My dissertation is called *Composing with Blooms*. Blooms is a piece of software that I've been working on, off an on, for about 10 years. It's a tool I made to help me compose. But the project, and this paper, came to be about much more than a tool, because no tool is just a tool. A tool encapsulates a way of thinking, a set of values, and a prioritization of those values. Tools shape how we see and how we think. So you can learn a lot about music, and a lot about yourself, if you take a deep look at your tools and ask a lot of questions. Or, better yet, make your own tools. That's the central pitch of my paper. Making your own tools is a path of self-discovery. If you ask a lot of questions. And this paper is I hope a compelling example of what that interrogation can look like and yield. We usually only notice our tools when they don't work. When you're hammering, your attention is on the nail, until the hammer hits your finger. Then you think about the hammer. My story begins one of these points of pain. For me that moment was a call to adventure. This call began an ongoing effort, off and on for a decade, full of challenges, trials and dead ends. It feels like I'm looking for something, something I feel out there, pulling me, but I can't really say what that thing is. I just feel a lot of possibility glowing. It's a search that always feels like it's just beginning. But along the way it's borne fruit --- I've written a lot of music with it, and it's also helped me understand myself better, and my mind better, and it transformed my relationship with music. The only word I can think of for something like this --- a long search for something that's calling me, that's challenging, exciting, transforming --- the word is kind of cheesy, but it's the right word --- I've been on a quest. (And if this is a little grandiose I blame Dmitri who called my paper a Bildungsroman which got me thinking in these terms.) So here's the story of my quest, and all quests. I'm sure you all remember this from high school English - this is Joseph Campbell's monomyth. ## Call to Adventure So let's start at the beginning. I was in grad school trying to write some piano music like this (play at piano). I was trying to write a music I didn't understand. And I was trying to understand it by listening. I would try to have an open, calm, receptive mind, so that I could inhabit them, identify with them, try to feel what they are feeling. Feel the relationships between the notes. Feel my relationship to them. Feel the ambiguous, bittersweet emotion that they summon in me. Listen to the silence after, feel the question ringing in it, feel the unique flavor of that question. Use that to find what comes next. I call these gestures blooms because there's something beautiful and organic about them, and they give the impression of erupting from a single impulse, like petals from a stem. In order to have this deep, sensitive listening experience, I needed to be very calm, and have an empty open mind. I'm trying to hear as if for the first time. Call this Consciousness 1. But it was very difficult to sustain Consciousness 1 while I was working. The actions of generating and executing and remembering and evaluating and recording these things kept breaking me out of the sensitive receptivity I felt the listening required. Call that Consciousness 2. That guy was getting pretty frustrated. I just kept bouncing back and forth between these two states of mind, and I was getting nowhere. I need another way to work. It turns out that I was having a hunch about something important, and something with very real cognitive basis. My source on this is the life-changing book *The Master and His Emissary* by Iain McGilchrist. Have have any of you read it? It's about our current understanding of why and how our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The pop science version of this is wrong and the picture that's actually coming out of brain science is much more bizarre. Because it appears that our consciousness is really made up of two consciousnesses, one in each hemisphere of the brain, each of which can function independently and experience a unified sense of self on their own. They work together on most tasks but they have radically different experiences of the world. So let's take a look and compare what he says to what I was feeling. So this is the first stroke of a picture I want to build up for you, as I try to share what I think this is all about. It starts from an intuition about and an attraction to a particular domain of experience, which I think is beautifully described by this understanding of how our minds work. In that moment of frustration, I asked: how can I access that open, receptive, intuitive, deep listening state *more* while I'm composing? That's when I thought: I'm going to write a computer program. And luckily, my hero, Jascha Narveson was there in that moment to show me SuperCollider. ## Supernatural Aid If I was going to try to enter and prolong states of tranquil, sensitive openness, I needed help. I thought: a computer would do a better job than me at some of this - playing the piano, for instance, and remembering exactly what it had played. So I modeled a bloom like this: Actually let me just show you in the program. midinotes is which note of the piano to play Velocities is how hard to hit each note timeIntervals is how long to wait until the next note I found that random values for all of these tended to sound unified if I sorted the velocities. You'll see the loudest notes are always in front. This puts a nice contour over the whole thing, where all the notes seem to be the reverberation or emanation from a single impulse. It phrases it in a natural way. (There's an insight for you, *phrasing* is about *sorting.)* Now the bloom is an *object*, in computer-science terms. When you're programming, an object is a thing that has two qualities: it *knows things* and *knows how to do things.