Finalized the read of Adam’s memoirs last evening, what was the best chapter of his soliloquy on life, music, and the art of a good acid trip.  Chapter 15 was worth the read and the expense of the book, although I do not find his conclusions well grounded in fact.  He does, to his credit, give a good state of affairs of where musical composition is today.  His analogy to gold mining, his bi-argumental view that music seems to look backwards in a naustalgia for good old days vs looking forward, his take on misconceptions about progress and evolution seem to all ring true.  The last subculture.  The last chapter.  I do not agree that the newer generation of composers, because of the tremendous information they have, will create outstanding interesting new ideas though – which was where he left you as his view.  I thought that was a more pandering and contrived ending to what was the only potentially great chapter of his book.

In the end of things, there were a lot of good tidbits and thought provoking observations in his memoirs worth the reading, and highly suggested to do so.  On the other end, I found the entire reading failed when taken as a whole.  He just doesn’t come through with very convincing arguments or conclusions in each chapter of his life and musical philosophy.  They are delusions that we don’t care anyway, John.

It does bring up some questions in my own recent work,   Little original things.  Why pick an instrumentation up front?  Isn’t that a contrived and limiting demand?  And should I be integrating those well researched designs into a more narrative form, or should I just continue using them as worlds into themselves where they seem to like to live, and screw the new work?  Should I abandon the violin work?

And some conclusions – yes the improvisation is absolutely the correct course to follow.  That opposite pole demands and allows for fluid new voices to form from a personal source regardless of academia or the false path of progress and Darwinism in musical thought these days.  Integrating some technology is also important to your work flow.