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Please Mister Please is up and running again, with your old favourites and a welcome return by Mister Buddy Greco. Beats me why there’s a blank space above this paragraph, so let’s just say I was trying to build up suspense. |
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Also re-uploaded, Real Characters and False Analogues: twelve pieces for microtonal piano, all available for streaming or download.
Blogging is ready to recommence, and the rest of the music will be up again shortly. Everything else seems pretty much intact, but there should (hopefully) be some improvements coming soon.
This includes the long-promised writeup of the Dumitrescu gigs from, oh, a month ago now.
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Whoa there a second…
Monday 26 October 2009
Regular update-type stuff is on hold while I change servers. It seems like several million Chinese punters made a common mistake and have eaten up just about all of my bandwidth. Enjoy the piano music, guys!
Also, RIP Maryanne Amacher – the link’s worth it for the photo of what I always imagined was a typical audience reaction. I mentioned this on Twitter but haven’t had a chance to write anything substantial. (Also haven’t had chance to put Twitter link on my website.)
Fan Mail!
Sunday 11 October 2009
In the early days of the internet, I used to get email every now and then from deluded fanboys who had mistaken me for a different Ben Harper. Of course, I always replied. That hasn’t happened for years, but last week I got fan mail from none other than the King of the Delta Blues, Robert Johnson. Apparently the afterlife now has email, but not Google.
Mr Johnson’s remarks were apposite, albeit misdirected:
Who did you have to blow to get to the level of semi-fame you have been handed? In your entire career there has not been one original moment. Your vocals and guitar playing, not to mention your lyrics, are dull, and the worst thing is your deep sense of self-importance. You seem humorless and totally self-involved. And you are just generally so AVERAGE. If it weren’t for your connections,you would be playing in a bar somewhere in the Inland Empire on a Sunday Jam night.
I know that your career was handed to you, so that’s nice for you. Since you have a soapbox on which to stand and pontificate, why not take just a minute and write something catchy? Be a pop star and a star-fucker (you already are), and stop with the fake social consciousness.
PS congratulations on those tattoos. They are about as original as your music.
Rolling over in my grave,
Robert JohnsonPS please stop playing my music. It’s embarassing.
As I said, I always reply to fan mail, regardless of whether it’s meant for me or not:
Dear Mr Johnson,
Thank you for your email. In reply to your question, I had to blow an old gypsy at the age of 12 to attain my present day success. Funnily enough, it took place at a crossroads. Ain’t that a kick in the pants? Thought you might find it amusing.
I know I got a pretty sweet deal going here so I have no intention of shitting where I eat and showing up my lack of talent by trying and failing to write something fun and tuneful. As for the fake social consciousness, well as you are aware I have next to no mojo so it’s the next best way to get laid. Sure, they’re those liberal arts student chicks who don’t shave in the right places but they’re hella uninhibited and besides when you’re almost drowning in pussy you don’t want to make waves, you get me? Same goes for the tattoos, they’re a real leg-spreader for the sheltered neurotic type that tend to hang out at my gigs.
To be honest, I have been working on some new material, its uploaded on my new website at http://www.cookylamoo.com/music/. I call it Klezska, its like a combination of klezmer, ska, and polka all wrapped up into one. I hardly need to keep typing cos I know you’re already downloading it, who can resist such an amazing blend of rockin styles. It’s pretty fucking awesome, though I say so myself.
Also, Eric Clapton and I have been talking about issuing a sort of customer loyalty/credit account card with your picture on it. You know, as a tribute. Is that cool?
You’re my idol,
Ben.Harper
“Only humans carry their fast around, their past around.”
Saturday 10 October 2009
I was uh downloading some mp3s the other day when I found that one of the files contained a bad CD rip. Like, really bad: the track stuck and skipped for minutes on end, like the grotty copy of “Best Beer Songs” on heavy rotation down the local. I sat through the whole thing, waiting to see if enough material had survived intact to salvage the track in editing. It hadn’t.
So instead I removed the good material and, with a bit of judicious editing and mixing, made a new piece out of the rubbish. The result sounds like a good old-fashioned mid-1990s skipping-CD glitch piece, because that’s what it is. Like folk music, its value lies in authenticity instead of originality, created by its circumstances.
Ben.Harper – The Past #3
(9’02″, 14.97 MB, mp3)
It’s A Grand Macabre
Wednesday 7 October 2009
How are you supposed to appreciate a work of art that is intended to fail? The possibilities boil down to “Congratulations, it sucks!” or “Too bad it’s good.” György Ligeti’s only opera Le Grand Macabre premiered in 1978, a little late for the 60s era of irreverent deconstruction. Appropriately, he tried to outwit the Zeitgeist by writing an “anti-anti-opera”.
