A room near Santo Stefano
On a Thursday in September (2026), I went to see my friend Naren Rauch.
He lives near Santo Stefano, in Bologna. That already matters to me because Bologna is not a neutral backdrop. I sat often in that piazza as a student in Bologna. And Bologna is a city of porticoes, inner rooms, sudden piazzas, old brick, towers, thresholds, and private interiors that often hold more intelligence than they could ever announce from the street.
Peeking through open doors, you can pass through from the outside, and discover another arrangement waiting inside.
I arrived around 11:30.
Naren and his family moved from California, approximately a year ago.
He is a musician and composer who creates music professionally. Commercially for film and advertising. The fuller view is that he has spent his life listening through instruments, studios, images, memory, and the human experience of how sound enters a room and changes what people are able to notice.
We began simply with a hug a hello and making a coffee while warming up to our visit which we chose to do by beginning at a table in a salon room, with a terrace overlooking a medieval garden courtyard. Nice.
The conversation when friends visit together, did not proceed in a straight line.
It moved the way a melodic musical conversation can move: circular, returning, widening, finding its own tonal center.
We spoke about music, listening, harmonics, vibration, healing, instruments, anthropology, language, drumming, recording environments, design, movement, theater, cinema, writing, and yes, human agency.
I like conversations that find their own architecture, it feels good.
Not everything needs to be forced into a thesis or a resolute state or opinion, at the moment it is happening or unfolding.
Sometimes in any conversation, a person can arrive with one question, and leave with a field of new ideas or new seeds to grow.
That was the feeling of how our morning. began. I arrived, to visit a friend. I departed four hours later, carrying a clearer understanding of something I acknowledged I already believed:
Harmonics, are what becomes possible when distinct elements are placed in relation to what is around us, and actually heard.
Naren
Naren in my experience: he is precise, without being rigid. Delightful and warm.
His professional life is already a working bridge between composition and image.
His music has been made for picture, for commercial work, for film, for television, for other people's projects, and for his own.
It is public knowledge, that he grew up in Los Angeles, wrote his first piano piece very young, studied jazz guitar, and also carried anthropology into the formation and continuing cultivation of his musical intelligence, art, and craft.
That detail is important in understanding Naren and his art and his craft.
A musician who studies only notes, can still make powerful music. A musician who also studies and observes: people, ritual, place, and communication... hears a different order of material in my experience.
An instrument is not only guitar, piano, string, drum, screen, software, microphone, or room in which craft is expressed. The instrument is a relation among all of them, individually, and collectively.
I frequently note this in the way Naren chooses his words.
In our visit together, he did not make a hard line between sound and culture, or between studio and body, or between composition and listening. He kept bringing the conversation back to what happens between all of these things. Between two notes. Between two people. Between a sound and the inner ear. Between ritual and memory. Between the body and a field of vibration. Between a room and the music the room absorbs.
This is why, for me at least, harmonics became a continuing word of our friendship.
HARMONICS ORIGINS (inspired by a conversation in 2025 with Naren) · ethraeon.ai/harmonic-origins
A harmonic is not just a decorative overtone riding above a fundamental idea or concept. It is evidence that something has sounded, landed, and that the sounding and landing, has real consequences. The string is touched. The column of air is set moving. The body receives. The ear organizes. The room participates. Another person hears something different, but not unrelated.
The fundamental is never solitary.
The Studio
After coffee and a circular undulating discussion that readied us for listening, we retired to Naren's studio.
It is a large, light-filled room. The space is what I remember, before the equipment. A curved or semi-circular desk, as though the working surface had been built to gather sound, screen, hand, and attention into one curve. A computer setup, a curved screen, keyboards and pianos, guitars gathered in the room around work space in carefully organized placements. Wind instruments, electronic equipment, acoustic damping and bass treatment, and tools that yes, also included AI-enabled materials among the analog and hand crafted and technical working instruments that support his intentions, and realizing his art and his craft.
I will say the room did not feel like a technology inventory. More like a studio where creativity lives and breaths in the sunlight.
An invitation, perpetually open. Very good energy.
In my experience, the best studios, painters, photographers, sculptors, inventors, musicians, scientists, engineers, athletes, and classrooms I appreciate, have these qualities of feel, touch and presence.
