“For the first movement of Ben Leeds Carson’s Wonderment and Misgiving, short bursts of low bass and tuba energy act like a kind of acoustic acupressure.”

—Mark Swed, “Critic’s Notebook: In Fluxus — making sense of the amorphous anti-art movement’s arrival in L.A.” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 2018

"This music is startlingly, starkly beautiful - a unique voice forging a path that invites the listener to follow its powerful internal logic. Original and remarkable."

—Patricia Alessandrini, Stanford University

"…music being reinvented from first principles: As we progress through the three pieces, their durations become more extended, their ranges of sonic possibilities wider, while at the same time their strangeness increases, as if every sound, every familiar interval, and, most crucially, every structural turning point, is being heard for the first time.”

—Richard Barrett, Royal Conservatoire The Hague

“…rare clarity and restraint. The precision of his sense of color…subtly recalibrated unisons…in all the pieces there's a fresh and challenging reassessment of tonal foundations, which can unfold remote and surprising implications. This work…invites patience, attention, sensitivity to nuance; to all of which the performances and recordings are admirably attuned."

—Erik Ulman, Stanford University

Carson’s ‘Piece for Four Strangers’ was a fun introduction to the symposium…and brought out a range of concepts around performance: being in a system in the moment that produces contemporary visibility; engaging a process to test the way something works or develops … and transitions [in states of consciousness] as a way of forming a sense of self.

—Gretchen Till, “Loose Ends: Writing Texts” (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance <http://iLandart.org>, March 31, 2012)

In this music … each element in a false dichotomy defines and becomes the other… [offering listeners] the opportunity and responsibility to navigate our own uniquely useful paths.

—Christopher Williams, ”On the Piano Music of Ben Carson”, in The Open Space Magazine, Issue 5, December 2005

BRIEF BIO (updated March 2024)

Ben Leeds Carson’s music is performed at wide-ranging venues for experimental music, including at SUNY Buffalo's 2023 Visiting Artist Series, Blurred Edges (Hamburg 2020); the Smithsonian Institute's Meyer Series (Washington DC 2019); the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (Mexico City 2018). Ben Carson has been an Artist/Researcher-in-Residence for the Perception Laboratory at IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and at Paris University VI, where his collaborations focused on the perception of complex rhythm perception, and led to empirical work and publications with American Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of New Music Research. Carson's opera merging a Star Trek teleplay with historical renderings of the Orpheus myth was premiered (June 2016) in a workshop performance directed by acclaimed opera director and Star Trek—Next Generation actor John de Lancie.

Since 2003, Ben has served the UC Santa Cruz Music Department faculty, where he is Professor, and Inaugural Director of Creative Technologies. He is a recipient of grants and awards recognizing excellence in teaching.

PURPOPSE

The term experimental is thrown about in the arts from time to time. Usually the term implies creative work in the spirit of “let’s-see-what-happens-if __”; in other words, experimental art and music should involve something empirical, an impulse driving from uncertainty to some kind of discovery.

The term also tends to be associated with ‘new media’, new modes of experience, or new social contexts, for art. By contrast, the questions I tend to ask, when I compose music, are more to do with the experience of a sense of subject(ivity), agency, or intention, in music. I restrict my empirical approach to a few pressing interests:

• How do we invest ourselves, as listeners, in musical subjects? If we care about something like a sense of subject, or identity, in music, how do we find the boundaries of that something? When we hear a theme or motive, and hear it repeat and change, our process is something like finding an object’s occurrence and variance in an environment. But do we also experience musical ideas as models for our own identities in the world?…does an idea and the musical space around it become an imaginary self and world, a rehearsal of our own formations of identity? Finally, if we map our identities in music’s boundary-making processes, are those processes necessarily the traditional dichotomies of ‘motive/development’, ‘melody/accompaniment’, ‘subject/countersubject’, or are they negotiated unconsciously in less obvious forms, layers, or temporalities?

• How do we perceive simplicity and complexity in rhythmic ideas? How do sets of timespans and timespan proportions attract us to particular perceptions of, and attachments to, rhythm? How do listeners search for pulse in music that avoids it? How can composers and improvisers use “grammars” of time to determine something that search? And can we ask listeners to transcend pulse altogether? (More difficult: rhythm and pulse require things to happen in succession through time. So how do we pick which paths to thread, dividing the participants of a rhythm from its surroundings, its other? In this latter question, the topic of ‘rhythm’ and the topic of ‘voice’ are unexpectedly related, perhaps even intimately.)

• What distinguishes musical time experienced as a continuity, from musical time experienced as a quality? Sound and music require distributions of activity through an apparently continuous stretch of time. But does good listening require the same continuity? When memory dissolves objective continuities and practical linearities into clouds and streams, what really remains of musical form? What modes of time-experience in music are dependent on continuity? (Phrase structures, movements from prolongation to cadence, but what else?) And what are dependent on qualities, or intensities, of time? (Syncopation, depths of swing and shuffle, degrees of remoteness from a pulse, but what else?)

