Music For The Bionic Ear premieres in two weeks’ time so I’ve been busy tidying the completed work, after a hectic week correcting an almighty stuff-up. What follows is a blog post I’d forgotten I’d written until I found it this afternoon while looking for something else.
Listened to 1/1 off Brian Eno’s Music For Airports for the first time in years. Much more happening than I remembered.
- My ear training has come along.
- I’m listening to a different mix that’s been “punched up” for today’s attention-deficit culture.
- Small, cheap speakers bring out the synth treatments more.
- My old LP pressing was really crap.
Seemed shorter, too (cf. years of listening to La Monte Young, Iced Vo Vos used to be bigger etc.)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please CXI
Sunday 23 January 2011
Bernd Alois Zimmermann, “Rheinische Kirmestänze” (1950-62). BBC Symphony Orchestra /Oliver Knussen.
(5’04”, 8.0 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXXIX: I’ll Chop Your Head Off!
Sunday 23 January 2011
What could be more exciting than an action comic strip written by a 5 year old boy and drawn by his 29 year old brother? Nothing! You are commanded to read Axe Cop.
Filed under: Art, Filler By Proxy by Ben.H
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Music For Bionic Ears: Progress Report
Wednesday 19 January 2011
This was going to be a standard progress update on the Music For Bionic Ears concert, tickets for which are selling fast. However, there is now a bad twist ending. I’m talking M. Night Shyamalan bad; I’m talking that episode of Roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected with the bee-baby bad.
Up until 15 minutes ago, things had been going okay, more or less. I’d been immersed in getting the final rendering, editing and mix of my piece, that state of drudge-work which leaves you convinced there is nothing remotely imaginative or interesting in your music. My main points of reflection during this process were:
- I need the instrument timbres to be clear….
- but not so clear that it sounds like I’m playing keytar for Howard Jones!
- These steady rhythms are really pissing me off now.
- These irregular rhythms sound like slop.
- Now I’m just aping Morton Feldman.
- Better than Howard Jones, I guess.
- I should just use something I’ve already made…
- except that would show blatant contempt for my intended audience.
- As soon as this is over, I swear I’m going to read the instructions for this software.
- Let’s try transposing this passage one octave higher.
- OH SHIIIIIIIIII
I have just discovered a basic error in my initial calculations for implementing the tuning in this piece. This means that everything I’ve done up to now is useless. Somehow, I had managed to listen to the two differently-tuned ranges of notes without ever hearing them both together. Everything will now have to be done over, from the top.
At least I know what it is I have to do, which is always the trickiest bit.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please CX
Saturday 8 January 2011
Robert Ashley, “Giving Love Away” (1991).
(3’52”, 8.8 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The Riddle of the Pills
Saturday 8 January 2011
Here’s an idea: if you’re making psychoactive drugs, don’t stamp cryptic numbers all over them.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Bionic Ear Study No. 3
Friday 7 January 2011
Music For Bionic Ears is nearing completion for its premiere concert in February. Here’s a sample of one of the elements going into the final work.
Bionic Ear Study No. 3
(1′23″, 1.7 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Music For Bionic Ears: A question of taste
Wednesday 5 January 2011
As an artsy-fartsy Modern Composer, one of the challenges of the Music For Bionic Ears project is having to come up with something that people might want to listen to. When the publicity for your upcoming gig promises a concert “designed to be enjoyed by both cochlear implant users and audiences with normal hearing,” you’re suddenly struck by a conundrum. How do you know whether or not the cochlear implant wearers are hearing something enjoyable in your music, when most “normal hearing” people don’t like your music anyway?
My music’s already been written up as using “bizarre scales”, and I have, on at least two occasions, been confronted face-to-face with the question What Is This Shit? So for this piece, should I try to write something (shudder) “accessible”, or carry on doggedly clutching my copy of “Who Cares if You Listen?” At least I can console myself that the tunings I’m using, which may sound off to most people, seem to sound pretty normal to implant users.
This is the quandary I’ve been facing since visiting the Bionic Ear Institute in Melbourne last November. While I was in town I got to see the (fantastic) launch concert for the CD Artefacts of Australian experimental music: volume 2. One of the composers on the CD, Sarah Hopkins, played her music on whirly tubes. As well as her own works, she performed Amazing Grace. Yeah, it’s simple and obvious, but whirly tubes play only notes in the harmonic series. In other words, it’s not in conventional tuning but a “bizarre scale” similar to the scale I’m using in this particular piece.
The scale is also very similar to one used by Ben Johnston, a composer with over 50 years’ experience of writing music in alternative tunings. His best known piece? A set of microtonal variations on Amazing Grace. This string quartet marked a changed in his style, from the more abstracted idioms of the post-war avant-garde, to using familiar harmony and melody as a foundation on which to build sophisticated elaborations on the physics of sound.
Although my music is still very different, I’m using these examples as a reminder of how I would like my music to be heard: I don’t want it to be easy, but I want it to be clear.