Some can be showrooms for tools, or instruments or machines, or cabinets of curiosities. In my view they are frequently more about arrangements of intention and function and purpose... by empirical design and preferences of course.
Everything including a photo on a desk or a framed artifact of a performance or certificate of accomplishment or headphones placed on the desk, have been chosen. For catches, holds, refinement, interruption, and in a music studio, for anything that releases or captures sound and vibration. A guitar on a stand is never, just a guitar. It is an available decision. A keyboard is never just a keyboard. It is a possible entrance. A curved monitor is not just a display to be used. It is a window into time and artistry and craft. Sound damping artifacts in corners is not merely a treatment. It is a positioned choice to hear what is actually there without the room taking too much from itself.
Naren moved a chair for me taken from the salon room, and positioned it purposefully, with ease, slightly behind his own at the studio desk.
That small gesture really mattered to me.
He was still at the center of what is his podium, but he made a place for me to hear from within the room, not from outside it. It was not a presentation. It was not a performance in the formal sense. It was the care and ease of curation for a shared listening experience, and shared listening, I noticed, that does after all, have its own ethics.
A choice of what to play.
An agreement to receive it in a setting with purpose and function.
The room, also then, becomes a spatial participant.
Listening as agreement
Earlier in the conversation I had brought up a recollection of an interview I had seen given by Henry Rollins.
In the interview, in his very confident style, he discusses memories of listening to records and adamantly suggests, choosing carefully the person with whom one listens to records or music or tracks.
The story he recounted in the interview, is remarkably simple: a lifelong friendship, a couch, a turntable, several records selected with care, and silence while the records and selected music or tracks played.
What mattered to me in the conversation was not a collectible memory of that interview. Rather, it was the principle, and a mirror. What was actively unfolding in a different way, in Naren's studio.
Rollins commented specifically that if there is any conversation during the listening experience, it must complement the music. Only then, is any conversation chosen, a deepening of the listening experience.
Otherwise silence is part of the respect owed to the work and to the person beside you.
This is not etiquette. It is attention. I really like that idea.
Naren understood this immediately because he had lived many other versions of that very thing.
An example he shared was of a group of listeners he curated and brought together remotely, during COVID, while still in Glendale. He invited and created a listening group. Perhaps five to ten people would gather by Zoom. He would use an audio playback app for high-fidelity routing setup so that the music could be heard with more depth than a normal computer input to output meeting allows. In his words, the group would choose recordings in an unstructured and easy way. Classical, baroque, popular, new pieces, in-progress work. Usually five or six pieces over several hours. No talking while the music played, listening was the primary intent.
That is a beautiful structure.
I don't believe silence is superior to speech. Silence can be many things uniquely interpreted by each person. But in that structure as in Naren's studio and our agreement, silence was a respected, consented, shaped, and purposeful choice that was shared. It put the music and listening and receiving experience at the center. It asked each person to be present without needing to perform presence nor demonstrate understanding. Like moments in a museum, that rare moment when you get to stand before a painting or sculpture or photograph sought out purposefully, and no one else is around. Time stops. The world becomes a lens the observer is experiencing directly.
I have had the good fortune of having been in many rooms like that.
In college, I knew someone who had built his dorm room around listening purposefully. The bed and desk had been moved aside. A low-backed couch sat in the middle of the room, with a window behind it, and behind the couch there was a glass-tube stereo system occupying most of the available living space carefully constructed on a low stabilizing platform on the floor. I remember the glow of that arrangement. A small blueprint for a city.
We listened to a Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane recording. He chose. We listened in silence on that couch.
The room and deliberate configuration is what I remember more than any other detail.
A dorm room had been carefully reorganized around a sound system, a record, a person, and the experience of listening. A young man positioning active philosophy with furniture. It was not about luxury or convenience at all. It was about priority. He had decided that sound for his enjoyment, deserved the center of the room. His living space.
I think about that now because so much of contemporary life is arranged against listening.
Speed is a constant demand. Platforms ask for reaction. Rooms are built for multitasking. Conversations become evidence of an opinion or a position rather than acts of mutual discovery. Music becomes background. Film becomes content. The person beside us becomes a wall or surface for our own projection.
