I’ve finally gotten around to uploading some more mp3s of my music. Everything I’ve been working on lately is pretty long, so here are some shorter pieces written over the past few years that I can still stand to listen to.
The two new additions are from a series of 24 piano pieces called Stained Melodies. The material for Stained Melodies was selected through the use of chance operations on a large array of MIDI keyboard works freely available on the internet. Rather than make a conventional collage, these pieces take only one kind of pitch from each selected work, all of which are then played back simultaneously. In effect, each melody is a collaboration between numerous ghost pianists, none of whom can hear each other; the majority of their music erased. A more detailed explanation is on the download page.
This set of pieces is quite likely impossible for a human pianist to play. To put it beyond any doubt, several additional adjustments were made to take advantage of a computer realization. Dynamics change abruptly from one note to the next, and the sustain pedal only works for the least occurring notes in each piece. Finally, the tuning was modified so that the piano retunes itself in each piece to suit the harmonic qualities of the most frequently occurring note.
At the moment, only Nos. 2, 12, and 18 are available for download: they’re about 3MB each. Two other, later works are available on the main music page. Comments are welcome and may be concise as, but not necessarily limited to:
- A: Love it.
- B: Hate it.
- C: Downloaded it and swear to god I’ll getting around to listening to it right after I get over the mp3s of that album Björk recorded when she was four years old or something.
- D: You’ve linked everything to a folder on your C drive, numbnuts!
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Sunday 1 April 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
Saturday 31 March 2007
Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
Tourists at the Gates of Hell!
And what evil lurks behind the Gates of Hell?
A bloke eating crisps.
Filed under: Art, London by Ben.H
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Filler By Proxy XLVIII: The Right Kind of Pain
Wednesday 28 March 2007
Mark Greif in the London Review of Books sums up the inadequacy of most popular music criticism when it comes to addressing the genre’s unique qualities, and its unique illusions:
This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling Stone-ism, the gonzo rock journalist who thinks he is a rock star. Perhaps worst of all, there is the curse of the rhetoric of social action and ‘revolution’, a faith-based illusion that pop songs clearly manifest social history, or an exaggerated sense of what pop achieves in the world. In truth, most critics aren’t verbally equipped to describe any band’s vivid effects on its main audience: the listener at home, alone in his room.
You could argue against that last point, but the reality of recording as pop music’s medium (and rock’s, if you are particular about these distinctions) is inescapable in Grief’s review of Richard Witts’ book on The Velvet Underground. Combined, the two writers reveal the band as something quite different from the quasi-mythical beast it has become in popular imagination, and discover the band’s secret twin on the other side of the continent…
Also: The Velvet Underground, as Doug Yule saw it.
Filed under: Filler By Proxy, Music by Ben.H
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Someone please reassure me I didn’t dream this
Tuesday 27 March 2007
When finishing up the previous post (which had sat around unfinished for weeks, poor thing) I got to the bit about where artists’ ideas come from and remembered an anecdote I think I heard on the radio about 20 years ago, but have never encountered since.
Igor Stravinsky, when asked what he was thinking of while composing The Rite of Spring, once replied* “Fresh air and cheese, plus a lot of electricity.”
Incidentally, googling stravinsky +air +cheese +electricity will take you to a bunch of Frank Zappa sites.
* Allegedly! i.e. according to me.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Stockhausen, Sirius, and Self-Belief
Monday 26 March 2007
It’s the highfalutin’ equivalent of a fight breaking out on a football pitch: the premiere of Stockhausen’s Trans staggers to a halt amidst a chorus of hoots and hisses from the audience. Some incensed concertgoers jump the gun and unwittingly start booing before the end, quickly subdued by insistent shushing and the last, unexpected sounds of the orchestra. Once everyone’s certain it’s finally over, the crowd, impatient but still disorientated by the stop-start finish, rises in partisan crosstides of cheers and catcalls. For several minutes the two sides battle for supremacy, the boos and hisses drowned out by cheers, the cheers drowned out by boos and hisses – all of it preserved on the CD release, as though it were part of the music.
Edward Winkelman recently posted on his blog about the importance of self-belief in the arts, and whether all art is to some extent a game of confidence.
Reportedly, an influential Chelsea art dealer was asked once what characteristic she felt separated the artists who would feature prominently in the history books and those who would be lucky to be footnotes. Representing several who’ve already entered the history books, she responded that the ones who make it, wake up everyday, look themselves in the mirror, and say “I’m the best fucking artist in the world” before heading off to their studios.Mind you, the heading off to their studios is no small part of their success, but the belief in the importance of their work is something I’m beginning to believe might be crucial to that level of success as well….
If not arrogance, then at least wholesale delusion seems to be an asset. Stockhausen, a composer confident enough to instruct musicians when they were playing correctly in the rhythm of the universe, was asked sometime in the early seventies that chestnut dear to clueless journalists, “Where do you get your ideas?” Unexpectedly, he answered in all seriousness that all his music was dictated to him by his ancestral supreme beings from a planet in the Sirius star system. He then spent the next thirty years of his life writing a seven-day opera detailing his cosmological revelations.
Trans, however, is a piece so unusual that even Stockhausen himself is incapable of explaining it, saying merely that it came to him in a dream he could transcribe but not interpret. It doesn’t get played very often, so I made a point of going to see it at Blackheath Halls last month, where students from Trinity College were staging it as part of a new(ish) music festival.
