2004 Musical Autobiography and 2005 Supplement and since 2005

2004-2005 logfile for Cross-Cultural Studies in Music at W&L
(many of the links don't work, but you can see what I was trying to do)

Introductory material for 2005 version of Cross-Cultural Studies in Music (plenty of linkrot)

An hour-long interview with musical examples, broadcast on WLUR in 2005

Five minutes or so of the Apollonio cittern, more or less bluesy (2013)

links to FIVE albums of musical improvisations with Daniel Heïkalo

*****

My method is a sort of unconstrained hopscotch:
from one musical example one can leap to any of a vast number of others,
justifying the choice with an engaging story of parallels, contrasts, extensions, counterexamples;
or one can indulge in wanton randomness, leaving the auditor to supply a rationale, or not.
The auditor/victim is either swept up in the narrative and carried along, or exits quietly.

*****

We've all had the experience of epiphany.
Conveying to somebody else in any medium is the greatest challenge of communication.
You have to induct that somebody else into the context of the epiphany.
It's a matter of getting to the place where you can see, hear, read, say --appreciate--
the subtleties, nuances, the message of a packet of information.

*****

18 December 2004:
Music is far too important to be confined to a single academic discipline, or to be relegated to "the Humanities" as if it had no vital connections to the Social Sciences and the Natural Sciences. In fact, more than any other "thing" that I can think of, music can be studied from the perspectives of every discipline, and there's still plenty left over that fits nowhere in the conventional structures of academia. I'm tempted to say (if only to be provocative) that music is really THE most important "thing" in human experience. It's certainly one of the great mysteries, and its archaeological traces are surely as old as Homo sapiens... Perhaps the "technology" that embraces tool making and practical knowledge is more important, or maybe it's language as a medium of communication, but surely music is right up there. How can something so apparently frivolous and non-mission-critical as making structured sound be so universal, and hence so important? And yet it's completely obvious that it is vitally important.

So we want to explore the how and the why, and our adventure will take us to many unanticipated corners of the world, and human knowledge. It won't be orderly, and it won't be"finished" in April. In fact, my dearest wish is that continuing exploration will be seeded in each of the participants in the adventure, that you'll listen differently, and think differently about significance and implication and cross-connection... and that you'll pass on to others the virus of widened interest in soundscapes.

*****

...more to come soon...