The Pleasures of Obscurity

Obscurity isn't invisibility; the "occult" or occluded isn't truly the hidden. It's what you can just make out, but not fully. You can tell it's there but can't quite see what it is. The obscure as an aesthetic principle has interested me for a long time.


Detail of 'View of Amanohashidate' by Sesshū

New Album: Of Celestial Medicine

After a wee hitch came up in my life plans earlier this month, I made a resolution to be prolific this autumn/winter and get on with some of the stack of projects I've been saving for later on when the time is right. The time is now!

On Two Regimes of Rhythm

Today I found words for something that's probably been bothering me in my playing for forty years -- a tension between two fundamental forces or organizational principles that I've been aware of but found difficult to see: the flexibility of time in jazz and the seemingly similar flexibility in classical music. I don't want to labour the point or be self-indulgent here so I'll try to get right to the point.

New Album: Crossing Ligeia Mare

I'm clearing out my house in more ways than one at the moment -- this project has been in the "nearly done" category for a very long time and I'm delighted to be able to release it at last -- more info below the fold:

Is Pitch Class Multiplication Just Nonsense?

There's a technique that occasionally pops up in discussions of post-war serial music that seems to exemplify the idea of "paper music" -- music written to be studied an analyzed but not actually listened to. Let's see if we can make any sense of it.

New Album: Seven Geases

Available to stream and buy now on Bandcamp, should be on all other streaming services in a few days. Listen to the whole thing using this player and check out some sleeve notes below.

Of Moonlight and Bridges, Part 3

In this final installment we look at some chords and harmonic ideas from the Moonlight and Bridge chords, focusing on the most exotic sounds we found last time.

Of Moonlight and Bridges, Part 2

In the previous post I introduced what I'm calling the Bridge Chord and the Moonlight Chord. In the process I made lists of their hypermodes as if it was obvious why I was doing that; in this post we'll peer a bit deeper into the waters we've disturbed and see what we can make out.



Thirteen ways of looking at the Augmented Coscale

For years I've been playing major seventh chords in a cycle of major thirds as a kind of "atonal major tonality". I talked about that here and in other places on this blog. But lately I've been trying major sixths as well, and they produce something similar but different. In fact it's the negative image of something very familiar.



Of Moonlight and Bridges

This post began with this work by Alan Theisen, where he figures out all the ways to combine four triads (major, minor, diminished or augmented) to exactly cover all twelve notes.

It ended up somewhere very different, but let's start there.