The orchestra is directed to play from behind a scrim, bathed in dim purple light – Blackheath Halls doesn’t have a proscenium on its stage, so instead of the scrim they filled the room with fog. Three tiers of string players faced the audience; in the violet gloom behind them, rows of other musicians could vaguely be seen, following a conductor hidden behind a screen. The string players created a dense veil of sustained tones that masks the sounds that emerged from the stage behind them. Occasional, mysterious solos erupted from the orchestra, for no explicable reason. A loud, shuttling sound thundered across the room at unexpected intervals, as a random punctuation.
Audience and orchestra, equally lost in the purple fog, partook of the event in a state not unlike the suspension of disbelief required to embrace the enactment of a myth. Its alien weirdness and denial of rational meaning suspended judgement, the music and its theatre an unquestionable, unalterable fact to be experienced. We all deferred to the indomitable arrogance of Stockhausen, an arrogance that was necessary to trust that he could put across a work he could not understand, without a safety net of explanation or justification.
As a piece of theatrical irony, the student orchestra looked nervous and uncertain of their place on stage, as though overwhelmed by the audacity of the work and plagued by doubts that they could successfully pull it off. At the end of the piece many of them had a stunned expression of disbelief at their success. The music itself had been powerful enough to transcend their lack of self-possession, treating them as vessels, receiving dictation from higher beings.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Now in Lewisham unchained and living
Friday 23 March 2007
I’m finally back online, nicely settled in the new house. The new place has several amenities the old one lacked (trees, birds, grass, stars at night), but then there are some things the old place had which this house doesn’t offer (drug deals, street fighting, car wrecks, karaoke from the pub across the street at night).
A quick snapshot from the toilet of each residence should give an idea on how my lifestyle has improved. Before:
After:
Just to the right of this picture you can also see the Millennium Dome, but no matter.
Sadly, I suspect I’ll no longer be able to see all sorts of exciting things out my window anymore, like shootings, fistfights, and grisly death. On the other hand, the neighbours’ back yards may turn out to be more exciting than I imagine.
After two weeks it’s hard to get back into the habit of updating this site again, so expect to see some rather out-of-date posts for the next few days.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Any Day Now
Monday 19 March 2007
“Normal” “service” will “resume” by the “end” of the “week”.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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House Moving! All Change.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Can’t believe the NHS is losing money with careful organisation like this
Sunday 4 March 2007
If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted here for the past week, it’s because I’ve been stuck on a bus behind an NHS protest which decided it would be a good idea to stage a march up a street that’s been closed off and dug up, and have only just got home. To be fair, the street’s only been closed for the past three weeks so it’s not like they had time to plan for this.
Filed under: London by Ben.H
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The iPod meme update: my dad clarifies the situation somewhat
Monday 26 February 2007
After posting a lengthy piece of filler about the contents of someone else’s iPod, my dad has written in to supply the missing information about the mystery orchestras.
The Beethoven is Nikolas Harnoncourt conducting The Chamber Orchestra Of Europe – this is part of a boxed set of the 9 symphonies and was released by Teldec in 1991. The 4th was recorded live 29/06/1990.The Villa Lobos is the Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, conducted by Villa Lobos himself! The soprano is Victoria de los Angeles (Nos. 1 & 2), the original recording is from 1957, digitally remastered in 1987 by EMI France.
He adds that he is relying on the Gracenote database for some of this information, and if Gracenote was good enough to out Joyce Hatto as a fraud then it’s good enough for me.
My dad also confirms that, sadly, he no longer has the John Betjeman LPs and so had to source these tracks from, uh, “elsewhere”. However, he remains silent on the whole Rammstein/Lavigne/Farnham business, preferring instead to opine, erroneously, that “Undecided” is inferior to “Turn Up Your Radio“, and to gratuitously diss Tom T. Hall for no apparent reason before signing off. Clever smokescreen, there.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Saturday 24 February 2007
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Shuffling with someone else’s mind
Thursday 22 February 2007
It had to happen by accident if it was going to happen at all. Every year I receive a shoebox containing several relatively high-end consumer knick-knacks from my dad, as he casts off his superseded technology and upgrades to the next generation of electronic gadgets. The box always arrives unexpectedly, the contents are always a surprise, and have a large degree of difference in usefulness. If you have unwanted battery-operated items lying around your house and cannot be bothered firing up eBay, I am considering expanding this service beyond members of my immediate family.
This year’s shoebox contained an iPod Nano so Dad, I hope you’re enjoying that new 80GB video iPod you’ve got yourself. I’ve never used a personal music player before, figuring that I’d always be switching it off every few minutes to hear something going on in the outside world. (The ancient Discman in the photo is patched into an amplifier, and in any case doesn’t like being moved. It’s another paternal cast-off.)
My Dad sent me his iPod with all his music still loaded on it, so before I do anything else with it I’m going to hit shuffle and report on the first ten tracks it plays. This experiment enables me to do simultaneously two things I’ve never done before: use an iPod, and take up a meme that has appeared on other blogs. Please note that I am using the latest definition of “meme”, which has now been extended to include “copying the Random Rules column in The Onion’s AV Club”.
Unlike other participants, who have prefaced their reports with disclaimers as to how the music on their iPod may not necessarily be representative of their actual tastes, I won’t resort to such a cop-out, and will boldly affirm that whatever tracks come up on this device are an unequivocal indicator of my dad’s personality.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Truly, this man was the Jesus of Cool.
Wednesday 21 February 2007
There haven’t been enough pictures here lately, so here’s one I nicked from Straight from the Tated .
