Boring Like A Drill.

Filed under: Travel by Ben.H

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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.

1. My ear training has come along.
2. I’m listening to a different mix that’s been “punched up” for today’s attention-deficit culture.
3. Small, cheap speakers bring out the synth treatments more.
4. 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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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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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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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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Robert Ashley, “Giving Love Away” (1991).
(3’52”, 8.8 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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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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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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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.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H

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Richard Trythall, “Omaggio a Jerry Lee Lewis” (1975).
(6’26”, 14.7 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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Filed under: Stupidity, Travel by Ben.H

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The Melbourne Age has published an article today about Music for Bionic Ears:

In February, the audience will get to hear the culmination of his experimental musical dialogue when [Robin] Fox and five other composers perform a selection of works at the Arts Centre created especially for the 1000 or so Victorian Cochlear implant recipients.

It will be a concert like no other; the deaf as well as those with normal hearing will be gathered together listening to the same music. While it is difficult to know how it is going to be interpreted by those wearing the device, Fox said: ”Hopefully, it will be a shared musical experience. Those with normal hearing will be able to discuss it together afterwards with those that are hearing-impaired.”

In the meantime, I’m getting stuck into making the finished piece for the February concert:

As you can see, the creative process is a thrilling mix of heady inspiration and unbridled fun.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H

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Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, “Sue Egypt” (1980).
(2’58”, 3.38 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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It’s the ultimate showdown: which proud national cuisine can turn out the most disgusting pizza?

Filed under: Stupidity, Travel by Ben.H

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Underneath all the music I make, there’s a problem nagging away at me. Whatever I do will always be second-rate because of one fatal mistake: I’m working with electronics instead of acoustic instruments.

Have you had this experience? You’re at a gig, someone with a laptop or decks, hi-tech or low-tech gizmos, and you’re into it, thinking to yourself that it all sounds damn good. Then for the next act some old bloke comes on with a penny whistle or ukelele or whatever and blows the room away.

It’s not just that we’re impressed by the visible effort – the ‘work’ – going into the music that is usually less evident in electronic music: the whole experience is tangibly different, more engaging, more exciting. I can’t explain in any satisfactory way why it always has to be like this.

Coincidentally, while procrastinating from writing this I just read a quote from Jeff Harrington:

I find that electronic music has a real problem to it, because, at this point, there is no good way to get across the kind of energy and vitality that the performer brings to acoustic music.

I don’t think that really gets to the heart of this problem, without understanding exactly what is meant when we talk about energy and vitality in music.

And I don’t think it’s all down to the performer either. There’s something in the natures of the two media that will always put acoustic music at an advantage, at least in a live setting. (I suspect I’d rather listen to recordings of boring acoustic music than of boring electronic music, but I’m reluctant to test this theory.)

One time I was playing a gig with live analogue electronics, spontaneously generated, no samples, nothing canned or taped. The air was alive with fresh, new, exciting sounds. As I wound up the piece with a flourish and the last sound ebbed away, a loose cymbal on another act’s percussion rig behind me slid to the floor with a resonant crash, capping off my whole set. The punters laughed and cheered. Acoustic beats electronic, every time.

Filed under: Music by Ben.H

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