Megan Roberts, “I Could Sit Here All Day” (1976). Phil Loarie and William Novak, voices; Danny Sofer, drums.
(6’25”, 8.98 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Busy, Busy World
Monday 15 December 2008
“Later that year Zuckermann abandoned his harpsichord business and America in disgust at the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War.”
It’s a good story about how a search to find Olivier Messiaen’s birthplace in Avignon leads to a conversation with the man who used to provide harpsichords for John Cage, but that sentence belongs in an old Woody Allen story.
II. She Sees Red:
Once upon a time, Banksy visited Melbourne and left a piece of street art. Culture-conscious locals preserved the ephemera with a sheet of perspex. Unknown vandal/artist restores the natural order of things by tipping paint down the back of the perspex. The obliterated artwork is tagged “Banksy Woz Ere”.
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
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Boulez plays Boulez
Sunday 14 December 2008
Two centenaries on successive days: Olivier Messiaen (d. 1992) on Wednesday, Elliott Carter (still alive and composing) on Thursday. On each night, Pierre Boulez conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain in a commemorative concert in London.
I went to only the first gig. There have been Messiaen concerts going on in London all year, and I’ve missed all of them up until now. My main motivation for going was that Boulez is one of the few remaining survivors of the 1920s generation, so I thought I’d better take this chance to see him in action, particularly as he was conducting his former teacher, and his own music as well. I’d been to some concerts of Carter’s music before, and had heard most of the pieces on the Thursday programme before, so I gave that a miss.
The two Messiaen works were from the early 1960s, both premiered by Boulez: Couleurs de la cité céleste and Sept haïkaï. Both works put Messiaen’s taste for the hieratic and the ritualised to the forefront. The former is a static processional for winds, brass, piano and percussion, creating sounds suitably imposing, rather than seductive. The latter’s short movements show the influence of Messiaen’s visit to Japan; less, thankfully, in musical exoticism and more in an affinity with the sense of eternal time expressed in traditional gagaku court music. It’s a suprising piece for Messiaen, particularly in the dense passaages of unusually thorny textures.
After the interval (where we witnessed at the bar a distinguished lady of advanced years scull a large rioja, either to recuperate from the first half or to fortify herself for the second) Boulez conducted his own work from the late 90s, Sur incises. The piece is an expansion of his piano piece Incises into a work for a hyper-instrument consisting of three identical groups of piano, harp, and percussion. It’s all very nice, but it’s a little too typical of much of Boulez’s later music, and its obsession with the doubling (or tripling) and shadowing of instruments, from Répons onwards. Long, agile phrases of melody contrast with sustained moments of stillness, impeccably put together but always feeling a little to mellow. The intellectual and emotional punches of his earlier music are all being pulled here.
On stage Boulez, combover intact, was a model of self-effacement, even taking a detour round the back of the piano each time he walked to his podium. My lovely companion F, who has suffered under conductors of varying degrees of waywardness, admired the undemonstrative directness and lucidity of his conducting.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Hentai-Oto-Ma
Thursday 11 December 2008
(This post is dedicated to the Slavic readers who can’t get enough of the two censored anime pictures on this page.)
Months ago I posted a spectrogram of a passage from my composition Hentai-Oto-Ma, and completely forgot to upload the sound file of the same section for comparison. So here it is.
Hentai-Oto-Ma was made using Coagula Light, a shareware “colour-organ” that interprets digital images as sound spectra (height=frequency, width=time). The image source for this piece was a pornographic Japanese manga comic: each digitally scanned frame of the comic was interpreted with five different, variable time-frames and pitch ranges. The five sequences of frames are played simultaneously, each subjected to different filtering and panning processes. In effect, the piece is a type of timbral canon, with the same series of tone structures transposed into different frequencies and durations – this can be heard most clearly at the end of the piece.
The left half of the picture above shows selected frames from the original comic. On the right is a spectrographic analysis of right channel of Hentai-Oto-Ma (0’28” to 0’39”) showing the images transformed across time and frequency.
Click here to hear an mp3 of the above excerpt; or listen to the whole thing (11 minutes, 17 MB mp3.) If that’s not enough, you can read more about this and related pieces for cheapo digital synthesis (and get another mp3).
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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George Brecht Event
Tuesday 9 December 2008
The Most Useful Piece of Advice You’ll Get All Year
Monday 8 December 2008
Got a tune stuck in your head and you just have to get rid of it? The Girl From Ipanema. It wipes the music part of your brain and then fades away. Works every time.
I recommend track 21 on that linked page.
(Crossposted at Sarsaparilla.)
Filed under: Journalism, Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Sunday 7 December 2008
Ninetynine, “Hawaii” (1997).
(3’17”, 3.78 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Exciting Housekeeping Stuff
Sunday 7 December 2008
For the sake of completeness, the full post on Google vs Death has now been included in this blog, having originally appeared at Sarsaparilla.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Exercise in Timing (after William Carlos Williams)
Thursday 4 December 2008
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Flowers By Irene
Thursday 4 December 2008
Ok, this is what, the fourth? Kombi that’s been parked across the street from my house in the past month. At least this one is a more cheerful colour.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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A brief reflection on crossing the threshhold
Wednesday 3 December 2008
I haven’t been getting out as much as I’d like to lately, but I did make it to the Philharmonia Orchestra’s (free!) performance of Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil on Sunday evening. Frankly, it’s mind-boggling that we didn’t have to pay to hear something as extraordinary as this music.
