If you know that many people believe a current lie, do you expose the lie, or the believers?
If you want to protest a policy, practice, relationship supported by many people, when do you
protest against the policy, practice, relationship and when do you protest people's support
of it?
If a text succeeds in expressing social criticism, what could music add to the expression without
subtracting from the social criticism?
Under what circumstances does a piece intended as protest register as protest?
what do I do facing the desire to have an effect, on the one side, and on the other side, the danger
of being choked and devoured by popularity?
Music needs words more than words need music (if the words have a music, do they need another
one?)
Music can surround a primary downbeat with many more secondary downbeats (and
accompanying upbeats) than language can if it is to remain intelligible as language. Thus
music can be both shorter and longer than linguistic components. But: music and language
converge when a thought has found its briefest expression.
How can the criteria used to locate social injustice also be consulted in writing a poem or a piece of
music?
Analogy: two systems are guided by one structure. To make an analogy: construct a system in
relation to another system such that the constructed system points at a structure which both share.
How do I begin a piece?
1.1 make an absurd proposition and construct its logic.
2.1 make myself afraid of the cliche' I like.
3.1 anticipate the nightmarish proportions to which simple data can grow.
Shall I write a feminist poem about women's issues, or:
a feminist poem about architecture,
a feminist poem about excuses,
an anti-war poem about love of a place,
anti-war way of quarreling with my roommate,
or an anti-racist way of talking to my parents?
Could there be an anti-racist, anti-war, anti-fascist, anti-sexist way of writing music?
