Boring Like A Drill.

I’m thinking about music made by visual artists. It’s so interesting, and seems to shed so much light on their artistic thought and methods. Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Martin Creed, those fluxus guys.

I’m thinking about visual art made by composers. It’s a struggle to think of anything really interesting, that extends or adds a new dimension to their body of work. Arnold Schoenberg, Carl Ruggles, it’s hard to see any connection with their music. It seems like the paintings would have happened anyway, with or without a head full of musical thinking attached.

Of course I can think of one exception straight away, but otherwise it looks like art has a lot to say to music, but music doesn’t have a whole lot to say to art. Once again I’m repeating Morton Feldman’s question: is music an artform? Or is it all just showbiz technique?

Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H

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Aldo Clementi, “Otto Variazioni” (2002). Geoffrey Morris, guitar.
(4’57”, 7.4 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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I missed the Gerhard Richter show at Tate this winter, but was lucky enough to catch it on my holiday in Berlin. One of his grey monochromes was in the show, something like (or exactly) this one:

Michelle Vaughan declares Richter’s grey monochrome superior to this grey monochrome by Henry Codax, recently discussed by Greg Allen:

For the sake of competition, I’d like to throw in another contender that I spotted on the way back to my hotel after a long night on the booze taking in the Richter show, on the platform of Hermannplatz U-Bahn station:

The Richter is still a better painting, but I’m not sure how well the Codax would stack up against it when compared in reality.

Filed under: Art by Ben.H

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I like those artists who can focus on just one thing for the rest of their lives, working this one particular angle without ever running out of things to say (Feldman, Morandi).

I like those artists who refuse to be pinned down to one style or subject, letting their curiosity take them into new creative territories (Tenney, Richter).

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There’s a bunch of stuff I need to catch up on but first I have to talk about the Charlemagne Palestine and Oren Ambarchi gig at Cafe Oto last week. I really have a problem with this type of “hey let’s take two musicians who have never worked together before and y’know like throw them together and then sit back and like watch the Magic totally happen” gig. It’s too much like there’s a curator in the background hoping to pick up the kudos if it somehow works. Never mind; I fuelled up on Beerlao from the cornershop and went anyway, largely because I had no idea what was going to happen.

Yeah yeah, there were the obligatory stuffed toys and glasses of brandy, but the music had to be different. For starters, the piano at Oto ain’t no Bösendorfer Imperial. The evening began while the punters were filing in, with Palestine playing a steadily-building tidal wave of noise from his laptop. For the concert proper he played with his distinctively animalistic mix of single-mindedness and capriciousness. In between the expected periods of drumming away at sustained harmonic intervals on the piano, there were more laptop collages, occasional extended drones on cognac glasses, and in one or two places some La Monte Young/Terry Riley type singing.

Ambarchi, as he freely admitted afterwards, really had no idea what to expect coming in to this setup. His response to being put in this situation is what made the gig work so well. Both experienced musicians, displaying all the craft they’ve spent years developing, refused to bend too far from what they do best. Ambarchi would build up layers of amplifier hum and electrical crackle under Palestine’s piano, and then seize upon the slightest pause and shift the frequencies and harmonics, forcing Palestine to retreat momentarily, and then start over on a new tonal centre.

Throughout the gig Ambarchi kept provoking Palestine, most entertainingly when the older man at the piano tried to play conductor, barking at Ambarchi “Drums!… Drums!… Drums!” The latter took his sweet time about it, before finally reaching over to gently tap one of his cymbals.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Charlemagne Palestine, Oren Ambarchi
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Ruby Andrews, “You Made a Believer Out of Me” (1969).
(2’39”, 3.6 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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In the second-hand bookshop in Stoke Newington Church Street on the weekend. They had a hardback copy of Lawrence Durrell’s Nunquam, a book I’m sure I haven’t seen since the days of the Third World Bookshop in Adelaide, over twenty years ago. Back then and there, a couple dozen fading copies of the thing were stacked up on top of the other stacks of books wedged between the top of the bookshelves and the ceiling on the mezzanine, and they never moved. Perhaps they were holding the ceiling up. No-one ever tried to find out.

