Rather like my fateful encounter with Jeremy Bentham, I was wandering pleasantly half-bombed on midday Chimay Bleus around the streets by Bruxelles-Midi station while waiting for the Eurostar when I turned a corner and bumped into this guy.
I thought he’d been dressed up as a prank but it turns out this is a Regular Thing. This day’s outfit is supposed to “honour the IT division of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).” Apparently Belgian tech geeks are into yachting; or at least Yacht Rock.
Filed under: Art, Travel by Ben.H
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The Day After SONNTAG
Friday 29 April 2011
I went to Cologne to see Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera SONNTAG aus LICHT, the culmination of his epic LICHT cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week. Only now has this opera been given a complete, fully-staged performance, some eight years after its completion and three years after the composer’s death. So much vague pronouncement and speculation has surrounded the LICHT project, based on what often seems so little direct experience, that I had to see it for myself.
Having said that, it seems impossible to discuss SONNTAG without going into a description of what happens in each of its five lengthy scenes, interpreted in this case by La Fura dels Baus, the same guys who did that version of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre I saw a while back. At the same time, it seems rather pointless to just give a rundown of what each scene contains: this will surely be covered in greater detail elsewhere. Some audience descriptions are online, along with video and photos of the production.
SONNTAG is an opera with no plot, not even any dramatic tension; not does it attempt to work on the audience to extract a catharsis as so much theatre which passes itself off as ‘ritual’. It matches perfectly a description I once read of Stockhausen’s earlier Sirius: “a sci-fi mystery play”. Each scene presents a tableau, depicting the spiritual aspects of all creation, in Stockhausen’s own peculiar vernacular.
I went into SONNTAG at noon on Easter Sunday and left at 9.30 that night. The next morning I went to see the service at the Kölner Dom, which included a performance of Liszt’s Choral Mass, and saw again much of what I had experienced the previous day. The use of word and music in affirmation of belief, the smoke and scent of the incense, the occasional chimes, the processions and movements of the clergy and of the congregation, the different colours of light suffusing the haze above the altar, from the sunlight streaming through Gerhard Richter’s windows, to the conclusion where the congregation turn to embrace each other. All of these aspects were present in Stockhausen’s opera. The connections between the two should not be at all surprising, but it was a powerful reminder that so much of what seems outlandish in Stockhausen’s music theatre has been an established part of life for centuries.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
Tags: Karlheinz Stockhausen
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Please Mister Please CXVII
Friday 22 April 2011
The Winstons, “Amen, Brother” (1969).
(2’31”, 3.4 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Lost in Amsterdam
Friday 22 April 2011
The Enduring Empire (aka Earth vs Soup)
Saturday 16 April 2011
Everything on Wikipedia is contentious: tomato soup is no exception. Since an entry first appeared in January 2006 – a mere three sentences describing it only as a tinned food, with “the consistency of cream of wheat and… tarty to the taste” – the humble comfort food has been a source of trivial controversy.
This is, of course, to be expected; yet in five years this brief article has been subjected to an unusually high level of arbitrary editing. Beside racist taunts, casual denigration of tomato soup, and mysterious references to the 1998 Swiss Tomato Soup Rebellion, debate has smouldered on the discussion pages over whether the ability to be served both hot and cold is noteworthy, and whether it is necessary to provide a citation demonstrating that tomato soup is, in fact, a soup made of tomatoes. It has also been the blameless target of revisions attributing the soup with the ability to increase sperm count, or of actually being a powdered donut made from llamas.
Despite all this, one element has remained constant for the past four years, surviving every revision and reversion since February 2007:
The American composer Robert Ashley wrote “Empire”, a section of his opera Atalanta (Acts of God), on the origins and proliferation of tomato soup.
Wonderfully, as well as being an excellent opera by one of the past century’s greatest composers, “Empire” deals with tomato soup purely as an industrial commodity, precisely as described in it’s original Wikipedia entry. Even more wonderfully, Ashley has stated that “Empire” is in fact
an allegorical telling of the founding of one of the great multinational corporations. The story was told to me by the scion of the family of that corporation. I have changed the names (and the product) to protect the privacy of the source. And I have deliberately made the metaphor (soup) more casual and humorous than the actuality of corporate America.
For all these years, the one constant in Wikipedia’s quest for authoratitiveness has been an operatic metaphor. Ashley has also stated that Atalanta (Acts of God) is an opera about story-telling, about the persistence of myth through its mutability. Already, Wikipedia has imbued “Empire”‘s origin myth with an obstinate authenticity of the sort that outlasts conventional history.
Filed under: Music, Writing by Ben.H
Tags: Robert Ashley
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This Was The New Music! Super Dodo 64
Saturday 9 April 2011
Super Dodo 64 is a piece I threw together back in 2000 on a slightly knackered desktop computer (powered by a Cyrix 6×86 processor).
