Sort of Like the Photo Below of the Black Wooden Pieces

I think that there are really two poles of my interest and in my music, which interact like magnetic poles.

One deals with music of a continuous nature. This can be imagined as a drone or as like a pedal tone in a Bach organ piece, but one with no figuration above it, such that that the pedal tone itself or the details within it come into focus and figure/ground relations are discovered within it itself, and infinitely. Periodic pulses, regular and/or overlapping ostinatos also. These have similar effects. For me, the music I am writing dealing with these affects has to do with perception. It has to do with perceptual activity and creating a field for it to occur within. I am not pushing anyone but it is like an installation of sorts, an environment one enters voluntarily in which certain peculiar perceptual affects take place.

The second aspect of my interest deals with what at first seems to be the opposite. Music (by which, of course, I mean simply organized sound, or even sound-payed-attention-to, as this itself is a highly organizational activity), anyway, music made of sounds and silences whose relations and durations are unpredictable. In other words these occur with an aperiodic or at least an unpredictable juxtaposition or intersection to one another. This can be true for the performer, for audience members, or both. Who, after all, can say what another will predict?

The interesting thing for me, is that these two situations that I love seem at first to be so opposite one another, yet in truth they are completely related.

In the first case, the music functions almost as a machine for focusing attention.

In the second, focused attention is required for one to be interested. By "interested" I mean for separate from what one might ignore in the outside world. By being interested in such textures one's perceptual acuity is developed. Its fascinating.

well

interest = payed attention to

isn't that interesting?