Listening sort of reverses that.
Listening says and gently requires an agreement. A silent commitment.
I will not make myself or others, the first event in the room.
On Harmonics
A harmonic is a relation made audible.
In physics, harmonic partials arise when a vibrating system produces frequencies at whole-number multiples of a fundamental.
Harmonics Origins is a subject Naren and I had discussed together before, I built and created an artifact that I have reshared that covers the foundations.
Harmonics as a definition is useful, but not really sufficient for this most recent visit with Naren.
Sure, a definition can describe the mechanism, but still miss the event.
A harmonic also tells us that a system has hidden capacities.
Touch a string correctly and a new tone appears. Change the length of the air column and another voice emerges. Place one frequency near another and beating begins. Put two people in a room with work made by hand, breath, instrument, software, memory, and attention, and a new field becomes possible.
The field is not mystical merely because it cannot be measured.
The field is not merely mechanical because it can be measured.
The field is in my experience, where mechanism and meaning meet.
That is where Naren and I held the space.
We spoke about vibration and the inner ear, about frequencies, binaural beats, well-being, Tibetan throat singing, didgeridoo, circular breathing, bass, breath, drums, ritual, body memory, essential oils, EFT, trauma-release practices, sage, tobacco, and the felt sense that sound and gesture can alter the atmosphere between people.
Not one category, is the point.
Some of these categories belong to acoustics. Some belong to neuroscience. Some belong to tradition or ancestry. Some belong to family history or evolution. Some belong to experience. Some belong to metaphor. Some belong to belief. Some belong to the human vocabulary people use when they are trying to describe what happened in a room before the room has been filled with a memory.
For me, these distinctions matter.
On Breath, vibration, clearing and memory
My mother had experiences and practices with Native Americans that shaped some of my own language around healing, essential oils, body-based release, and the felt intelligence of ceremony.
Tribal affiliations aren't important nor is this a nod to a credential. I am simply preserving a memory and a family thread. That thread gave me a vocabulary for recognizing that people have long used scent, smoke, pressure, touch, rhythm, and breath to mark a transition from one state into another. Often with each other, and often alone.
Sage as an appropriated technique, came up in the conversation as a cleansing practice: smoke moved over the face and head, a clearing of mind and spirit, a threshold action. Tobacco in raw form also came up in relation to peace offering, an exchange, a vehicle for trade, clearing space, and the relation between people. These are not accessories to me but very much a part of the same question.
How does a space change?
How do people signal that something else is now possible?
Music can perform a clearing function, not because it is identical to fragrant smoke from a smudge stick, or prayer or a medicine bundle or a laboratory intervention, but because it can reorganize the attention of the people present.
It can make a room less defended. It can make memory available. It can make grief or joy or sadness or memory rise without being commanded. It can return breath to the body. It can create an opening in which the next sentence is different from what would have been spoken before the sound was received or experienced.
The didgeridoo entered the conversation through ideas we discussed about vibration, breath and body. Circular breathing is not only a technique for sustaining tone. It is a discipline in which the body learns continuity. Tibetan throat singing which I've written about before, and overtone singing entered through the astonishing fact that one human body can sound more than one apparent tone at once.
Bass entered through the torso, through breathing, through the way low frequency is not only heard by the ear but also felt by the body of the chanter or of the listener.
Binaural beats which I've also written about before also entered as a question about perception, vibration and frequency. Two tones presented separately to the ears that gives rise to the perception of a third oscillating tone in the interspace of our conscious or unconscious state.
The research record on brainwave entrainment is mixed and methodologically uneven, but the phenomenon itself remains a clean example of the deeper point: relation produces a perceived event that neither isolated tone carries in the same way.
A thought and feeling for me that belonged to the whole morning with Naren.
Relation does indeed produce a perceived event and of course, memories.
Before Formal Language
At one point we spoke about McGill University and music cognition.
