Author: Tobias Reber

Hallelujah

Have you ever noticed how, in the first verse of Hallelujah, the music mirrors exactly what the lyrics are saying? A verse that is not just describing the power of music in a few simple words, but also the music we are hearing right at this moment. The general and the particular.

It goes like this, the fourth the fifth

(each number accompanied by the F and G major chords on the IV and V degree in the major key)

the minor fall

(the A minor chord on the VI)

and the major lift

(back to the F major chord on the IV)

Some poets are able to touch our hearts and some make us think, and the best of them do both.

Goodbye, Leonard Cohen.

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Cricket Transmissions

My composition “Cricket Transmissions” was released in the latest issue of the online sound poetry magazine Huellkurven. Listen to Issue 5 here.

Here’s the liner notes I wrote for my piece:

“Cricket Transmissions” is a concept piece composed for a compilation by the .microsound mailing list on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of William S. Burroughs’ novel “Naked Lunch” in 2009. In a lecture at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado on April 20, 1976, Burroughs explained “the origins and theory of the tape cut-ups”. I’ve taken an excerpt of the recorded lecture and instead of cutting it up in the time domain I cut it up into ten frequency bands, omitting everything below 800 Hz. I then moved the bands out of sync with each other and cut out “transmission drop outs” here and there. The title and sonic concept is of course a nod to the typewriter insects in David Cronenberg’s movie adaptation of “Naked Lunch”.

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Back to Work

I woke up this morning with the existential dread over my future that gets the better of me from time to time, long before I thought of reading the news. When it finally occurred to me to do that, my immediate response was: back to work.

Back to the hard work of being human.

Back to working on my art, so that others may feel what I’m about. And just maybe, what they themselves are about.

Back to working on my vision, however small my influence may be.

Back to caring for my health, so that I may be of better service in caring for others.

Back to raising my daughter, who raised herself into a proper sitting position for the first time early this morning. Let me be like her: just doing the work at hand, one step at a time. Raising myself.

Back to showing my grown-up and children students that music gets us in touch with ourselves, that it encourages abstract thinking, that it fosters the imagination.

That using, producing, hacking, modifying and criticizing media sharpens our awareness of the made-ness of our technological environments.

Composing is listening. Learning to ask better questions, then asking again. Going deeper. Learning to think like an artist means learning to perceive, and reflect on our perceptions, and then to act.

These are crucial tools and facilities for a life of agency, responsibility and dignity. May we be creators, not just be shaped by others. May we be programmers in the true sense, and seize what agency we have.

All of the above will move us toward a path to our inner life, and the inner lives of other humans and non-humans.

Attention is love. Who and what do you give it to, moment to moment?

Back to receiving instead of broadcasting. Artists need antennae first, loudspeakers second.

Back to poking the filter bubbles so they may burst, both mine and those of others. When have we spoken in person for the last time, not just through a social media broadcast?

Back to doing my best to ask how you are, and then really listen, and maybe ask again. Like I try so hard to do. Like I encounter so rarely.

It will be good to see you. I want you in my life. Talk to you soon.

Now back to the Work. What else is there that we can do?

This is where I usually mention my newsletter, but today I just want to say thanks for reading and for being there and doing your work.

I Give You A Tool

I give you a tool. We don’t know who made it. You use it.

I give you a tool that I made. You use it.

I give you a tool that someone made. You use it and study it, and come to know its strengths, its shortcomings, its unexpected or unintended benefits.

I give you a tool and show you different ways of using it. You try them out and use them.

I give you a tool and show you different ways of using it. You try them out and use them and improve on them. Ideally, you then teach me.

I show you how to make a tool. You build it and use it.

I show you the thinking behind the tools I and others make. You study their history, traditions, the conditions that led to their inventions, the needs they adressed when someone first thought of them. Now you come up with your own tool.

Then you invent your own way of making tools according to your ideas and needs. You build them, refine them, and use them.

You document why and how you made your tool, and how I can make one myself.

You give me a tool.

All different ways of relating to one another, different distributions of authorship, power and influence. This does not just apply to art, but the consequences can be particularly striking there. The things we work with can be the things we think with – if we see the opportunity.

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