My friends called Third World “the bookshop that couldn’t say no”. The saleable stock was slowly and inexorably being crowded out or swallowed up by accumulating substrata of unmoveable stock. Occasionally you got lucky, like when I found a signed first edition of Janette Turner Hospital’s Borderline under half a centimetre of dust. Otherwise you could just take a reassuring tour of the familiar layers of superseded Pelicans, teacher’s handbooks, Nunquams and, in pride of place at the end of the Mezzanine, all 300 volumes of the collected writings of Lenin, a massive, yellowing white elephant.

Back in Stoke Newington, I noticed another vast off-white mass on top of the shelves where Nunquam lurked. It spilled over onto the adjoining bookcase. It was the collected writings of Lenin, in 300 volumes. I’ll have to go back next week to see if they’re both still there, in eternal embrace.

Filed under: Writing by Ben.H

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I saw Nixon in China about – wow, that long ago – and really enjoyed it. I passed up the chance to see The Death of Klinghoffer at the Coloseum last week, and I’m not exactly sure why I was so reluctant to take a punt on it.

Part of it must be just that John Adams is one of those composers I like most of the time but can’t get really fired up about. I’ve heard the recording and had the same general impression most criticisms start with: dramatically inert, awkwardly self-conscious yadda yadda. The main thing that kept me away was fear. Fear of being bored. Fear that the production would seize upon some of the opera’s worst aspects to make some cringingly well-meaning but insulting gesture toward “saying something” about the Middle East or, worse still, “offering support”.

On one level I dislike the opera’s tokenism; the way Adams and Alice Goodman grab the subject matter and then, unsure of what to do with it, revert to making the people and incidents symbolic, loading them down with excess ideological baggage. What should be the conflicted consciousness of the characters in their dilemma, is replaced by the confusion of librettist and composer contemplating the dilemma, and so the characters become aloof, ridiculous and phoney.

On another level I generally can’t stand pieces that are endlessly batted around in the meeja for their “controversial” subject matter, while being artistically inoffensive.

Meanwhile, another new opera is being staged at Covent Garden. When the composer’s own promotional spiel makes it sound like a ghastly Trendy Vicar swing at “relevance”, how can one hope it to be worth a damn?

Filed under: Music by Ben.H

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It must be about dead-on a year ago that I first saw a performance of John Cage’s vast, protean Song Books. That time it was Exaudi at King’s Place. Last night I got to experience it again, enacted by a hodge-podge of players including a bunch of old Scratch Orchestra alumni, at Cafe Oto. On the surface the approaches taken by the two groups were broadly similar, but it was through the details that the work can truly live or die.

I almost didn’t get to see it this time. I hadn’t booked a ticket and when I got there a queue was already stretching down the street and round the corner. The place was rammed: the crowded atmosphere emphasised by having punters sitting in amongst the performers in the ‘stage’ area, and other performers scattered in amongst the standing crowd. Exaudi had a similar setup of their singers stationed around the audience, moving from one spot to the next from time to time. The crowd at King’s Place, however, remained seated in the middle throughout. Besides the milling crowd at Oto, there was also the bar and pavement outside luring punters in and out for refreshment.

On both nights, the programme was set up to last an hour, in the space of which each player independently performed a chance-determined programme of solos from the Books. Exaudi played their pieces expertly – I want to say impeccably. It was a faithful, thoughtful interpretation of Cage’s music, but it felt remote and clinical. It was ‘art’, mounted and framed. With the Scratch Orchestra et al things were more chaotic, a little rougher round the edges but no less faithful in interpretation. Some players were a little too enthusiastic, swatting at tables with paper plates or menacing punters with alligator masks. Others were a little too reticent, like the couple who spent most of the time in the centre of the room, singing in unison, apparently more to themselves than to the audience.

It was precisely this diversity that made last night at Oto the more rewarding experience, as we all saw and participated in an enactment of Cage’s aesthetic and social values of the time: of diversity, abundance, coexistence, anarchy, the merging of art and life. For an hour or so everyone in the bar experienced Cage’s vision for the world in microcosm. The crowded room inevitably cramped some of the theatrical elements called for in the score, but compromises were made, punters made room as necessary. In other words, there was true, unselfconscious audience interaction and participation, without coercion.

