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 6j takes the sequence of notes as a melody without regard to rhythm, duration, or register. The melody is then split between two voices within a common octave, alternating from one note to the next. The second voice is shifted one beat back to produce intervals. Unisons are doubled two octaves lower, and played at half duration. For solo piano.
Redundens 6j (4’16”, 6.84 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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It’s Not The End Of The World
Wednesday 4 March 2009
Kyle Gann has reluctantly closed down his PostClassic Radio internet station. It’s a pity: over the past few years it’s been a superb way to hear hundreds of pieces of great music by composers who don’t fit into the standard pigeonholes of “modern classical” or whatever you want to call that stuff.
I can’t blame him. It’s not as if he doesn’t have other things to do besides update and maintain that service; and there’s no way I’d spend hundreds of dollars each year on letting everyone hear other people’s music.
Besides, over PostClassic Radio’s five years of existence a number of other internet resources have arisen (and some have fallen again). Although it will be missed, there are more ways today than when it started, of exploring a wider range of music, by hook or by crook. Even when a corporate behemoth crushes a technological innovation that gives people what they want, an alternative soon emerges. Goodbye Muxtape, hello Seeqpod – or whatever becomes next week’s vehicle of choice for sharing music. The situation will remain in flux but still active, as long as we can access the means of distribution.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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What’s on top of the (virtual) pile?
Sunday 1 March 2009
New Directions in Music 1 (Robert Craft et al.)
This 50-year-old LP of Pierre Boulez’ Le Marteau sans maître and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse* is just one example of many Vinyl Age recordings of the post-war avant garde I’ve been enjoying lately. This guy conveys some of the thrill in hearing performances made of music when it is still brand new and something of an unknown quantity (when this record was released, both of these pieces had been completed only the previous year**.)
That’s not all, though. These old recordings have a starkness to them, a thinness of sound which emphasise just how unfamiliar the music was to a contemporary audience. Modern recordings too often have a sweetness and softness to them that is appealing at first, but eventually sounds bland.
Lux and Ivy’s Favorites, volumes 1-11
Speaking of scratchy old records…. The Cramps have always been a band I intellectually admired but not subjectively liked. Lux Interior’s recent death has spurred WFMU into hosting on their website the complete set (so far) of Lux and Ivy’s Favorites: fan-compiled CDs of songs mentioned by Lux and Ivy in their various interviews. Liking random collections of old records as much as I do, this plethora of pop, soul, blues, and novelty records from the 50s and 60s has made my week – and given me a better-sounding copy of The Five Blobs’ “The Blob”.
* Or Zeitmasze. Stockhausen seems to have changed his mind later about how to spell it.
** And now they are old. And yet…
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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A Conundrum
Saturday 28 February 2009
Which is slower, more tedious, more frustrating? Going through a piece of music in a computer program, modifying it note by note? Or writing a script to modify the whole thing automatically, inevitably having to subject the whole thing to trial and error, running it numerous times before you’ve fixed all the stupid syntax errors and made it do what you wanted it to do, then checking the modified work to make sure there are no mistakes?
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 26 February 2009
Michael Graeve, “Kriesler, Kriesler, HMV” (2004).
(6’58”, 10.34 MB, mp3)
(6’58”, 10.34 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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There he goes again
Thursday 26 February 2009
The worst of the winter seems to have passed, and so the Volkswagen Campers have started parking outside my house again. This is the fifth one to lurk beneath my window.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Secrets of the Vatican
Wednesday 25 February 2009
Both photography and talking are prohibited in the Sistine Chapel. Unlike most churches which don’t allow photography, the Chapel has relatively few punters in it blithely flashing away at something fifty feet above their heads. The chatter, however, is almost impossible to control.
I was about to make a joke about the effrontery of being told to shut up by a bunch of Italians, but it isn’t necessary: the guards, when they weren’t shushing people, passed time by chatting to each other or yakking on their mobile phones. Besides the guards, the worst offenders were Spanish speakers, who seemed to be at pains to point out that their language is completely different from Italian and the two are mutually incomprehensible.
To get to the Sistine Chapel you have to schlep a long, convoluted path through most of the other Vatican Museums first, with the Chapel itself acting like the centre of a labyrinth. After several miles the senses become dulled, particularly during a series of rooms filled with mostly dull modern religious art. Then, secreted between a room of dodgy late de Chiricos and a room of godawful late Dalis, is a little room which you might overlook in your hurry to get to the Chapel before christmas: it has a dozen Morandis in it. Six paintings and six drawings.
Up until then I’d only seen three of Morandi’s paintings, and none of his drawings. Given how excited art lovers can get when they find more than one of his paintings in the same room, it seemed incredible that this bounty was casually plonked off a passageway with so little fanfare, surrounded by so much vulgarity.
His drawing method is as fascinating as his brushwork, rendering all shade, contrast and depth in a careful layering of meticulous crosshatching.
One last piece of advice: don’t ask the cashier in the cafeteria how much the bananas cost. It will only cause you grief and anxiety and you won’t want a banana in any case.
