Benjamin Carson

Scores and Recordings

What I am trying to do

More than anything else, these works are surfacial and technical explorations of floating rhythm, ambivalent counterpoint, and submissive sotto voce. As with other experimental music, a kind of cultural resistance provides an important underlying motivation. But rather than resist tonal "language" or Romantic "idea," you might think of these works as attempts to escape some other entanglements and truisms that affect both Romanticism and the avant-garde: "organicism," "generativity," and "complementarity."

photo: Ashanti Austin

(San Diego 2002)

recordings

notes

TAKES to the STAGE

for solo cello in recital, 2007

Spreadsheet for tempo calculation

(check back later!)

Rhythm and program-dependency

Some MIDI click-tracks

ANAHISTORIC

for cello and two percussionists, 2004

score (ca. 4.7 MB)

Empyrean Ensemble

(11'14")

I still think about this constantly

Instead of organicism (large objects "growing from," and reflecting, the small ones) I hope you will find something like an intertwined machinery, or ecology, of gestural difference. In place of imitation-oriented generative processes, I try to acheive a kind of energetic sense of change, and incongruity. In place of complementarity -- the idea that one thing "goes with" and "completes", another -- I try to suggest a calculated negotiation between strangers, a heterarchy of ideas crossing between reluctant conversationalists.

cello w/ cues

B. Carson, cond.

parts

cello w/o cues

(check back later!)

percussion 1

(.sit format)

percussion 2

PIANO MUSIC 1999-2006

on writing for piano

John Mark Harris

Coda: "You Are Not I"

1999

listen

(2'10")

Paul Bowles and Karen Wallstein on the future...

Plain-clothes cop

2000

listen

(1'53")

"Inverting a fear of racial violence"

(484 kb)

Persistent Names of Lost Spaces

2001/2006

(44.1 MB)

listen

(38'33")

(title)

(legend)

...Riot Gear Exeunt

1999

Benjamin Carson

But what does that mean, to try to make something incomplete or ambiguous, if ambiguity is the state we find things in before we bother to make anything of them? The question, for me, forgets something important: that we put so many of our mental processes (both voluntary and involuntary) to the specific purpose of making sense out of the insensible, making identity and distinction out of the blurry and indistinct. Our compulsive search for distinct realities impairs our ability to recognize and thoroughly sense what are ultimately complex experiences, because in those searches we do not declare our thoughts successful until simplicity has been discovered. I think that music can offer a special challenge to those uncritical impulses. If there is any unity in these pieces, it is not wholeness, but consistency: I have tried to make every event suggest a parsing of things that contradicts some organization that preceded it. If am successful, then we will have nothing but abundance, and every moment will be an opportunity for release from illusion, for a return to the surface. More than anything, these pieces are about a technique, about a surface: sotto voce, floating rhythm, and perpetuality of inimitable and inchoate differences, which are, in the end, the same.

(check back later!)

audience rehearsal

(7'15")