PurposeBen with enemy combatant. Photo: Chuong-Dai Vo.

The term experimental is wielded in the arts from time to time, aptly suggesting a kind of “let’s-see-what-happens-if” sensibility that the arts sometimes share with the sciences. But experimentalists usually explore new media, new ways of experiencing art, or new social purposes in the art-making process. You won’t find those kinds of innovation here; I write for instruments and media that are mostly well-established. My music is played in situations that encourage the same kind of listening you’d bring to work by Brahms or Coltrane.

My main concerns as an experimental composer concern two simple aspects of musical experience: our perceptual attention to the “shapes” of rhythms in musical voices, and our conceptual investment in the “identity” of whole musical ideas. These two questions are unified in the larger issue of what is “musical subjects”; any aspect of music that might carry or represent the identity of a listener, or anything that seems to speak from, or give voice to, experience — experience of the world, or experience of some mental interior. Traditionally, this kind of subjectivity is located in a tune, a theme, or in the relationships between a tune’s fragments. Drawing from the writing of Michel DeCerteau and Eduardo Galeano, I consider “subjects” not as a stable identity, but as a process — when we listen, we may hear rhythms and chords, accompaniments and melodies, that exist somewhere in the real world, but the subject that emerges in the midst of those things, is emerging as part of the ongoing act of listening. I think this process is worth thinking empirically and analytically about. And it is certainly a process worth composing and improvising toward.

While these questions can be brought to bear on a wide variety of music literature and practice, my most recent research in this area emphasizes the two aspects I described above. In the musical foreground, I investigate, empirically, the perception of stream segregation and grouping, in order to learn something about how a musical idea becomes coherent in the minds of listeners. Second, thinking about “large-scale form,” (the “background,” perhaps) I concentrate on music literature around the fin-du-siècle crisis of tonal language, particularly the music of late Brahms and early Schoenberg. I have argued (and others have argued) that 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. So it interests me to know how musicians manifested uniquely modern feelings of identity and selfhood, in their sense of how to make music whole.

I see these “experimental” efforts not just as a pursuit of knowledge-for-its-own-sake, but as part of a process of music-making. I try to compel these two kinds of thinking — thinking about the surface of music as an interplay of groups and streams, and thinking about the “form” of music as a fascimile of our individual and social investments in identity — to work synthetically, and to aid in the imagination of some new possibilities for musical experience. In that sense, my compositional method aspires to something like what William James called radical empiricism. But this term needs a little explanation. 

Empiricism is sometimes associated with the rooting-out of bias, to favor ‘objectivity’ (and these are not favorable goals for an artist in our age). Being empirical really means being skeptical of theories and inherited assumptions, and preferring observation and experience. Ironically, radical empirical thinking ends up

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll dig further into this site and let me know what you think.

Brief Biography

Ben Carson’s work as a composer is supported by a variety of theory and research, including work in both critical gender studies and empirical musicology. His music has been performed at local and international festivals, including Aspen, the 25th-anniversary “June in Buffalo” festival of new music (2000), the Sydney Conservatory’s conference on Music and Social Justice (2005), the New England Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (2004), and as a headliner for the 2009 Festival of the International Society of Improvised Music. This year Columbia University’s Music Performance Program presented a concert of eleven chamber works by Carson, with the assistance of the Franklin Furnace Collective and New York’s acclaimed piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. Carson’s music will appear in the 2009-2010 catalogs of Centaur Records and Albany Records.

In 2003, Dr. Carson joined the department of music at UC Santa Cruz, as an assistant professor of theory and composition. He teaches in the PhD program in musicology/ethnomusicology, the MFA program in Digital Arts and New Media, and is an affiliate of the Department of American Studies.

Exploring this site

If you’re a curious listener or musician, please explore the links to my listening pages under BASICS on the left.

If you’ve been invited to contribute to a discussion here, or want to do some listening or blogging in Introduction to U.S. Popular Cultures (American Studies 80F), please log in.

Other students: The Current Courses section of this site should have a page or two to help organize your learning. But please remember that I’m not teaching “online”…the site is good for discussion threads and listening, but most of the good stuff happens in class.

Stay tuned: I’m currently constructing a section of this website called Hearing Time Freely. Here you will be able to move through a hypertext discussion of musical rhythm, oriented toward particular problems in the musical perception of pulse, “unpulsedness,” order, and some possibilities lingering just outside of order.