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
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Good with Computers
Sunday 22 February 2009
So today I hacked together a crude many-to-many relational database in Microsoft Access. Yes, I’ve been normalising data to reduce inconsistent dependencies. Blech. I shuddered just typing that out.
It doesn’t help that ‘normalisation’ means something completely different in the sound editing software I’ve been using for years, thus turning every piece of helpful database advice on the web into gibberish. Speaking of music software, I also spent many hours this weekend trying to figure out why some of my software was serenely ignoring every piece of MIDI data I sent to it, in a vain effort to control it.
Tonight I finally figured it out. I forgot I’ve got a new computer, and hadn’t installed the little widget that makes all the music programs talk to each other. Durhey. I was about to speculate how this kind of thing is more likely these days, with so much technical stuff being handled invisibly in the background by computers, but then I realised that I’m equally capable of overlooking that the real reason a piece of equipment is unresponsive is because it is not plugged in.
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Wednesday 18 February 2009
Sonic Youth, “Stil” (1997).
(7’27”, 8.79 MB, mp3)
(7’27”, 8.79 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The past is a foreign country, and sometimes vice versa.
Wednesday 18 February 2009
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
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What’s on top of the (virtual) pile?
Tuesday 17 February 2009
A whole bunch of stuff by Earle Brown
Brown is an influential but overlooked composer, who’s guaranteed at least a footnote in history for his association with John Cage and his radical experiments in music notation. He’s one of those composers you might hear about a lot, without ever actually hearing them.
The Earle Brown Music Foundation has thoughtfully been uploading sound files of a number of his compositions, in addition to program notes and samples of his manuscripts, so now you can hear them for yourself. Available Forms I is a concise introduction to his open form style, Module I and Module II (performed simultaneously) are a contrasting study in austerity.
A couple of hours’ worth of assorted Bo Diddley tracks
His status as The Originator served as much to constrict his reputation as it did to celebrate it. I’ve only got into his stuff since his death, and discovered that not only did he rock hard, he was an out-and-out loon with a boundless capacity to surprise. The Probe has put up a nifty little selection of eclectic cuts as a tribute.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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While Shepherds Watched Their Ducks By Night, or The Decline of the Roman Empire
Sunday 15 February 2009
First of all, the threatened photo of Wussius Maximus.Secondly, before anyone asks, no I didn’t buy any Fonzies when I was in Rome. By the time I remembered to look for them I was already at the pitiful airport departures terminal and didn’t want to pay an extra Euro for the privilege of possessing a rather sad looking packet behind the only bar. (If you’re a Twisties fan, apparently you’re not missing much.)
The good thing about visiting Rome in the middle of winter is that the city is pretty empty. On a Monday night in January you and your special someone can have a restaurant more or less to yourselves. This makes it an excellent time of year to visit the Vatican, which at any other time is impossibly packed with tourists. Mind you, the low season doesn’t deter the dodgy touts who still hang around on the Rome-Vatican border offering you “special access” to St Peter’s and the museums, even though you it’s perfectly possible to wander in by yourself. (Don’t try this at any other time of year! The queue for the museums gets up to a kilometre long.)
The Vatican houses some of the greatest masterpieces of art from the past two millennia. It also contains some remarkable modern catholic tat. The Holy See keeps its Christmas decorations up until Candlemas, so I got to see two nativity dioramas: a ho-hum, life-size one outside in the piazza, and this monstrosity inside the basilica itself.
It looks like someone just went crazy with the church credit card down at the local garden centre, then just shoved it all together wherever they could get it to fit.
Apparently there was a sale on plaster ducks that day.
It’s good to see the Catholic church still has a good eye for a fine bottom on a young lad. That rooster is totally checking him out (make your own joke here.)
Filed under: Art, Travel by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXVII: Rejoice
Saturday 14 February 2009
Muzak has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
After a failed merger with one of its major creditors, the “sensory branding” company DMX last year, the firm which began life as Wired Radio Inc in the 1930s has been teetering on the brink of financial collapse.
There’s a history of the company at The Independent as well:
Visit the headquarters of Muzak Holdings LLC, the spiritual home of Muzak, and you will hear its eponymous product in every room, pumped in from the giant Well database containing 2.6 million tracks. Every room, that is, except for the elevator…. Employees of Muzak say the absence of sound in the company’s own lifts is maintained for “deeply felt symbolic reasons”.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Tuesday 10 February 2009
Earle Brown, “Event: Synergy II” (1967/68). Ensemble Avantgarde /Earle Brown and Steffen Schleiermacher.
(7’57”, 11.40 MB, mp3)
(7’57”, 11.40 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Housekeeping
Sunday 8 February 2009
- What passes for my discography is now online. I’m considering ways to putting up my music with better audio quality, but for practicality’s sake all downloadable music on this site will stay in mp3 format for now. More mp3s can be found via the main music page.
- A better quality recording of Redundens 6i is now ready, along with two more pieces from the Redundens series: Redundens 1b for piano and Redundens 6 for organ.
- Sarsaparilla is down at the moment; I don’t know why. The site is undergoing a redesign in any case, so should be available again soon with a spiffy new look.
