I’d like to think the way in which I connect to music is somewhat analogous to the way smell and taste work at a micro level – a lock and key mechanism. From what little facts I’ve obliquely retained from high school biology, if the form and shape of a molecule are complementary matches,…

  When The Strokes released the first song off their upcoming album, Comedown Machine, set for release in March, shocked fans wondered if the band had veered into…well, 80s pop territory, A-ha style.  In ‘One Way Trigger’, fast-paced keyboards underlie frontman Julian Casablancas’ straining falsetto as he shifts through inevitable but satisfying pop changes.  Some…

The late great German novelist Thomas Mann has been celebrated for his explorations of time—its ability to speed up and slow down in a sort of life-rubato, its tendency to switch gears, to drift and drag and fly by all at once. Some readers, myself included, have reported feeling this very sense of time shifting…

Throughout history, music has generally been understood as that art that operates through the medium of time. This is in contradistinction to the visual arts, which, for the greater duration of Western philosophical and aesthetic culture, were conceived of as spatial forms that mimetically represented a divine and ordered Nature. We can think of Da…

When we make music, we get to decide how to break up time. Time becomes our clay.  Here’s how you mold it.   The way a musician divides time—how one delineates the musical space—is consistent with the way he or she sees the world. So first, decide how you see the world.   One of…