Saul Bellow's comments (below)on the condition and treatment of American Poets: Hart Crane, Edgar Allan Poe, John Berryman etc..from his novel Humbloldt's Gifts.I felt this quote enormously profound in its implication of what becomes of older artists in every medium and particularly how artists are percieved in this country. Many are placed into the category of deranged genius's like Thelonius Monk or Bud Powell.

"This country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poet's testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkeness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can't make it here. They exist to light up the enormity of the awful tangle and justify the cynicism of those who say, 'If I were not such a corrupt, unfeeling bastard, creep, thief, and vulture, I couldn't get through this either. Look at those good and tender and soft men, the best of us. They succumbed, poor loonies."

" The highest aim of art is to make life more livable,more beautiful, more humane, less violent."

Musician/Composer Dr. George Russell

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure! It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of god. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of god that is within us. It's not just in some of us. It's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fears, our presence automatically liberates others."

--- Marianne Williamson from "A Return To Love"

"Finally I am free to discover who I am on the piano, what I like to do, where my hands happen to fall and cultivate it and make it sing; Bill Dixon was the first person to encourage me to create music this way. I collect and construct things. I believe a compostion must have beggining, middle, and end. I've never been very fond of repertoire. I want to go somewhere else each time and see what I find. I believe rhythm is still an unexplored territory. Even the simplest musical ideas can be given a complex aura by the way they are placed. I strive for a variety of attacks and dynamics.There is always a problem in the balance of color and saturation between the pedaled and unpedaled sounds and how that affects the sounds of the other instruments. Why should someone come hear my work? Well thats my responsibility; there has to be a reason.

-Eric Zinman

There is a tendency for people to look to art/music to provide a sense of familiarity, comfort and reassurance. Its no wonder, then that their critiques are likened to the treatment of model airplanes particularly in the way we percieve varied interpretations of traditional pieces. It would seem that musicians have trained their audience well.

 -Eric Zinman

It is my misfortune----.and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! How awful for a painter who loathes apples to have to use them all the time because they go so well with the cloth. I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things ---- so much the worse for them; they just have to put up with it.

---[Picasso]

I think what is so mesmerizing about large ensembles are the vibrations created by the masses of sound..timbres etc....you can't do all the things you do in the small intimate settings but I've developed a hunger for large ensembles as if all the problems of music in the 21st century are being solved here and now by all these bodies in the room singing and moving together........I remember Bill Dixon had this vision that in the future musicians in the symphony orchestra would not need to use calligraphy in performance. Anything the musician needed to know would already have been digested. The musician would no longer need the composer to tell them what to play( not that this still couldn't happen) because they would be so advanced that they will know how and what to play together almost like telepathy and their knowledge would allow them to create all sorts of contemporary textures,lines, noises etc............not that other approaches to organizing material would be obsolete but that the players role in construction would not be compartmentalized so the term improvisation would be obsolete because what we are really concerned with is the "organization of sounds under any formal combination of elements he or she chooses to define as musical".......This is the definition of a creative musician according to Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart defined the creative musician as an "engineer of sounds" saying

"A musician is more than a person who plays an instrument. A musician should utilize any and every sound in the production of music"

It can be said the purpose of Art is to maintain the sensual fabric of humanity. Media Philosopher, Marshall Macluhan explains how art help has helped human beings meet the challenge of technology. Macluhan uses numerous examples. The most striking example for me was the reaction of the so-called Romantic poets to the Industrial Revolution.

-Eric Zinman

"Newton, in an age of clocks, managed to present the physical universe in the image of a clock. But poets like Blake were far ahead of Newton in their response to the challenge of the clock. Blake spoke of the need to be delivered "from single vision and Newton's sleep," knowing very well that Newton's response to the challenge of the new mechanism was itself really a mechanical repetition of the challenge. Blake saw Newton and Locke and others as hypnotized Narcissus types quite unable to meet the challenge of mechanism, W.B. Yeats gaave the full Blakean version of Newton and Locke in a famous epigram:

Locke sank into a swoon ;

the garden died;

God took the spinning jenny

out of his side.

"Yeats presents Locke the philosopher of mechanical and lineal associationism, as hypnotized by his own image. The "garden" or unified consciousness ended. Eighteenth century man got an extension of himself in the form of the spinning machine which Yeats endows with its full sexual signifigance. Woman herself is thus seen as a technological extension of man's being.

Blakes counterstrategy for his age was to meet mechanism with organic myth. Today ,deep in the electric age, organic myth is itself a simple and automatic response capable of mathematical formulation and expression, without any of the imaginative perception of Blake about it."