The cycle of songs was Grisey’s last completed work, before his sudden death in 1998. Over ten years after the completion of his remarkable Les espaces acoustiques, his abilities in creating and balancing new sounds had deepened in skill and sensitivity. My reservations about his reliance on dramatic gestures in his earlier work did not apply: this meditation on death hovered like a final breath, both frail and terrible, suspending time and revealing the profound emotional depths of which music is capable.
Nothing felt forced, everything felt natural yet utterly strange; every development in the music was unexpected yet inevitable.
By a fortunate coincidence, Inconstant Sol has recently posted a recording of the complete work, taken from a performance in Paris earlier this year – having earlier given us a complete Les espaces acoustiques. The Quatre chants are well worth a punt on your bandwidth.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Saturday 29 November 2008
Gerry Hatch, “Love Me Tonight” (197?).
(2’34”, 2.49 MB, mp3)
(2’34”, 2.49 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Saturday 29 November 2008
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Dick Without A Hole
Wednesday 26 November 2008
Dick Without A Hole (Red Detachment Of Women Mix) (2’11”, 2.85 MB, mp3).
It is recommended that this track is played on a continuous loop.
It is recommended that this track is played on a continuous loop.
Bob the late-night talkback radio host is taking your calls on the open line about the issues of the day that matter to you, and our next caller is Gene. Gene wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t get it. Moving right along: Peter is next on the line. Peter also wants to ask Bob a riddle. Bob doesn’t know the answer, but Peter won’t tell him! Perplexed, Bob takes Phyllis’ call and asks her Peter’s riddle, but Phyllis just wants to hear Gene’s riddle again…
Dick Without A Hole was inspired by my love for the genteel stupidity of talk radio in Adelaide in the 1980s. The hosts craved the urgency and confrontation of shock jocks in other parts of the world but everyone in Adelaide, announcers and callers alike, were just too nice to carry it off. I still have a few cassettes of some of the better sessions, particularly the 9pm to midnight shift when the demographic got drunk and doddery.
This playful little dance of fumbled verbal exchanges and missed punchlines comes from one of those surviving tapes. Set to a cheerful, semi-funky shuffle, our four protagonists juggle the two dud gags back and forth, never grasping them yet never quite letting them drop. I find that their shared confusion in joke-telling gives a satisfying sense of mystery to this simple yet intractable form of social interaction. Their ritual is consecrated by the hallowed incantation of Messrs Kennedy and Gray, the two Magi of mid-seventies Australian comedy.
Dick Without A Hole made its public debut at John Beagles’ and Graham Ramsay’s Museum Magogo in Glasgow, 1999. After that it toured to PB Gallery in Melbourne, and was revived in 2002 for the Piped Music series at The Physics Room in Christchurch – more specifically, in the toilets of The Physics Room.
Now with the mp3 player of your choice, you too can enjoy Dick Without A Hole in the comfort of your own toilet. For best results, leave it playing on a continuous loop.
Filed under: Art, Music by Ben.H
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The Childermass, p.97
Monday 24 November 2008
…”I shouldn’t be surprised if one day I met my mother, I hope I shall; but I should if I met my father.”He presses fiercely forward, his neat white teeth with their graceful absence of set or spread ambushed beneath the bristles of the squalid cavalier moustache, as the father-son motif crops up, with savage appeals from its stage-tomtoms.“I consider the father a side-show a mere bagatelle – they are like the reason, overrated and not essential at all, that is the fathers – the male at all if it comes to that.”He laughs, clearing up the atmosphere. Exit Fathers like a cohort of witches, turning tail at sight of the bristling righteous phalanx of incestuous masculine matrons, with hittite profiles, hanging out like hatchets just clear of the chest, Eton-cropped, short stout necks firmly anchored in asthmatic lungs, with single eyeglasses, and ten diamond corking-pins representing the decaceraphorous beast of the deliverance. They guard the child-herds. Revolutionary cockades bouquet’d with spatulate fig-leaves, symbolic of absolute divorce anti-family son-love and purple passion, dissimulate their abdominal nudity. Pullman barks fiercely: he is the gelded herd-dog. He barks at the heels of the Fathers, bearded despotic but now despatched.“You don’t find it slightly intoxicating?”Enter unobserved at the other extremity of the stage a small select chorus of stealthy matronly papas. They applaud as one man, community-singing the national anthem of the New Babel jazzed. They take up their position in the nursery modestly as regards The Average, with caressing eyes like head-lights of Santa Claus doing his rounds. Sweetly handwashing they stand aside, retiring Big Businessmen. Featuring as their spokesman, a super-shopwalker offers meat-pale sunkist fleshings of celanese silk stuffed with chocolates, crossword-puzzles, tombola-tickets for crystal-sets, and free-passes for war-films, to the million-headed herd of tiny tots of all ages but one size.“I think it’s perfectly splendid discipline. I’m never quite certain myself, if it’s a pukka White Man’s policy. There’s the other fellow to be considered even if he’s a mere pawn or peon.”
