Mythod

 

This is an incomplete attempt to decribe what I usually do and how I do it.

 

BEING: The unprovable assumption that I AM is reasonable for doing what I do.

It is made up of

1   the MATERIAL, which comprises

    11    the PHYSICAL (the body and its organic parts, born in 1945 and beginning to occasionally

            but mildly suffer from ailments such as gout, coronary complaints and eyesight deficiency)

    and

    10    the FUNCTIONAL, which manifests itself in

           101  ACTION, which works as

                  1011   CREATING ideas as in

                           10111    REALISING them, i.e.

                                       101111  GENERATING music, texts and films usually (not always)

                                                   by diverse algorithms and parameters as well as organising

                                                   music events - my compositions turned dodecaphonic, then

                                                   stochastic by 1970, the phenomena of tonality and metricism

                                                   also entering the picture then - my texts are either theoretical

                                                    (see below) or comment on the state of things, mainly music -

                                                    my films are time-structured concatenations of pre-recorded

                                                   or of algorithmically generated shapes

                                        and

                                       101110  TRANSFORMING texts, images and music into each other

                                                   algorithmically, e.g. the letters of a text, the formants of speech

                                                   sounds, a photograph's pixels or a film's moving objects into

                                                   pitches and rhythms - the transformation of music itself was

                                                   effected e.g. by probabilistically redistributing the original

                                                   material

                           and

                           10110    THEORISING on matters of music and mathematics, as e.g. in making

                                       formulas for melodic harmonicity and rhythmic metricity and for digital

                                       signal processing, but also on socio-psychological issues, such as the

                                       (humourous) parametrisation of the "satisfaction gained by Artmaking",

                                       of the quality of late 20th Century music, as well as of individual human

                                       relations and of the mentality of Central European peoples, mostly

                                       resulting in the writing of books and articles

                  and

                  1010   TRANSFERRING information, as in

                            10101    TEACHING composition and sonology at the Royal Conservatory in

                                        The Hague and computer music at the Music Academy in Cologne

                            and

                            10100    LEARNING (in this order:) English, piano playing, music theory,

                                        mathematics, German, the programming languages Fortran and Pascal,

                                        acoustics, Dutch, French, Katakana, Hiragana and hopefully more later

           and

           100 PERCEPTION (my being aware of things through my sense organs), resulting in

                  cognition, mainly of the visual, audible and olfactory

and

0   the IMMATERIAL, which comprises

    01    THOUGHT, which manifests itself in

           011  IMAGINATION of how to explain phenomena, of books to be written, music to be

                   composed, films to be made, but also of culinary and other physical delights

           and

           010  MEMORY (including the evaluation) of a half-century of experiences, such as the

                   strictness of school, the futility of being a Catholic for 20 years, of great music heard,

                  of fascinating features of mathematics and astronomy

    and

    00    FEELING, which manifests itself in

           001 INTUITION (including inspiration), as when I instinctively feel how to shape a

                  composition, or to judge a work of art

            and

           000  EMOTION, as when I enjoy a delicious meal, music works of past centuries, or when

                   I am disgusted by a typical piece of late 20th Century contemporary music