* These are its data and methods. This is the bloom's data. Next I set about writing some methods. What do I want a bloom to be able to do? Well, play itself, obviously. `b.play` And I need to be able to hear a different one if I want to. `b.seed` I definitely want to hear it slowing down or getting softer. `b.slower.play` `b.softer.play` `b.slower.softer.play` Isn't that beautiful? Over the years I've written many more of these methods. Like almost 200 of them. I've made a handy interface for the most useful ones that lets me trigger them with keystrokes. This lets me work with my eyes closed. Let me give you a tour. \< 15 min demo and talk through \> So as you can see in a lot of ways this is a labor saving device. It does work for me that I would normally have to do myself --- memory, arithmetic for the transformations, execution, and making something random in the first place. But it's not really about the labor saved. Ironically, on balance I'm sure I've put a lot more work into it than it's saved me. John Cage had a thought about this once. This is the epigraph for my paper. It's not about saving labor, it's about shifting consciousness. ## Crossing the Threshold This shift in consciousness has three aspects. First, it helps me shift my attention from parts to wholes. When I'm focused on memory, arithmetic, and execution, I have to think about all the individual notes separately. By handing off those tasks the computer, I can step back and live in the experience of each as a unique whole. According to McGilchrest this is the view of the right hemisphere. Second, it helps me not know what's going on inside. This may seem like a bad thing. But having a relationship with the unknown is actually why I like doing this in the first place. I'm going to talk about that a lot more later. Third, it changes the nature of my agency. I can do a lot with these, but there are a lot of things I can't do. Transformations happen wholesale and often produce random or unforeseeable results. Blooms are very hard to micromanage. But I'm not taking my agency out of the equation altogether. This is very important to emphasize. It's not a program that writes music for me. It's not an automaton. I've found that there can be a big temptation to make such a monster, when you're in the coding mindset. I put this down here, in the trials and temptations part. It's very tempting to try to make the **Instant Music Machine.** That is, the one button program that helps you meet your deadlines. There's a lot going on in AI art right now, they're all in the thrall of this siren song. Don't fall for it, and here's why. Making music is fun. If a computer does all the work, we miss out on all the fun. When I put all my work into making the machine, it was the machine I came to love, not the music that came out. The music was just 'output.' I don't want to give up my agency because being involved in the notes is part of what makes the notes matter to me. It's like Cage says. Our machines should give us *more* work to do, not less, because the work is where the good stuff is. I learned this lesson the hard way. At some point I realized I wanted my agency back. What I'm going for is a kind of loose agency that lets me be *more* involved on other levels. Our core metaphor for making music is *making*. With 'making' you picture tools in a shop, construction, things assembled from smaller things. But in the paper I describe Bloom praxis as a kind of foraging and cooking. I start out into the woods not knowing what I'm going to find. I don't know what I'm going to find but I have an idea of the kind of thing I'm looking for. I might find one, or I might find something else. And then I go home and cook it. I know some tricks for making whatever I find into a full meal. I'm not just a passive receiver of whatever comes out, like a classic experimental music science project, but nor am I in a position to ever really dictate that any particular thing happen. So it doesn't eliminate my will, but it does de-emphasize it, and redirects it toward a posture of receptivity, curiosity, and exploration. And this tilts my posture away from the left hemisphere to the right. \~ Randomness is particularly important here, and places Blooms in a particular tradition. We of course think of Cage and Xenakis as two pioneers of chance in music. But the tradition in art is actually much older and more widespread, and also can also be understood as a strategy of shifting consciousness from the left to the right hemisphere. This is McGilchrest again: "Although inspiration cannot be relied on, not forced or willed into being, it could be indirectly courted by using chance as a way to limit the power of conscious intention, allowing a cooperation between what is given and what comes to be created by the artist. Thus famously Leonardo advised painters to take their starting point from the shape of a chance outline, created by, for example, damp stains on a wall, 'because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.' According to Kris and Kurtz, Leonardo's recommendation is far from unique: We became aware of how extraordinarily widespread these connections are when we learn that the eleventh-century Chinese painter Sung-Ti advised Ch'en Yung-chih to create a picture of a landscape in accordance with the ideas suggested by a tumbledown wall: 'For then,' he said, 'you can let your paintbrush follow the play of your imagination and the result will be heavenly and not human.'" \[In this view\] the artist's creation \[is\] a discovery, rather than invention..." p 310 In this view the art object has a kind of semi-transparency --- you're looking at it, but you're also seeing through it, 'to the heavenly and not human' as Sung-Ti put it, which resonates obviously with John Cage, who repeated this statement throughout his life: "the function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation." Which is the same as Xenakis putting, in his words, 'universal scientific laws' into the hearts of his pieces. So you have this experimental, empirical chance tradition going on in blooms, but you also have what we usually think of as the opposite, the hyper-objectified world of serialism --- which is basically just treating the parameters of music as independent lists to be transformed. Which is exactly what's happening here. ## The Trials Temptations and trials! I've already told you about the Temptation. The trials --- I'll spare you. Writing software is hard. ## The Abyss I have to warn you about the Abyss. **FRAME.