About Daniel J. Levitin and the larger McGill world of music perception, cognition, memory, health, and the brain. I have long been interested in the question of whether organized sound preceded formal language, accompanied it, or emerged in dialogue with it. No answer needs to be totalizing. Human communication did not likely begin as one clean channel but having studied semiotics and semantical structural evolution this lands with me. Gesture, rhythm, cry, laughter, breath, movement, mark, imitation, signal, touch, image, and tone very likely developed together in uneven, and of course overlapping ways.
Thought is also powerful.
Before a sentence became grammar, perhaps a repeated sound could have meant: come here, stay together, danger, grief, celebration, warning, trance, courtship, child, death, rain, hunt, dawn.
Before a written alphabet, perhaps rhythm organized collective time.
Before notation, the body certainly knew repetition.
Before doctrine, breath could enter a hollow object and produce a harmonic voice.
The archaeological record can and does give us a precise humility here.
There are evidence of early bone "flutes," including Middle Paleolithic material sometimes discussed around Neanderthal contexts.
Evidence and historical record is quite astonishing without exaggeration.
Bone and ivory flutes from the Swabian Jura in southwestern Germany show a well-established musical tradition among modern humans more than 35,000 years ago.
At Jiahu in China, early Neolithic crane-bone flutes, some playable and carefully made, take us into another ancient register of deliberate sound.
The point is not a competition for the oldest instrument, rather, intentionality.
A person shaped a bone, made deliberate openings with purpose. An understanding that material, wind, air, hand, mouth, and spacing could be brought into real relation. Someone made an instrument from what had once been living structure. Someone breathed into it. Harmonics emerged.
Wonderful.
It is design, memory, death, breath, body, mathematics, and desire, truly... in one gesture.
Drumming may be even more ancient in a practical sense because rhythm does not require a flute.
Rocks can be struck together. Hands can strike skin, earth, wood, chest, table, wall. Repetition can carry across distance. Rhythm can coordinate work, movement, dance, ceremony, war, play, and mourning or joy. It can and does in many variations, hold a group in collective time.
A drum is also a social machine.
It does not exactly replace language. But it does organize conditions under which language, movement, and relation can and do happen.
Three 'hearings'
In the studio, Naren played three works.
The first a piece by Thomas Tallis. Impactful. It opened a real vertical space in the room. The effect was not only melodic. It seemed to rearrange many surfaces of attention. I listened with eyes closed.
Then Naren played an approximately three-to-five-minute work he composed in 2020 which he humbly called 'old'. For me it was new and inspiring.
A variation on Robert Johnson with classical strings and a rising and falling tonal movement. Not a "song" in any ordinary sense, even though it was composed with song, within it.
It felt like an architecture.
Johnson was there as trace, source, pressure, and inheritance, but the composition did not behave like a quotation alone. It placed a blues ghost, literally, inside another harmonic frame.
That is difficult to do without freezing or exploiting the source.
Naren's composition did neither in my 'hearing'.
It 'allowed' for line to persist and transformed, literally, the air around it.
As I listened, a field of correspondences arrived and naturally unfolded without direct intervention nor direct focus, in my minds eye.
Harold Pinter came to mind: pressure held inside silence. Bertolt Brecht: structure, distance, estrangement, the intelligence of not being swallowed by illusion. Voltaire: the blade of wit and human absurdity. Kafka: an interior architecture that seems legal, dreamlike, and inevitable at the same time. Lars von Trier's Europa: hypnosis, rail-line motion, black-and-white dream machinery, the feeling that history itself is moving under the floor. Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man: spectral passage, spare duration, Neil Young's guitar cutting a path through a wounded American myth. Stranger Than Paradise: restraint, repetition, black-and-white distance, and unexpected tenderness.
Naren did not cite these.
These are what my hearing of his composition called forward in me. And I shared that after the listening.
Listening is not proof of influence. Listening is an event, in, the listener.
The next share, I requested permission to show Naren a multi purposed composition I am developing.
The Nexus of All Possible Mornings · ethraeon.ai/film
A film, musical piece, exhibit and narrative all wrapped in one that I made and am evolving that is influenced by harmonics, and is largely harmonic. Its only 9o seconds in duration. Can be watch or listened to or both.
He listened and watched.