In this atmosphere, the chance coincidences and juxtapositions took on more than just an aesthetic appeal. At one point a pretty lady in a red dress stood and repeatedly intoned Thoreau’s anarchist maxim “The best form of government is no government.” Behind her, a pianist began playing Cage’s lovely 1949 composition Dream. Soon after this was almost drowned out by insistent hammering. All three carried on unperturbed. When the hour was up, this same woman in red had just been tasked with typing out a phrase of Erik Satie’s, 38 times, on a recalcitrant manual typewriter. The audience stood around intently, and waited patiently in silence until she was finally done.

The Oto performance succeeded as art because so much more of life was able to infiltrate it. Whenever I think I understand Cage a little better, a new complication appears. I keep thinking of Morton Feldman’s challenge, “Is music an artform? Or is it just showbiz?” (For this argument, the Exaudi gig was showbiz.) Cage’s music is definitely art and yet, in this case at least, the closer it comes to life the better it works as art. Put that way, Cage sounds like an old-fashioned mimetic artist, but what he achieves is not mimicry of life, rather he recreates certain principles on which life conducts itself. What bugs me about this is: if interpretation of Cage’s work were to continue to approach ‘real life’ closer and closer, at some point it would cease to be art. If we accept Cage’s conceit that there is no distinction between life and art, life may be permitted to intrude upon a performance of Cage to the extent that it misrepresents Cage’s work. There is some undefined tipping point within Cage’s work whereupon it refutes itself.

Therefore, to be like life, Cage’s music must always remain as art, to some extent. Of course there is a distinction between art, as witnessed at Cafe Oto, and artifice.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: John Cage
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Phil Winsor, “S.T.O.C. ‘Same Tired Old Changes’” (1982). Mark Graf, flute; Mary Beth Skaggs, clarinet; Neely Bruce, organ et. al.
(6’38”, 9.9 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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I’d much rather think about things than do them. Or rather, once I’ve thought of something, it seems largely redundant and pointless to go ahead and actually make it. This is why I make music, and why I make the type of music that I do: I don’t know what it will sound like until it’s done.

Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H

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I’ve been really busy lately so not much time to update the blog. This is just to point out that me and/or my music will be featured on ABJECT BLOC radio onRESONANCE 104.4fm, Tuesday 6 March 2012 at 22.30 GMT. What’s that? Of course you can listen online!

If you haven’t checked Soundcloud or The Listening Room yet, this would be a perfect time to find out what it is I actually do. Please note that I haven’t figured out exactly what it is I’ll be doing yet, so it should be a nice surprise for both of us. There will be something not otherwise available online, even if it’s me yelling about the Greek bailout, drunkenly recalling teenage crushes etc.

Also, I’ve slightly redesigned everything on the website. The text column is now 12 pixels wider. It was agony. I hope you’re grateful.

Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H

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I need to do a write-up of the Redrawing: Collective Collaborations show at Monash last year. Apart from a sneak preview of my contribution, nothing else of the latest, book-format iteration of String Quartet No. 2 (Canon in Beta) has been posted on my site yet.

The visual form of String Quartet No. 2 (Canon in Beta) was a spectrogram made of the 10-minute version of the piece. This produced a long, striated pattern that tied in neatly with some of the other visual and musical models on which the original(?) piece was based. Now, deciding to produce yet another distorted copy based upon the already distorted copy (itself based on a distorted copy etc.) I ran the spectrogram through the freeware image-to-sound program Coagula Light. The results are surprisingly consistent yet pleasingly different.

I’ve made a small video of the spectrogram, with the accompanying music. For comparison, I’ve included the video for the original(?) String Quartet below. Of course, you can also try playing them simultaneously.

Filed under: Film, Music by Ben.H

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Jane Siberry, “Lena Is A White Table” (1987).
(6’42”, 10.9 MB, mp3)

Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H

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After Saturday’s post, a few more friends have sent in music with evil cackling. From Mark Harwood, Jani Christou’s Epicycle:

Clive Graham sent in a couple: Daphne Oram’s Dr Faustus Suite, and this:

Filed under: Music by Ben.H

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