A Living Constellation
"We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants."
—Bernard of Chartres
Influence is not imitation. It's conversation across time, medium, and practice. The voices gathered here have shaped how I see, work, and listen. This page will grow as new teachers appear—some through books, others through example, many through work that has nothing to do with music yet everything to do with attention.
The Cinematic Eye
Fritz Lang
Metropolis remains pure architectural poetry. "The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart"—this could be inscribed on every music stand. Lang understood that systematic vision without human feeling creates monsters. Every technical solution must pass through the heart.
Stanley Kubrick
2001 as counterpoint to Metropolis—where Lang's city screams, Kubrick's space whispers. First viewing in 1981: the Ligeti awakening something, the Strauss waltzing through void, silence as the loudest sound. Kubrick teaches that craft includes knowing when not to speak. The match cut from bone to spacecraft—4 million years in 1/24th of a second. This precision in time remains my aspiration.
David Lynch
Beyond the 20 cups of coffee daily, Lynch models the discipline of sustained curiosity. Filmmaker, painter, musician, furniture maker—not dilettante but deeply committed to each practice. His weather reports during lockdown were daily observations elevated to art. He finds the uncanny in the quotidian, showing that attention itself is transformative.
The Musical Heritage
Jordi Savall
My musical father, though he'd never use such terms. Beyond technique, beyond historical knowledge, he teaches that early music is not museum work but living practice. Every rehearsal a masterclass in listening. Every concert a ritual of collective presence. The way he shapes silence teaches more than any method book.
[Space for others to emerge]
The Writers' Room
W.G. Sebald
Sentences that walk. Photographs that interrupt. Time that folds. Sebald showed me that observation and memory interweave, that the documentary and the dreamlike can coexist on the same page. His melancholy precision influences how I approach fragments—incompleteness as its own form of truth.
Annie Dillard
The Writing Life sits on my desk, reread annually. "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." Dillard makes the ordinary mythic without losing its ordinary quality. Her attention to creek water and solar eclipses equally models how to look until looking becomes seeing.
[Growing list]
The Philosophers of Practice
[The four already named in the colophon—Alexander, Bachelard, Berger, Sennett—remain the cornerstones]
Susan Sontag
Not for her theories but her hunger. The notebooks reveal someone who treated curiosity as spiritual practice. Lists of films to see, books to read, ideas to pursue. She models the life of structured voracity—not consuming but engaging.
[Others as they surface]
The Anonymous Teachers
The violist in Basel who showed me how to hold silence.
The student who asked the question I couldn't answer.
The janitor at the Palau de la Música who knows where sound really lives.
My daughter, who teaches presence by absence.
My unborn son, already reshaping time.
On Influence
This list resists completeness. Some influences work underground for years before surfacing. Others flash and fade. The real teachers often aren't the ones you expect.
What matters: remaining porous without becoming shapeless. Taking what serves the work. Leaving what doesn't. Acknowledging debts while finding your own currency.
Contributing to This Page
This document lives and breathes. New influences will be added as they reveal themselves. Some entries will expand, others may disappear. Like practice itself, influence is iterative, seasonal, surprising.
Last updated: Whenever someone new entered the conversation