He must be as free as the mathematician. If he is by chance a great artist he will want to present as much of life as he knows. He will have no time to make repetitions." (25, Pound, Patria Mia and the Treatise on Harmony)

If taken in combination with the above, the artist MUST make repetitions in order to show that he truly understands the workings of nature as he sees it. And let us not forget the mathematician. It must be both what endures and what is transient, and Pound's "Cantos" are a perfect combination of those two concepts. "Patria Mia" alone is a struggle between these two points, whether he should stay on focus with the writing of the America of his time or veer off into the transcendental.

And when he mentioned the mathematician, the first thought that popped up in my head was the geometer from "The Manuscript found in Saragossa" by Jan Potocki.