As with any composition, perhaps some feel a vulnerability in showing a work that did not emerge out of a committee, or that was not made to satisfy a brief, and that carries its own internal value system. That in my experience is what authorship, artistry, craft of any kind is about. It doesn't require nor ask for approval.
A person makes a thing.
Another person receives it.
Something appears between them that neither person could have made alone.
The Blues Line
Robert Johnson is a key in Naren's composition, perhaps, because a blues phrase is never simply 'old'.
It carries. It crosses hands, instruments, ancestry, experience, history, rooms, records, movies, cities, bodies, myths, mistakes, and recoveries. A phrase can often survive by being changed. Sometimes the faithful act or response, is not to reproduce... but to hear the pressure that made the phrase necessary in the first place.
That's why Naren's classical-string treatment truly impacts and interests me. The movement rose and hovered and shifted across multiple planes but never fell. It was deliberate. It did not imitate Johnson's guitar as a costume. It placed the blues foundations into another tensile system of Naren's design. That system created and still creates myriad possibilities for hearing.
I thought also of Monk and Coltrane.
Monk understood architecture in intervals.
He could make a chord stand in a room like a chair at an unexpected angle. Coltrane could move through structure with such pressure that structure itself seemed to become almost a spiritual demand. Their collaboration, especially in the 1957 era, is one of those places where discipline and freedom, quite simply, refuse to be enemies.
That in my view, is harmonic principle.
Freedom without structure becomes sprawl.
Structure without freedom becomes a prison.
The living work is the vibrant relation.
Ambient Rooms and Exact Feeling
I also noted to Naren in my view, Brian Eno belonged in our conversation not as an artist, and as a studio thinker.
Eno's deepest contribution, in my humble opinion and for my purposes here, is not merely ambient music as a genre. It is the idea that composition can in fact, make a place. Sound becomes environment. A studio or a room or any space becomes a system. The listener is not pushed through a narrative. The listener is placed inside conditions.
I recall a simple Eno sculpture I once held, a lattice of black painted wood with simple speakers attached at each cross wired to a tiny battery operated playback mp3 loop of, recorded sounds of crickets. No larger than a large book hung on wall. Chirping indefinitely. This was an artifact in the office and loft space of my first business partner, Diego Cortez (James Curtis).
Presence noticed but not demanded.
That is close to what I felt in Naren's room.
I also mentioned Ryuichi Sakamoto belonged. I had the opportunity in NY to work for him and a label he owned, I did photography for artist album and CD covers in production. Ryiuchi belongs for another reason: exact feeling.
Piano, film, electronics, atmosphere, restraint, fragility, space. Sakamoto's works in my experience, often carry a precision that does not cancel emotion, and that is very purposeful. It intensifies emotion because it gives emotion architecture. His film music understands that image and sound are not separate streams placed side by side. They are a in many ways, a single weather system.
A good film score does not tell the viewer what to feel, rather, it changes the room in which feeling, becomes possible and realizes and reveals itself to the listener or viewer of sensor of vibration.
Simply another reason I was not surprised that Naren's music, to picture or film or experience, and his own listening practices seemed to come from a common source.
To compose for image is to accept relation as the medium. The picture is sounding even before music is added. The music is seeing even before it is synchronized. The job is not to decorate, but rather to discover where the work is already resonating and then choose the intervention lattice.
Downtown Lines and Memories
Arto Lindsay, David Byrne, DNA, Gray, Paul D. Miller, Diego Cortez and Blonde Redhead entered as a New York and downtown thread. The Kitchen, among many other venues.
These arrived as memory and people I know, not a complete encyclopedia of no wave. There are musical worlds where refusal becomes method, Arto certainly is among that truth, and DNA did not sound "free" because it lacked form.
It sounded to me, dangerous because it invented forms severe enough to release ruptures. Arto Lindsay's guitar 'use' and compositional language hold those lessons: abrasion is not automatically chaos, and noise can be disciplined, and constraint can in fact, become permission.
Gray is the band founded by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michael Holman, a group that made industrial, ambient, machine-like sound inside the New York art scene. An inspiring factor for an exhibition I helped put in place for Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) when I was the Director of the Annina Nosei Gallery.