La Fura dels Baus‘ production of Le Grand Macabre is now being staged in London, where it has played upon, and been played by, the modern-day Zeitgeist. Self-consciously provocative, this production’s central conceit is a coup de théâtre that the action takes place on, around, and especially inside a naked, corpulent woman suspended apparenty in extremis. During the first scenes the audience gently chuckled, even more self-consciously, in an attempt to show the Catalans that these English punters were down with all the sexual innuendo and in-jokes. By and large, the critics were at pains to demonstrate that the show failed to shock them and that the whole affair felt a bit dated, really.
By half-time I was starting to feel that the opera was a fine museum piece, at odds with itself over whether to provoke or deflate its own pretensions. The second half won me over. Ligeti’s score is incredibly detailed – it functions more as a chorus commenting on the characters’ behaviour than as a backdrop to their singing – and the latter half contains some of his most unusual, affecting music. I’ve read some reviews that thought the spectacular set dominated procedings. Well, it did, but the singers were a match for it. Besides attacking their parts with lustily grotesque abandon, they gave remarkably active, physical performances. Depsite Ligeti’s qualms about expecting his performers to be actors and singers, one of the greatest pleasures in this production was how seamlessly the singing and the stage acrobatics blended together.
What really makes the opera succeed is how it fails to fail. For Ligeti, failure is not to be denounced but accepted, even embraced. Having survived two of Europe’s most ruthless attempts to impose an all-encompassing system upon society, admissions of fallibility must come as something of a relief. Who can be disappointed by the opera’s ending, that Death’s “sacred mission” ends in failure? The autocratic prince and his secret police are rendered humourous and charming by their ineffectualness. The chief of police’s fevered babbling becomes a coloratura tour de force; the drunkards’ carousing ends in ringing harmonies. Dross is transformed to gold, and we end up feeling affection for these caricatures.
Ligeti talked about “overcoming fear with alienation“. In a world where we are harried to be more and more fearful about less and less, Ligeti’s comedy has found new ways to prod at our nicely settled discomfort.
Filler By Proxy LXXIV: Percy Grainger’s Electric Eye Tone Tool
Tuesday 22 September 2009
A short video of Warren Burt and Catherine Schieve playing the last of Percy Grainger’s free music instruments, the Electric Eye Tone Tool:
Between 1954 and 1961, Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross worked on a machine called the Electric Eye Tone Tool. Years later, I was looking at the diagram of the Electric Eye machine in the Grainger Museum and I said, “That should be fairly easy to rebuild.” Well, it turns out it’s not fairly easy to rebuild but it was rebuildable.
The Electric Eye Tone Tool seems to be the first light-controlled synthesizer. Its oscillator circuits were transistorised (more stable than the old valve technology) and could be controlled graphically, simply by painting a score onto a transparent plastic sheet which could then be passed over the instrument’s array of photoelectric cells. Take that, UPIC.
Burt has written a brief study of the history of experimental music in Australia, reprinted at the Australian Music Centre website.
(Hat tip to Mr Graeve.)
Stupid Tuplet Tricks
Monday 21 September 2009
Just the other day I was complaining about writing out conventional dots-on-lines music using notation software. “It needs a regular, steady beat, and needs to know how many beats will be in each bar before it begins to fill them with notes and silences.” I haven’t used notation software for years because it didn’t seem to want to let me do anything fun.
I generally don’t write for human beings anyway, so if I’m writing out musical instructions to be understood by a machine I’d rather use sequencer programs which can give you more direct control over your data. This means I end up punching in lots of numbers by hand* or writing scripts to generate the numbers for me. Now someone’s found out by accidentally hitting the tuplet key twice in Sibelius that you can create all sorts of groovy irrational rhythms and temporal illusions by building up stacks of multiple tuplets, like so (illustrations and sound samples follow).
* or by banging my head against the computer keyboard Don Music stylee.
Re Redundens 1m
Friday 18 September 2009
In case you don’t hear the music in your head when you read a score – and I sure don’t – I’ve made up a little electronic realisation of Redundens 1m for you to enjoy. It was written for melodica (and for Melodica!), but this recording uses an accordion soundfont because I couldn’t get a decent-sounding melodica soundfont for free anywhere on the internet, not even illegally. These particular accordion samples sound closer to a melodica than an accordion, anyway.
