2011-01-11T15:28:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year All!

Sorry for the delay in posting gigs.

Had a couple of fun nights at Boccis in Santa Cruz CA with guitarist, Mike Roberto and friends.
Early Jan!

And the Tempest Fugitives-Kid Fate-Chapinistas Band still getting together and playing.

Jan 15th 11 am w/PapaHugs, David Sharpe @ the Tree House in Willow Glen(Children's Music, with Characters and Fun)

Jan 16th 3-7 pm w/vocalist Isis @ Tessora's Barra Di Vino at the Pruneyard, Campbell(blues and jazz)

Jan 23rd 1:30 pm w/PapaHugs, David Sharpe @ Los Gatos Jewish Community Center

Music for Thought!

2008-07-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

I want to include this email in my blog.
Barak is one of our clients and a friend.
This is a subject that I think about almost everyday I play music.

barak perelman wrote:

Mr. Volpicella, I wanted to thank you for the recording session, I listened to the CD about four times today at work (it does pretty well at work, since people don't even notice it) and its an excellent recording. If you do have a chance to listen to it one time, here is a short essay i just wrote in regards to Opus 6 (the piece you recorded yesterday) short essay regarding Op. 6: Many years ago, I made the decision to become a composer because I wanted to create something completely new. After years of struggling to find myself, develop my ideas, experiment and explore, I arrived at a language (Opus' 1 through 6) that uses one tone of fixed length and one rest of fixed length as the only material to construct and develop my ideas. I initially (when I was working on my masters in composition) decided to label my work as "Literalism", but now I am not very concerned with what to call my work. I am aware that those who hear my work may have difficulty perceiving the ideas that I am trying to express (although they can clearly be seen on the page as demarcated by bar lines), but in my defense I will argue that the purpose of new music and art is to push the limits of human perception. My composition deals with unusually long spans of silence for a purely technical reason, because my ideas are constructed of only a few instances of the same tone and the span of an idea can range in size, the ideas mandate a long enough separation between themselves so that ideas can be perceived individually. In the case of Opus 6, material consists of the single tone always grouped in pairs, for the simple reason that it is easy to miss one individual tone surrounded by nothing for extensive durations, which can ruin ones perception of an idea or relationship between ideas; therefore, with two adjacent tones, the listener will not miss as many instances of the tone (hopefully none). I also understand that every individual will have their own unique understanding of my work; however, I must emphasize that although it takes a great amount of focus to enter the composition, the essence of my work is NOT a study in meditation practices nor that of stream of consciousness. There are clear ideas, that I spent months developing, and they are the essence of my work. I know it may be difficult at first to hear the idea(s), but that is only because this is something new. I believe that if my ears can understand the composition's message, anyone can understand my composition. Again, thank you for recording the piece for me, hope to talk to you some day about music when there is more time later -barak

Hey Barak,

Thank you so very much for your email!
And thank you for your short essay.

I completely understand your wanting to push your music to another place. It's just very hard for an artist, because it seems that very few musicians want to search for new things in music. This is something I always scratch my head in wonderment.
I consider it the job of an artist to search and create other sounds. To move forward. Not sit still!
Barak, you do not know how many discussions I have had about this subject. And some people agree and some think I'm just bitter.
So many times at this studio I hear the same old crap! Be proud of what you write and keep going until you don't want to do it any longer. You've studied! You play great piano! Don't try to impress anybody but yourself and to hell what some people might think of your music!

Take Care,

 Tim

Thank you for the e-mail.  you are right of course, the only thing I
would say is i am interested in new ideas, sound is negligible to
me...if it sounds new that is great, but at the end of the day its the
ideas that i remember.  take any sound and you will find that it is
composed of uncountable amount of frequencies, even the "simplest"
noise is irrational.  But ideas, that is what gives the reason,
meaning, understanding.  To come up with really new ideas, that is
hard.

take care, see you guys probably in 4 or 5 months with opus 7

-barak

Tim Volpicella

Music for Thought!