At the end of Naren's piece which he commented on perhaps wanting to 'change', there was a thumping of a beat like the pulse of a heart. It reminded me of Gray and Paul D. Miller. A pause and a not random brushstroke.
Blonde Redhead also came up and carries a different New York association for me. The band's own name does point back toward DNA, and its work moved from noise and tension into dreamier, more cinematic forms without entirely losing the edge. Kazu and Simone and Amedeo are friends from my time in NY. Their choices of guitar, drums, strings, wind instruments and Kazu's wonderful range are movements that matter.
Artists do not have to remain trapped inside the sound that first invited, inspired or announced them. I love that idea.
They can and do and have for centuries, change the harmonic field.
Tallis
Naren introduced Thomas Tallis to me.
Tallis opened another doorway. Sacred choral music is not only melody extended upward. It is architecture in voices. Polyphony teaches relation by making each line responsible to every other line. One voice begins, another answers, another holds, another delays, another resolves. The listener does not merely hear sequence in my opinion, but equally, vertical time.
Tallis as the first listening provided a wonderful harmonic architecture: voices in sacred relation.
And I will be revisiting Tallis works for certain.
Peart and Revision
Neil Peart also entered through a video memory of a replay of his kit session during a Buddy Rich tribute. And a chance I took in New Mexico to attend a Rush concert.
Peart did not "become a jazz drummer." He also apparently did not need that simplification, but was an accomplished artist willing to enter another rhythmic and ensemble language of art and sound and drumming and rhythm with discipline and active requests for mentorship. His Burning for Buddy work and the Buddy Rich Tribute material to me, show a musician approaching a 'big-band' to learn under different constraints.
Mastery is not a trap unless you allow it to become one.
An artist, a musician, an author, a scientist, a critic, a person becomes known for one vocabulary and an audience rewards it, and the marketplace names it, and the body memorizes it. Then the artist in my view, has a choice: repeat the proof of identity... OR... take risks, for expansion, change, new learnings, revision.
Peart's example to me belongs to harmonics because revision is relation with one's own evaluation of the prior self and also. Naren's comment that the piece he composed from 2020 and shared was 'old' but after re-listening, gave him the idea to revisit the pulse beat at the ending.
The old mastery is still present. The new demand creates interference.
If anyone listens deeply enough, another tone often appears.
Growth is not the erasure of the fundamental, rather in my experience, a discovery of a new overtone and opportunity to try something new, a divergence worth risking.
On Cinema, Theater, Literature
The music Naren played did not only remain inside music for me or within me.
And to me, that is one of the signs that a work has activated a larger field. It begins in sound and calls images, rooms, texts, bodies, and histories to itself. My associations while listening, with Pinter, Brecht, Voltaire, Kafka, von Trier, and Jarmusch are not intended as decorative name drops. They were for me listening images from visual memory and my experiences of reading and viewing and attending and seeing and listening.
My past experiences folding directly into the present without prompting or forcing the associations. Memory unabridged.
Pinter: (The Dumbwaiter / In Bruges adaptation): the unsaid, as pressure that is felt before seen.
Brecht: the frame visible enough to create thought within a very human frame.
Voltaire: intelligence moving faster than institutional certainty.
Kafka: architecture as fate, hallway as metaphysics.
von Trier: Europa, a train as dream machine, narration as hypnosis, postwar Europe as a moving corridor.
Jarmusch:
Dead Man - the journey through death while still walking, carried by the stream of life and consciousness.
Stranger Than Paradise - Lounge Lizards + Lurie. A form stripped down until small gestures actually, become a kind of visual weather with a walking to, soundtrack.
I have always trusted that kind of response when it arrives from any experience of any kind. Culture is not a list, its a network of recoverable sensations. I really value that. One work touches another because the listener has lived enough with unique experiences, for the relations to appear or re-appear nudged by vibration. Harmonics.
Not proof. Resonance.
Movement as Harmonic Architecture
The conversation also opened into movement, theater, ballet.
Willem Dafoe and The Wooster Group / St. Anne's Theater.
Amanda K. Miller and Pretty Ugly Dance Company.