"The artist is the man in any field scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implication of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness."

---From Understanding Media, Marshall Macluhan, 1964 Mcgraw Hill Book Company

If the subject of science is the nature of phenomena then the subject of art is the human being. Art provides us withthe most reliable evidence of who or what a human being is, his or her thoughts and feelings, the fact that one person differs from another, that we are not all the same like buttons produced on an assembly line. Ezra Pound asks"how are we to contrive man's maximum happiness unless we know what sort of animal man is?

The following are problematic words in Art: "Signifigant Form", "Creative", "Expression" ,"Sign", "Symbol"

Expression in art is the" idea" or" symbol" and its signifigance is its expression.

Art can be said to be the "symbol" of feeling.This "symbol" is manifested on an intellectual, physical, and emotional level. The ability of this symbol to capture the mind of the human being and induce a state of ecstacy, rapture, epiphany,trance etc............makes its form"signifigant" Yet as soon as I say this the truth is beset by paradox.

-Eric Zinman

"Most of the dominant ideas, even taken all alone, carry with them some danger of self-defeat. As soon as we develop them we find ourselves with dialectical concepts on our hands. We have Signifigant Form that must not, at any price, be permitted to signify anything-illusion that is the highest truth-disciplined spontaneity, concrete ideal structures-impersonal feeling, "pleasure objectified"-and public dreaming."

"Such "expression" is the function of symbols: articulation and presentation of concepts. Herein symbols differ radically from signals. A signal is comprehended if it serves to make us notice the object or situation it bespeaks. A symbol is understood when we conceive the the idea it presents."

"So much, then for the theory of music; music is"signifigant form," and its signifigance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensuous object, which by virtue of its dynamic structure can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion, and emotion constitute its import."

" the making of this expressive form is the creative process that enlists a man's utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power,imagination. Not the invention of new original turns, nor the adoption of novel thems, merits the word "creative," but the making of any work symbolic of feeling,......"

Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form

" In proportion as art becomes purer the number of people to whom it appeals gets less. It cuts out all the romantic overtones which are the usual bait by which men are induced to accept a work of art. It appeals to the aesthetic sensibilitiy, and that in most men is comparatively weak."

Roger Fry, Vision and Design, pg. 15

"In art, progress does not consist in extension, but in the knowledge of limits.

Limitation of means determines style, engenders new form, and gives impulse to creation.

Limited means often constitute the charm and force of primitive painting.

Extension, on the contrary, leads the arts to decadence.

New means, new subjects.

The subject is not the object, it is a new unity, a lyricism which grows completely from the means.

The painter thinks in terms of form and color.

The goal is not to be concerned with the reconstitution of an anecdotal fact, but with constitution of a pictorial fact.

Painting is a method of representation.

One must no imitation what one wants to create.

One does not imitate appearances; the appearance is the result.

To be pure imitation, painting must forget appearance.

To work from nature is to improvise."

George Braque, "Thoughts and reflections on Art" 1917

"the joy of life is the irresistable constant victory of new values"

-Wassily Kandinsky

INTOXICATION

You must always be intoxicated. It is the key to all:

the one question. In order not to feel the horrible burden

of Time breaking your breaking your back, and bending you to

the earth, you must become drunk, without truce.

But on What?On wine, poetry, or virtue,as you wish.

But you must get drunk.

And if at times, on the steps of a palace, on the green

grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room,

you awaken, and your intoxiction is already diminished

or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird,

the clock, everything that flees,everything that groans,

everything that rolls, that sings, that speaks, ask what

time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird,

the clock will answer you:" It is time to get intoxicated!

In order not to be slaves martyred by Time, always

becaome intoxicated: On wine, on poetry, or on virtue,

as you will."

-Baudelaire

Improvisation: "to compose at will"

-Art Davis

Improvistion: "the conscious manipulation of known material"

a paraphrase:" many notable musicians are playing a music that was played better 40 years ago............it is our responsability to make ourselves happy in the space that we occupy..........its ok to disagree with what other established musicians are doing as long as you're willing to do your own research"

-Cecil Taylor

"if you play one note for 20 years, noone else will be able to play that note the way you do, and out of it will come a technique, a method, and a philosophy"

a paraphrase ' for some traditon can serve as guide; for others it makes them a prisoner.'

a definition for composition:"The assembling of materials, generally accessible to everyone into a new order.

-Bill Dixon