Su Terry

Great American Sax Phantasy: Jerry Dodgion, Su Terry, Frank Griffith, Mack Goldsbury (not pictured), John Metcalf, ca. 1985, New York City.

In 2009 I was in Peru attending some ayahuasca ceremonies.  (For more info on that see my book For The Curious.) On one of the free days I was hanging out in Cusco and came across a wonderful little tienda…

Everyone is talking about this new A.I. program that answers questions and is supposedly better than using a search engine. So I decided to try it out. 

To get more complete information, you have to keep regenerating the question. You…

The note set derived from the tonics of each mode is a M3 down from the scale used to generate the modes. Why?

The folks from Cuevas del Ilaló and I are planning a workshop for August 2023 on the metaphysics of music.  The course will cover all the important sound/music topics that AREN'T taught in music schools.  Sure, you can find a…

Last night I did my annual holiday show; been doing this for several years.  But during the day I had gone into a building and the Muzak was playing the same songs I was going to do that night.

I…

For the poet, everything is poetry.

For the painter, everything is a portrait.

For the musician, everything is music.

Don't lose the magic.  Without the magic the music is empty.

Some musicians have the illusion that magic comes by itself, merely by wishing for it.  This couldn't be further from the truth. Magic is a fickle Muse who only…

Illustrations by Max Neumann.  Music (via QR code or link) by Miklós Szilveszter. 

Extraordinary.  A book you keep thinking about. I will show it to Pedro and Paúl after the gig on Saturday.  16-year-old Paúl will say but what are…

I'm learning a shakuhachi piece called "Shika No Tone."  This is known as one of the "secret" pieces because it's quite difficult, very nuanced with a lot of specialized techniques.  In the Edo period when some of the ronin Samurai…

Tomorrow my students are supposed to come to class with a new composition they made using this method.  Well, I couldn't tell my students to do something unless I can do it too, so I used the method myself, to…

Today I was asked to issue a certificate of completion to two students who so far have missed two out of four sessions of a mini-course I'm teaching.

I intend to resolve the issue during the final class, by having…

Why do we musicians not have the courage to define, in concrete terms, what we would like our working conditions to be?  Why do we keep allowing others (non-musicians) to dictate what these conditions are, and take advantage of us?

…

While I was practicing today I started to play the first lines of Long and Winding Road, but then I needed help remembering exactly how the melody unfolded from there.  I put it into YouTube and ended up clicking on…

I am obsessed with shakuhachi and practice 3 hours daily.  Conventional wisdom has it that "mastery" level of anything requires a minimum of 10,000 hours of focused practice.  That means 3 hours a day for 10 years.  If you want…

The notes we play correspond to frequencies, which we measure with the term Hz (hertz)--number of vibrations per second.  So when we say "A 440" we're referring to the note A which is tuned to 440 vibrations per second.  An…

On the FB clarinet forum someone posted that even though they worked with a tuner on a daily basis, they had trouble with intonation when playing with others.  I replied that you have to understand the function of the notes…

More and more I’m hearing the phrase “we’ll agree to disagree.” 

This expression approaches the zenith of both moronic and oxymoronic reasoning. It is the last resort of someone who wishes to retain their self-perceived throne of conversational hierarchy without…

If you grid the whole number major scales like this, you get a curious result. The Xs are where the tonic repeats. Why is it like this?

Tesla said the numbers 3, 6, and 9 are the secret to the Universe.  If we apply those numbers to a tonality, we get a sequence of 4ths.  

For the number correspondences, I'm using C as the tonic. 

The cycle…

I’m really sick of getting Pollyanna newsletters in my inbox, full of supposedly uplifting thoughts, allegedly empowering suggestions, so-called supercharged tips… designed to make your life even more awesome than it already is.  

The truth is the world’s going to…

This morning I go down to my studio (it’s separate from my house, on the lower level of the property) and do yoga, make coffee, then start looking for weird music on Bandcamp.  There’s lots of weird music there.  Some…

A previous post says the pentatonic scale comes from the circle of 5ths.  And it does.  But that's like saying Shakespeare's plays come from the alphabet. They do--but that's only one aspect.  The alphabet is the coding material for the…