Someone had given me a CD-R filled with dodgy music software, along with several thousand MIDI files from a boatload of various computer games. What on earth are you expected to do with a bunch of video game MIDI files? I used Andrew Culver’s ic program to select certain files by chance, then use chance to extract one instrument track from the file, assign it a new instrument patch, and insert it into a 15-minute composition.
The resulting trainwreck was played through whatever SoundBlaster card was in the computer, using the standard General MIDI set of instrument patches. In the middle of the piece I switched everything over to the percussion channel. The glitches you can hear are down to half a dozen sets of MIDI instructions all sending conflicting demands at once.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Not An Update
Thursday 7 April 2011
For the past couple of weeks I have been writing music and seeing some very cool gigs, however right now I’m just trying to upload something to Soundcloud. Should be ready any day now.
Soundcloud, if you’re going to keep dicking around like this you’d better come up with some sort of cute Failwhale character to offset the rage.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please CXVI
Sunday 20 March 2011
Polly Bradfield, “Solo Violin Improvisation No. 2, 19 June 1979” (1979).
(3’07”, 4.4 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Little Old Ladies Are Waiting To Rob You Blind.
Friday 18 March 2011
The evolution of my video style: a pictorial history
Friday 11 March 2011
In 2008, Fiona Macdonald made a flat, white video for my installation at her Redrawing show.
In 2010, I made my own video for a performance of String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta), and uploaded it to YouTube.
In 2011, my piece This Is All I Need was performed as part of Interior Design: Music For The Bionic Ear, with a video projected against the back wall.
Next year, I expect I shall make a video that is solid black.
Filed under: Art, Film, Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please CXV
Wednesday 9 March 2011
The Bobbettes, “I Shot Mr. Lee” (1960).
(2’33”, 2.3 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Here Goes Nothing
Wednesday 9 March 2011
I had a few too many drinks last night and added a link to my Facebook profile. I think it works. Please observe the rules of admission, below.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT MX
Monday 7 March 2011
For an idea of what each piece sounds like, below are mp3s of the first four minutes of each mix.
- NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT MX (2002/10)
- NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RMX1 (2010)
- NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RMX2 (2010)
- NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RDX (2011)
NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT MX, or ‘Instant Harpsichord Pocket (Packet?) Mix’, was composed in 2002, in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of John Cage’s Death. The premise of the piece is simple: a potted rendition of the musical ideas used in John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s HPSCHD, particularly multiplicity and microtonality, on a single CD.
The source material was John Sankey’s online archive of MIDI renditions of the 500 keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Every one of these sonatas was edited and transformed by removing the notes in each particular sonata’s tonic triad, thus erasing a clear sense of which key the sonata is played in. Before each sonata, the keyboard is retuned at random.
These retuned – or detuned, if you prefer – sonatas are played simultaneously by 14 virtual harpsichords arranged from left to right in the stereo spectrum, so that all 500 sonatas are heard in 75 minutes. With its length, excess of detail and amorphous tonality, the piece is intended to recreate, on a small scale, the immersive sonic experience of Cage and Hiller’s original multimedia extravaganza.
In 2010 I prepared two alternative versions of the piece, in which not all of the harpsichords play simultaneously. These remixes were inspired by the KNOBS program used to generate playback instructions for the original LP released of HPSCHD. In NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RMX1 anything from a single harpsichord to all fourteen may play at a time; in NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RMX2 no more than six harpsichords can play at once. The volume level of each harpsichord, when present, also varies. Decisions about which harpsichord plays when, and how loudly, were all made by chance operations.
The frequent changes in tuning throughout NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT MX, as well as the large mass of notes being played in any given moment, creates a cloud of overtones that constantly changes. In early 2011 I experimented with different ways of reducing the amount of finer detail from the music and enhance the presence of the underlying harmonies. Eventually I was able to achieve a version in which the more transient events had been blurred into the more persistent sounds. This mix, titled NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT RDX, finds a balance between the sound and surface complexity of the source material, and the underlying harmonic drone.
More information about these pieces are now on the main website.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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This Is The New Music! On Soundcloud
Sunday 6 March 2011
I’ve been playing around a bit with Soundcloud and have uploaded a few tracks. In particular, there are excerpts from the four different versions of NSTNT HPSCHD PCKT MX I have just completed. Fourteen out-of-tune harpsichords never sounded so good – you’ll have to take my word for that. At least having all four versions on the same page allows for some neat comparisons.
More about what’s going on with those pieces will be posted tomorrow. I’m sure you can wait.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy LXXX: NSFW NSFW NSFW
Friday 4 March 2011
You really can find anything on Google these days. In their mania for completeness, Google Books has scanned in the Cunt Coloring Book.
Or rather, someone scanned in the first few pages of the book before either they lost interest, the scanner died, or they could resist temptation no longer and had to go break out the Faber-Castells.