The series of works collectively titled Redundens was begun in 2001. All the pieces take Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano, Op.11 as their starting point: only the top line in Schoenberg’s pieces is retained as an unaccompanied melody (or as a list of pitch classes if you’re more technically-minded.) Each set of pieces uses a different method of encoding this melody; by pitch, register, timbre, duration, dynamics, or other means.
Redundens 1m keeps the same register and duration for each pitch class throughout the piece, determined by the nature of their initial appearances in the original. The range of the original has been compressed to suit a solo melodica with a range of two-and-a-half octaves. Certain notes have been selected by chance to be extended to four beats’ duration, so that they may overlap with following notes.
The Last Of The Proms (Part 2)
Tuesday 15 September 2009
When I get to gigs at all, it’s because of what is being played rather than who is playing it. I’m not a huge Stravinsky fan but I had to go hear the Proms performance of Les noces, that fantastically eccentric piece for singers, chorus, four pianos and a load of percussion. My general lack of enthusiasm for Stravinsky comes partly from disappointment that he moved on to pursue other musical ideas after writing something as awesome as Les noces. It’s a sad, stupid blind spot I have which persuades me, when I hear this piece, not to listen to any of Stravinky’s other music for fear of spoiling it.
The real highlight for me for the Proms season was the late-night concert one Friday devoted to George Crumb. Crumb’s music really needs to be heard live to appreciate it, not only for the theatrical elements of its performance, or for the spatial placement of sounds (more than once the musicians had to relocate from the stage to one of the balconies to achieve an elusive, distant quality to their sound), but for the subtlety and complexity of the sounds he specifies.
These details can’t be fully captured on recordings. Just one example: the soprano begins and ends Ancient Voices of Children with her back to the audience, singing into the resonating strings of the amplified piano. The Nash Ensemble played these pieces superbly, keeping the technical details in focus without ever losing the dramatic and emotional impact of the music. Each piece ended with a long, reflective silence from the audience before breaking into applause. That’s another thing you don’t get to experience in recordings. Again, in the Royal Albert Hall the best place to appreciate all this was standing in the arena.
(Churlish footnote: Ancient Voices of Children has a part for a boy soprano. In the programme guide was the note, “Owing to the late hour of this concert it is not possible for a boy soprano to take part in tonight’s performance; the BBC is grateful to Amy Haworth for agreeing to take on this role at short notice.” Sounds like there was a late intervention from a Health’n'Safety officer, and one disappointed youth.)
The Last Of The Proms (Part 1)
Sunday 13 September 2009
I missed the Last Night of the Proms this year, not that I watch it anyway: I simply missed that it happened on the weekend. There wasn’t even the usual hand-wringing from the usual suspects about jingoism and cultural imperialism that usually presages the event. Perhaps getting David Attenborough to perform the floor polisher solo in Malcolm Arnold’s beloved Opus 57 put the night beyond criticism.
In fact I went to more Proms than usual this year: three of them. I think I’m acquiring a taste for them. Depsite the dreadful acoustics, the Royal Albert Hall is starting to endear itself to me. Getting arena tickets helps. You have to stand for the entire gig but it’s only £5 and it’s probably the best way to hear what’s happening on the stage, what with all the seats in the hall being either side-on or far, far away.
For the Xenakis prom I scored a seat in one of the loggia boxes from a friend (thanks!), which was just as well because the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Nomos gamma from inside the arena itself, leaving room for only a few lucky punters to mill about in the company of the scattered groups of musicians, and Mrs Xenakis, who presumably was given a chair. It was one of those rare occasions where the Albert Hall becomes a suitable venue, with the sounds of disjointed groups of instruments rising up from the centre of the arena.
The playing seemed more passionate than at the Total Immersion concert earlier this year, particularly in a suitably brazen performance of Aïs. Are the British developing a taste for Xenakis? Perhaps they’re less reticent when safely behind an instrument, and they’ve always shown a greater tolerance for new music as long as it makes a suitably large noise.
A Free Hour
Wednesday 9 September 2009
Continuing the minimalist binge (cramming myself with lots and lots of very little), I’ve been listening tonight to a new performance of Tom Johnson’s insidious An Hour For Piano by R. Andrew Lee. It’s available for download on Lee’s blog, in either mp3 or (gasp) wav format. Thoughtfully, he reprints the program notes, which are meant to be read while listening to the music. If you’re one of those people who can’t help reading the notes while listening, you may think this is a boon. Remember, I said the piece is insidious.
