This is my first blog. I am jumping onto the blogwagon with the intent to write about music every sunday. This is as much an excercise for me as it is the desire to begin to share ideas about music in a public manner. But as projects go, who knows what this will turn into. It is my hope that some of this will be lucid, profound, engaging, and maybe read by someone sometime. If it is none of these things, then I am no worse off, and no one would have read it anyway. Here goes nothing:

Sunday is for sounds. I debated about whether to use the word 'sounds' in the title of the blog. I thought of 'sunday is for song' ; too cute, and I want to read broadly beyond the stylistic implications of the word 'song' here. Oddly, the word 'sounds' seems to have its own limitations. What do we mean when we say "I'm listening to the sound" of something - a piece, an object, a person, a painting, a memory? This is neither a blog about sound art in any of its permutations, nor is it about acoustic ecology or cultural anthropology, or anything else in particular. In all the vastness of implication that sound, or the notion of 'sound', can take part in, and that the potential emergence of what can be known as music can be based on (for music can never, ever, only be about sound, or what we try to conceptually partition as sound), any attempt to employ a single word to represent this enormity will necessarily lose value as it careens toward a particularity of sound - in better words, as it means certain things to certain people. I chose the word that seems (historically of course) most open ended (i.e. least judgemental) to the spectrum of musical/acoustical possibility. That said, why sunday?
Sunday is a good day for music. It is a day that bulges with suggestion. It can mean anything. In my cultural background, among many other things, sunday is for resting, for church, for movies, for making phone calls to family or friends you didn't call during the week. Sunday is for reading, for sleeping, for eating, for enjoying those things which are merely details during a weekday grind. For students, of which I am still one, sunday brings the harsh reality of deadlines, guilty consciences, and hangovers together with a bursting sense of nostalgia, loneliness, sentimentality, aesthetic contemplation, and general laziness. But beyond that and more broadly, sunday has been reserved in one way or another as a punctuation, a day unlike any another, sandwiched, elevated, and swept clean of much of the branded, grammatical ambition of a monday or wednesday. Sundays seem to lie just outside of language, somewhere between a concept and the complete absence of a concept. This place, the ambiguity, the suggestiveness, the unexplainable (disfunctional) but highly emotional importance put on its reservation from regularity is so akin to the experience of a profound musical event that it seemed a good day to spend on music. To waste a little time outside normal time, or thinking about time as it bends and twirls and dances during a piece of music, is just what a sunday is good for. So listen. Think about sound, about its familiarity, its complexity, about how it is part of something but not anything itself, about how it gets pieced together to make music, and about how music gets pieced together in your body. And then take a break and eat food.
'till next sunday,

-pb