** Dan, I remember you warning me about this too. Coding is addictive. It's easy to sit down to make music *with your software* and end up just working *on your software*. It's definitely helped me write music, but it's also helped me *not* write music, if you know what I mean. So you have to be intentional about when you're sitting down to make the tool, and when you're sitting down to make music with it. ## Transformation ### What can I do? I said at the beginning that my central pitch is this: "Making your own tools is a path of self-discovery. Especially if you ask a lot of questions." And by 'asking' I mean inhabiting questions, walking around in them, kicking stuff, *living into them* for a period of time. And I mean asking actual questions and trying to answer them in words. I want to thank my teachers and this school for prompting me to do this. And for the opportunity to come and talk about it. And just for being great teachers, my time here was life changing. Thank you. And having to write this paper, and do this kind of verbal interrogation and research, it's made the whole adventure much deeper and more meaningful for me. Thank you. The rest of this talk will be about two big questions. The paper has a lot of different lines of interrogation but I think these two are the ones that transformed me the most, my understanding of myself, my mind, and music. The first one is: What can I do with this? It's a tool --- I made it, and so it has a lot of me in it, but I can't know what world it opens up until I use it. I know what my own ideas are, or at least I *kind of* know, but I won't know the *consequences* of those ideas, and how they all interact to create a space, a topography of possibility, until I use it. Here's probably my favorite image of all time. It's a metaphor of how genes interact to create a landscape of possibility, but not a specific destiny, for a single cell. For us, the bottom is our ideas we put into a tool, and the top is the world they unfold for us to traverse. This is what I mean by self discovery. If you are up for another metaphor, picture this. Our tools are reflections of us. So if you make your own tool, for something that uniquely you want to be able to do, it's like making a mirror that you can hold up to see yourself, except this mirror isn't a flat surface but it keeps unfolding and unfolding into a whole world *as you use it*. Kind of like a video game. I like how Thor Magnusson writes about this: **FRAME.** I feel like I've just scratched the surface of my Bloom world, but I gone in and pulled out some pieces that I'm going to show you in a few minutes. But first I want to tackle the second question. Why do I do with this? I left this typo in for you, Jeff. It could be in your New English Grammar. ### Why? Why am I making these sounds in the first place? What is it about them that attracts me, and what can I learn from that attraction? Let's hear a few more. I think there are two related qualities that attract me. \~ I'm attracted to their ambiguity. They're confusing. They often short circuit the part of my brain that is measuring and modeling what I'm hearing and connecting it to what I already know --- which is the left hemisphere, by the way. It can't keep up, and so it relaxes, opening me up to a more direct experience. Which keeps me more sensitive, "more vigilant for whatever is." Which, remember, is a description we saw before about the right hemisphere's attention. \~ Second, I am attracted to the emotions they evoke. They are very often wistful and tender and mysterious and fragile and sad. Where do these feelings come from? Harmony is clearly doing a lot of the work. There's a lot of harmonic tension, which we tend to experience as wanting to resolve, although of course the wanting is in us, not in it. Resolution is union. In harmony, we feel a potential for union that is unfulfilled. And that introduces time, because it points into a future, and somehow that pulls at our heart. So in a random bloom we often get a bundle of unresolved and self-contradictory relationships. It's not like a 4-3 suspension where there's one obvious way to settle this. Any potential resolution of one note will create a new tension with another, and so on. There are many possible more-stable shapes that this could take, and we may even be experiencing all of these at the same time, superposed. McGilchrest writes a lot about unresolved and self-contradictory experiences, for example in this passage about Renaissance poetry: "Renaissance poetry... reiterates the union of pleasure and pain, the affinity of sweetness and sadness. Because of its reliance on indirect expression, metaphor and imagery, and its tolerance of the incomplete and unresolved, rather than on explicitness and the resolution of contradictory propositions in the pursuit of clarity and certainty, the epistemology of the right hemisphere is congenial to ambiguity and the union of opposites, where that of the left hemisphere cannot afford to be." So here's the connection between ambiguity and complex emotion. So I'm adding another stroke to the picture from before, the picture of consciousness. I am searching for right-hemisphere experience. I'm doing it in two ways. One, by creating a new working method which favors it --- software that lets me shift my consciousness --- and (2) I'm working with materials that favor it, because they are difficult to categorize, and evoke mixed, complex, difficult to categorize emotions. The left hemisphere only sees its own categories of things. It's reductive and re-presentational. I'm after the presentational. To put it all in one sentence --- I'm seeking a calm, sensitive openness to incomplete, unresolved, ambiguous images, that project complex emotions, pleasure and