It’s a fine performance, never mind Lee’s perfectionist quibble that he ran twenty seconds over the one-hour time limit. He got closer than Frederic Rzewski.
(Found via aworks.)
Etudes Boreales for Piano
Tuesday 8 September 2009
The piano etudes are really more like percussion pieces, the player using beaters and making noises on the piano construction. … Kirstein found the piece unplayable; it was only Michael Pugliese, a virtuoso percussionist, who found the way to play these “impossible” pieces.
– James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (1996), p.199.
Last Tuesday night I left home and walked twenty minutes down the road to a cafe to hear the pianist Mark Knoop perform John Cage’s Etudes Boreales (1978) for piano. I was reminded of that story of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s percussionists or whoever taking thirty rehearsals to muddle their way through Varèse’s Ionisation (1933), whereas now it’s a staple of student percussion ensembles.
It is indeed, like all of Cage’s Etudes, a fiendishly difficult set of pieces. Having never heard this particular set of four pieces I can’t compare how well Knoop performed it compared to other musicians. It sounded fine to me, and he didn’t appear to be struggling with getting the right beater to the right part of the piano in the right time, nor was he playing particularly slowly.
Interestingly, the music in these piano parts is significantly more sparse than in the other etudes. Cage was apparently mindful of the practicalities of performing these pieces, even if they did seem impossible at first. The idea behind all the etudes was not to defeat the musician, but allow them to accomplish something never attempted before. To paraphrase Morton Feldman: now that the Etudes are so simple, there’s so much to do.
The mystery of Julius Eastman’s Creation
Thursday 3 September 2009
When a forgotten talent is rediscovered, it’s sobering to realise how little time it takes for the biographical details of an artist to become as elusive and conjectural as those of a Jacobean playwright.
The fate of the composer Julius Eastman, not yet twenty years dead, is an extreme but illustrative example. Mary Jane Leach has been on a quest for ten years to gather up whatever scattered fragments of his work have survived. Devoid of context, the stray odds and ends can be frustratingly hard to fit into place.
Having heard Stay On It on the Internet Archive, I searched around and found a recording of another Eastman composition called Creation. According to the program notes, the recording is from a broadcast on KPFA in 1973, it “appears to be an aleatoric piece for voice, instrumental ensemble, and some prerecorded sounds”, and was written in 1954. If this last point is true, the piece is remarkably advanced for its time, particularly as Eastman would have been 14 when he wrote it*.
The program was repeated in 1974, and again the piece is called Creation by Julius Eastman. In the list of known works by Eastman, no such piece is mentioned. It seems unlikely that a hitherto-unknown piece, regardless of when it was composed, has been hiding in plain sight on the web. Perhaps the piece was mistitled in the broadcast: Thruway and The Moon’s Silent Modulation, both from 1970, are the only two on the list whose descriptions could possibly fit the recording. The former exists in a recording ten minutes longer than this 1973 broadcast, the latter lists no surviving recording or score.
I’ll have to become a researcher myself, just to find out for certain what this piece actually is.
* The 1954 date also seems incorrect when one of the singers quotes “The Girl From Ipanema“, although this particular song may not be specifically cited in Eastman’s score.
Melodica!
Tuesday 1 September 2009
Daniel Wolf, of Renewable Music and Winter Album fame, has compiled a new survey of present-day composers who have written music for the melodica (or multiples thereof). Composers include Jon Brenner, Stephen Chase, Kieran Daly, Paul A. Epstein, Graham Flett, Aaron Hynds, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Kondo Kohei, Nomura Makoto, and Ushijima Akiko. There may be some new additions over the next few days.
My own piece, Redundens 1m, continues the ever-growing series of Redundens pieces. A mirror of the PDF will be added to the page shortly, and maybe an mp3 of a MIDI realisation (although good melodica soundfonts are hard to find). In the meantime enjoy the collection.
What’s On Top Of The Pile?
Saturday 29 August 2009
Julius Eastman, Stay On It (Ne(x)tworks live in concert at The Stone)
I’ve been having a little binge on minimalist music lately, and happened to find this 2007 performance of an essential piece by Julius Eastman – a tragic, quasi-mythical figure in the New York music scene. Stay On It starts out in a jaunty, upbeat fashion typical of much repetitive music… but then it starts to fall apart. And then something else happens. And then another something else, and then… It’s a great piece of music, and a neat reminder that in 1973 some composers were already finding minimalism old hat.
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