Experimental combinations of traditional tonality with wide-ranging rhythmic language, and unusual dynamic ranges, sometimes blurring boundaries between intentional musical sound and incidental environmental noise.

Benjamin Carson^1

Benjamin Carson's work as a composer is supported by a variety of theory and research, including disciplines of history, critical gender studies, and cognitive science. Both in scholarship and in musical practice, Carson is primarily concerned with the sometimes unpredictable locations of musical "subjects," which he defines broadly as any identity-bearing aspects of musical experience. He doesn't care whether or not music sounds good, as long as there's some compelling intellectual conversation attached to it.

Carson's music has been performed at local and international festivals, including Aspen, the 25th-anniversary "June in Buffalo" (2000) festival of new music, the Sydney Conservatory's Music and Social Justice conference (2005), and at the New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (2004). Carson's music has been supported by a number of international awards and research grants, including the first prize in chamber music (2001) for the London-based International Bass Society. Carson's piano music is the subject of essays by music critic Christopher Williams in the Fall 2003 issue of The OPEN SPACE Magazine.

Ben Carson completed his PhD (2001) at the University of California, San Diego, where he developed a habit of working across disciplinary boundaries. He has collaborated in projects at the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, and at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. He has lectured in the series Perception et Cognition Auditives (Paris Universite VI), at the controversial Thurgood Marshall College Writing Program (UC San Diego), and at the UC Santa Cruz Cultural Studies Colloquium. Carson presents his work at conferences in cognitive psychology, history, and the interdisciplinary humanities, as well as in the disciplinary music conferences.

Carson's creative works explore the connections and distinctions between event groups, especially in regards to the ways that one kind of connection or distinction (melodic, rhythmic, timbral, contrapuntal) might conflict with another. Carson also attempts, in his research, to broaden these technical issues to address questions about the history and ideology of compositional method.2

In 2003, Dr. Carson joined the department of music at UC Santa Cruz, as an assistant professor of composition and theory. He offers seminars in composition and theory for the DMA program in Composition, and also teaches for UCSC's MFA program in Digital Arts and New Media.

1. This lengthy bio may be edited through (1) omission of the fourth paragraph, and/or (2) combination of second and third paragraphs. Please contact me for alternate versions.

2. Specifics are not warranted in a short biography, but these "questions about...compositional method" should be clarified, a little: How do composers' works reveal characteristics of consciousness, or a sense of being in the world? In what ways does the structure of a musical idea reflect the nature of ideas in general? Can musical practices offer us insights into particular ways that we relate to information and identity?

My concerns in music can be summarized in the concept of the musical subject, which I define as those aspects of music that might carry or represent the identity of a listener, aspects that seem to speak from, or give voice to, our experiences -- experiences of the world, or experiences of the mind's interior. While these questions can be brought to bear on a wide variety of music literature and practice, my main research on this topic emphasizes two kinds of questions. In the musical "foreground," I conduct empirical research on the perception of stream segregation and grouping boundaries, in order to learn something about how musical ideas become coherent. Secondly, thinking about the background shapes of whole musical pieces, I concentrate on music literature around the fin-du-siècle crisis of tonal language, particularly the music of late Brahms and early Schoenberg. This musical culture coincides with a late-capitalist European world that nourishes new and troubling concepts of self, development, and individuality, including the birth of psychoanalysis.

I'm also deeply disappointed with the norm of aesthetic discussion in new music today. It's time to give up our commonsensical mixtures of novelty, crisp clarity (too easy and artificial), and sonic vanity (music needn't "sound" beautiful if it *is* beautiful). We have all been going for super-rich quasi-orchestral colors, and melodies that express something like a mixture between longing (just soaring, really, which is easier than longing) and strangeness (just contrariness, really, which is easier than strangeness)...although all of this seems "deeper" than the loathed beeps and squaks of Stockhausen and Babbitt -- nothing could be more shallow a contrivance than our moralistic sing-songy non-music of the diet-sweet bet-you-didn't-think-I'd-write-for-*THAT*-instrument, chuckle-to-ourselves-for-being irreverant 21st century New Music Society pretenses. New music culture is filled with this. It's time to stop posturing ourselves to death and start listening. Doubt your craft, your maturity, your "musicality." Your "musicality" is, most likely, a wad of paper ruined in the laundry, pried dustily into unintelligible coughs of cottony nothing and stuffed into the rear-hole of a toy robot. Or perhaps it is not quite that bad. But it *is* quite remote from your most intimate and important musical experiences.

***

What to do, then? Time to put things together that don't obviously "belong," things that can only seem to belong through a feat of imagination or a shift of perspective.

Somewhere along the line, academic musicians, thinking they were revoluting against something (atonality, I suppose, as though that were ever in some dominant position...) were enthralled by the idea of holistic, rich, and deep/smooth-sounding musical sound-worlds. We may have deceived ourselves -- we look to distant and past traditions, and we hear music that strikes us as being unified, even homogenous; we reason unconsciously then that music should be consistent and smooth in order to be well-formed.

But from a distance, anything--even the Deleuzian "oceans of dissemblance"--can look smooth and blended. Viewed close up, and in the worlds of their origins, all those now-remote and homogenous-seeming traditions are filled with strange breaches and ruptures, moments of radical difference...in their own times, they only achieved a kind of "belonging together" through the conviction and persuasion of musicians...someone plays them just so, and then an unexpected sensibility blooms, like quickly cooling glass out of an uncomfortable fire.

But now? Now we hear them centuries later or thousands of miles away and we think we have discovered something sublime simply because it feels both complete and different at the same time. But we aren't listening.

Those distant objects, that 'give' us our benchmarks of musical beauty -- we have wrenched those markers from the thin air of Murdoch and Disney, we put together a way of rocking ourselves to sleep old-timey-style and we call it music.

When we forget what music was or what it will be, and think instead about what it is, then we will finally be artists, we will be leaders...someone will suddenly hear a sound that doesn't make sense and wonder why we care so deeply for it. And then this unlyrical, stilted, and superficial utterance--slapping sensibility in the butt and then sqeezing hard--will become the fat loins or the boom-boom greasy charcoal-briquettes of a truly new era of seeing, smelling, and thinking-out a true true music from an almost-oblivion of once-again-young-as-babies well-shaped pipes and drums.

A is for Azimuth and Arnica (solo percussion; 2008)

When all of us find peace there will be time to search for other things (saxophones with drumset, continuo harpsichord; 2003)

Anahistoric (cello with two percussionists playing consumer-model electronic keyboards; 2004)

Penance and Praise for Obstetricians (six short works for piano with optional singing; 2005)

By the wall (voice, penny whistle, harp; 2006)

Sparagmos / Sense (piano; 2006)

Best Guest Dissemblance (piano; 2006)

Takes to the Stage (solo cello; 2007)