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Back in August of 2012 I moved to New York City after eighteen years in Chicago. I came here to go to school, where one of the things I’m involved with is The Gadfly, Columbia University’s undergraduate philosophy magazine. It’s run by a smart group of people, and I’m happy to be a part of [...]
Today I happened to notice something I wrote back in 2010 at the end of a post about perfect pitch: “… perfect pitch is a tool which, depending on one’s perspective, may or may not be a benefit or liability to musicians and music in general, but is most likely irrelevant either way in the grand scheme of musical [...]
“If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.” – Jaron Lanier, on Facebook ——————— Last week, I explored some of my reactions to the first half of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (originally published in 2010; mine is the 2011 edition, which [...]
Last week I finished up another semester of classes and have a few weeks free, so I have some time to work on some other projects, including getting some posts done for this blog. I don’t have a particular topic for this one, so I’ll just sit and type for a while, touching on some of the [...]
Hello world. Here’s an update of my current goings-on… plus the usual tangential forays into n’importe quoi. Verbum Sap Back in 2001, I recorded an album entitled Verbum Sap that I shelved for reasons that I won’t get into just yet. I’m excited to announce that I’m finally mixing it for release, with a planned drop [...]
This morning, I started writing about a podcast episode I enjoyed that touched on the theme of reductionism. In doing so, I was reminded of Intelligent Design exponent Michael Behe’s notion of irreducible complexity, which lead me to an extensive aside about Intelligent Design that I’m now going to publish as a brief post in [...]
“Callin’ it your job don’t make it right, boss.” –Cool Hand Luke I. Overview: Philip Pettit on Group Agency The other day, I heard a fascinating interview with philosopher Philip Pettit on the Philosophy Bites podcast. The topic was group agency (the subject and title of Pettit’s as-yet unreleased new book), described thus on the podcast’s [...]
Earlier today I posted Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” as an example of an avant-garde attitude that I don’t care for. As an antidote to that, here is a beautiful article by the visionary avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (often referred to as the Father of Electronic Music). To me, this writing is an expression of [...]
In 1958, High Fidelity magazine published the following article by avant-garde composer Milton Babbitt. Babbitt is known for taking serialism to the extreme and for being an active proponent of the modernist movement. This isn’t as cool as it might sound. Fortunately, the sort of attitude in which he took so much pride is increasingly [...]
This is an essay I wrote during a recent period in which I was interested in the question of to what extent, if any, emotion as an inherent property of music contributes to our emotional experience of music as listeners. I first look at some of the prevelant existing ideas on the topic (especially from philosophy [...]
