I’ll be playing in/with the Great Hall at Goldsmiths on Saturday 7 February 2015, as part of an all-weekend project by Contingent Events.
Things start at noon on Saturday; I’ll be on at 1.30 pm.
All the performers will be playing around with the acoustics of the Great Hall through an unusual 8-channel speaker arrangement. The whole event is an informal, exploratory occasion, with composers and musicians trying out different ideas or playing full pieces. People are welcome to come and go and wander around the space as they please. The schedule is pretty much continuous throughout the day.
I think I’ll be working on this new piece for multiple interconnected feedback loops, which I was polishing over the new year break. I’ll post some teaser samples of what I’ve got in mind later in the week.
Filed under: Music, Self-promotion by Ben.H
1 Comment »
This Is The Old New Music: String Quartet No. 1 (π Quartet)
Wednesday 14 January 2015
I think this is might be the earliest piece I wrote which I still have lying around, but I’d never heard a satisfactory realisation of it. I’d been reading about mathematicians constructing visualisations of the decimal places of π, to better its apparent randomness. This made me think of a musical interpretation, to find out if long strings of decimal places would deviate from the mean over time or else show true randomness with no significant long-term deviation.
The final piece, of course, does no such thing.
Each instrument in the quartet obtains its material from a different string of decimal places of π. Each digit is compared to the mean of the preceding digits, with the difference expressed as a (microtonal) pitch change. Instruments exchange digit strings to obtain note durations, from 0 (grace note) to 9 beats. About halfway into the piece, rests replace notes for the most extreme deviations from the mean, and the range allowed for pitch changes reduces until by the end all deviations from the mean are expressed as silence.
The piece was conceived as a string quartet, using a scale of 36 tones to the octave; both to keep within the 2-octave range common to all four instruments and to avoid excessive ‘leaping’ from one pitch to the next. It was not expected that performers would perform the microtones accurately, but would drift away from a sense of shared tuning as they went along. Despite this, the piece would still be very difficult to play and I’ve never wanted to pester any musicians into attempting it.
I’d made a couple of MIDI realisations of the piece before, using various intonations and instrument patches to retain some of the string instruments’ properties of attack and sustain, but none of them were acceptable substitutes. Over the new year break I dug up the old MIDI files for one last shot and completely remade the piece. The tuning now has the inaccuracy lacking from the previous versions and the samples used give a rough approximation of the instruments’ sound. I figure this will be as good as it gets, so I’m offloading it to Soundcloud for at least a little while.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
No Comments »
Work Resumed
Monday 12 January 2015
So far this year, I have been busy on making a half-acceptable realisation of a very old piece. I suspect it’s unplayable by live musicians and my previous attempts at synthesised versions were dreadful. It seems more acceptable to revisit an old piece as long as I am working on learning new ways of achieving what I wanted at the time, if not now. I think this year I will be resuming some old, unfinished pieces and pursuing ideas never realised.
This piece will probably get uploaded somewhere when it’s finished, soon. Right now I need to make a collage of background studio noise.