I thought of a dear friend I met long ago in New York, Amanda K. Miller and the Pretty Ugly Dance Company, and of Seth Tillett's importance in that visual and stage world and productions. My memory of Pretty Ugly is not only movement or the time I spent around Amanda or in Seth's mother's home, or at performances... but remains also with printed matter, small booklets, crafted librettos, objects made for the performances that were themselves art objects. I still have many that have also stayed with me in my mind's eye.
Dance and movement, makes harmonics visible.
A body crosses a space. Another body answers. Light alters the interval. Costume carries line. A stage picture holds tension. Printed matter extends the performance into the hand of the person who leaves the theater as an artifact that holds presence and memory at the same time. The choreography is not only the sequence of steps. It is the arrangement of bodies, rhythm, visual field, story, silence, duration, paper, and memory. All durable in memory and rekindled or reignited by listening.
Amanda Miller's history supports that scale and still does. She worked with Ballett Frankfurt under William Forsythe from 1984 to 1992, then founded and directed Pretty Ugly Dance Company from 1992 to 2009. Pretty Ugly existed in Germany, including the Freiburg and Cologne periods, toured internationally, and was recognized for artistic and social collaborations.
Amanda belongs with harmonics, because her journey of work began in ballet and moved beyond conventional ballet into an original, movement-centered language and sound.
That is to me, a harmonic migration.
A form is learned. The form is respected. Then the form is pressed until it reveals other possible bodies.
Naren recounted after I shared that sotry, his own related experience in movement and theater, creating music for a friend or sister involved in that arena of experience making.
Music for dance must listen to bodies. It must understand weight, breath, turn, floor, entry, exit, jump, collapse, stillness, and return.
The composer is in my view only sharpened, not reduced by that relation.
Artificial Tools and Human Choice
As happens in the end, we discussed AI-enabled tools what I do, and AI parts in Naren's studio and craft.
They did not dominate our time together. That is important. Technology was present as part of the working field, not as the meaning of the field. A studio in 2026 naturally contains electronic instruments, software instruments, routing systems, recording environments, screens, plugins, databases, sample libraries, synthesis, and sure, increasingly AI-enabled tools.
But tools do not choose the moral center of the room and in Naren's and my words, do not replace the imagination nor every can of the maker, the chooser, the artist, the author, the composer. The person.
People are that moral center, and that is really important.
Naren chose what to play. I chose to listen.
We chose to speak quietly afterward rather than rush to explanations.
Johnson chose a blues line. Tallis chose voices in relation. Monk chose intervals. Coltrane chose pressure through structure. Eno chose systems and environments. Sakamoto chose exact feeling through sound and image. Lindsay and DNA chose abrasion under discipline. Gray and Paul D., chose art and sound as another form of visual culture. Blonde Redhead chose transformation across decades. Peart chose revision inside mastery. Amanda Miller chose bodies as thinking instruments of creative expansion and expression.
The machine can assist but the human being arranges.
That responsibility is indeed the 'work' and the joy, not a burden added to art from the outside.
A Reflective Note
I keep returning to the chair that Naren placed for me.
Naren easily positioning it from chair heel to floor, slightly the the left and behind his own. Me sitting there while he chose what to play. The light in the room. The curved desk. The guitars. The pianos. The wind instruments. The acoustic treatment. The screen. The equipment. The works. The quiet exchanges after listening.
It is tempting to make harmonics abstract because the word is beautiful, but harmonics are not an abstraction. They are architecture under relational terms.
They are what happens when a sound is not alone. They are what happens when a body receives more than one frequency. They are what happens when a room participates. They are what happens when memory places Pinter next to Robert Johnson, and Jarmusch next to classical strings, and a dorm room, next to a studio near Santo Stefano, and a bone flute next to a composer's workstation, and a handmade dance booklet next to a film.
The morning did not ask me to solve music and neither did Naren. He just made an offer, and asked me to listen. And I accepted and we shared a really great day.
That is enough. Listening is already an act of composition. It arranges the self toward what another has made. It refuses to treat another person's work as background. It allows the field between people to become more intelligent than either person's monologue.
A room was made, briefly, by instruments, screens, breath, silence, and two human beings receiving one another's work, whole. I am grateful for that memory. That is harmonics, resonant, and an echo that I will carry in gratitude. Naren... Thank you.