pain, sweetness and sadness. I'm not just seeking them, I feel pulled to them. This idea of *a pull* is important. We said each bloom is a bundle of unresolved and self-contradictory relationships. You could call these relationships lines of longing --- they're pulls to resolution, to union, criss crossing every which way. All these trajectories both create and confuse our feelings about what comes next. They create anticipation without expectation --- that's the question mark feeling I feel, anticipation without expectation. And they create longing without wanting. McGilchrest makes the distinction between longing and wanting this way. "Wanting is clear, purposive, urgent, driven by the will, always with its goal clearly in view. Longing, by contrast, is something that 'happens' between us and another thing. It is not directed by will, and is not an aim, with the ultimate goal of acquisition; but instead a desire for union - or rather it is experienced as a desire for *re*-union. This goes with there not necessarily being a simple explicit version of what it is that is longed for, which remains in the realms of the implicit or intuitive, and is often spiritual in nature." I think of the tender, wistful and sad sensations arise in us when we enter into them and experience their longing for resolution. That's "the pull, the tautness, as in a bow string." The fact that we can't put our finger on exactly what resolution would sound like -- unlike say a 4-3 suspension where we know what's coming -- means that it is activating the realm of the implicit, intuitive, and spiritual, again, the realm of the right hemisphere. \~ I want to expand this idea for a moment. It's my view that this is at the heart of what we mean by 'being an artist' -- in the sense that we all feel that being an artist is a kind of calling, a way of life, not just a vocation or social role. In this sense, to be an artist is a way to live a life of longing. To live in relation to something unknown, and feel a pull toward it, that adds meaning to life. That's the calling. It's a desire, but not a desire to acquire, but a desire to unite with what we have not yet made. We feel that something in us --- in our imagination, in our potential --- and yet that thing is also over the horizon, unknown and unformed. We desire to be united with it, so we try to make it. Benjamin Britten said "Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house - the color of the slates and bricks, the shapes of the windows. The notes are the bricks and mortar of the house." There is that motion from the implicit to the explicit, from the unknown to the known, from the left to the right. But something in us pulls us to drive out into the fog in the first place. And it's that pull, that living longing, that gives not just an artistic life its meaning, but I think all kinds of life their meaning. For more evidence that this might be true, look at the other domains of life that give us meaning, and think about how they do it. Religion, all kinds of love, mission and ambition, idealism, *questing*, all of these are ways to live where we feel something inside of us reach toward something outside, with a pull toward union, that 'tautness as in a bow string.' The German word for longing is *sehnen,* which is also the word for tendon - there again we have this idea of elastic connection. I hope you can understand why I think the ambiguity, unknowability, and tender longing of blooms makes them a microcosm, and my Ariadne's thread, into the heart of a life in art. \~ And I really think about music very differently now. This pursuit has changed me. You could say I'm much more of a phenomenologist than I used to be. That is, I'm interested in the experience of music much more than the content or the structure or the techniques or the history or the politics or whatever. I don't think it's all in our heads but consciousness matters. The type of attention you bring as a listener or as a performer or a composer matters --- if not determines what the music means. And this shift, in prioritizing the experience over the content has changed my life. It's led me away from academia, to be honest. Now, the two most meaningful areas of my life now are prison music and Indian music. I don't think I'd be doing either of them if I was still judging music by its content. ## The Return So FINALLY let's get into some music! You already have a taste of this early bloom style. I think of this as the 'classical style' - lots of silence, each bloom one at a time, lots of repetition so you can register small changes. This aesthetic is all about *magnifying the salience of difference*. By that I mean that by *titrating difference*, by making the amount of change small between each bloom, it makes the significance of *small* changes *large*. A re-arranged note or emphasis here or there makes a big difference when you're brought into this kind of microscopic listening. This is music where every little thing matters, which is aesthetic but possibly also an ethic, having to do with caring, and wanting everybody to be meaningful and to have space to be heard. This is music that invites us to practice being more sensitive. I've spent a lot of time in the world on my own, but have had a hard time committing them to a finished form. I did a few acoustic pieces --- an electric guitar quartet, and one of my bowed vibraphone quartets. But I feel like I didn't really sit down to do the pure idea until recently, so that's what I want to show. **\<Full Bloom 3 edit\>** I find this music really gorgeous but I admit it's quite narrow, and I do burn out on it after a while. The stopping and starting, pregnant pause thing has a lot to offer but it can also get pretty ponderous. So I started to explore other things that I could do. And I found that it's really great for working in cycles, patterns, states of flow. **Bloom Suite** **Facets** **New Year's Day** It also helped me find a rhythmic mode that I've used in a few pieces, particularly these nocturnes. **Two Nocturnes** **Flows** **Flowerpot Music Books** **What's next**