I hope it is clear to most musicians, from the descriptions above, that these three concerns dovetail and negotiate with one another, so that answers and insights in one conversation begin to transform another. Drawing inspiration from thinkers like Elizabeth Grosz and Alphonso Lingis, I find that musical actions, their repetitions, and their repeatability across other landscapes and scales of experience, bring musical time into inevitable dialogue with the politics of space, race, gender, species, and technology. Obversely, thanks to Stuart Hall, Luce Irigaray, Eduardo Galeano, and others, I consider both musical and personal ‘subjects’ not as stable selves, but as processes, and perhaps as ‘becomings.’ I think this process (“subjectivity”) is worth thinking empirically and analytically about. And it is certainly a process worth composing and improvising toward.

I see these “experimental” efforts not just as a pursuit of knowledge to support music-making, but as a way of thinking more clearly about music in the vein of a social and political space. If the surface of music is aninterplay of groups and streams, then the forms emerging on those surfaces might be fascimile of our individual and social investments in power, identity, and experience in the world.

About Ben

Born in North Carolina, Ben Leeds Carson visited 47 U.S. states before he was eight, inhabiting trailer parks, highway rest areas, and rural campgrounds, as his parents updated bird lists and topographical maps, accumulated mineral collections, and worked for the U.S. Geological Service. Musical life began later in Walla Walla, Washington, with teachers like José Rambaldi (d. 1989) and Bradley Hunt (d. 1988)—whose lives were cut short by AIDS while Ben was still a teen—and with mentors John Peel (Willamette University) John Rahn (University of Washington), Roger Reynolds, Jann Pasler, Brian Ferneyhough, Harvey Sollberger, Jerry Balzano, and George Lewis. Carson's abundant works for solo piano explore "the establishment and erosion of musical boundaries, the evolution/devolution of melody, and the use of silence as a structural component" (Fanfare Magazine July/August 2012); critic Christopher Williams describes their tonality, and tension between small-scale and large-scale harmonic progressions, as "a paradox", in which "each element in a false dichotomy defines and becomes the other", allowing us "the opportunity and responsibility to navigate our [own] uniquely useful paths" ("On the Piano Music of Ben Carson", in The Open Space Magazine, Issue 5, December 2005).

Carson has been an Artist/Researcher-in-Residence for the Perception Laboratory at IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), and at Paris University VI, where his collaborations focused on the perception of complex rhythm perception, and led to empirical work reported in the American Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of New Music Research. Carson’s music has been performed at venues for experimental and contemporary music, including (recently) the Boston Non-Event Series (2018), Washington DC’s Sonic Circuits (2018), the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (Mexico City 2018), and the Smithsonian’s Meyer Series (Washington DC 2019), Blurred Edges (Hamburg 2020), New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for the Contemporary Piano, and a wide range of other venues, including full concerts at the Sydney Conservatory’s Music and Social Justice conference (2005), with the Colorado Springs Peak Frequency Ensemble, and for the Columbia University’s Music Performance Program. LA Times critic Mark Swed described Reidemeister Move's REDCAT performance of "Wonderment and Misgiving" as “a kind of acoustic acupressure” (LA Times Critic’s Notebook, October 2018). Longer discussions of Carson’s work appear in the Open Space Magazine (2005), and iLand (2012); Ben’s scholarship also appears in Search Anthology, the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research, and UCLA’s online journal ECHO.

Carson's recent work has moved in the direction of music drama, and includes an opera merging a Star Trek teleplay by Gene Roddenberry, with historical renderings of the Orpheus myth: "Act I" of the result—Menagerie...—premiered (June 2016) in a workshop performance directed by John de Lancie (actor: Star Trek—Next Generation, Breaking Bad; acclaimed guest director of Atlanta Opera and San Antonio Opera) and led by acclaimed singers Sheila Willey, Emily Sinclair (sopranos), Aleksey Bogdanov, and David Cushing (baritones). Since 2003, Ben has served the UC Santa Cruz Music Department faculty, where he is Professor, and Inaugural Director of Creative Technologies. He is a recipient of grants and awards recognizing excellence in teaching.

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.

Short Bio (140 words; <1000 characters)

Ben Leeds Carson’s music (“a kind of acoustic acupressure”—Mark Swed, LA Times Critic’s Notebook, Oct 2018; "a paradox", in which "each element in a false dichotomy defines and becomes the other"—Open Space 2005) has been featured at numerous venues for experimental music, including the Foro Internacional de Música Nueva (Mexico City 2018); Smithsonian Institute's Meyer Series (Washington DC 2019); Blurred Edges (Hamburg 2020); and SUNY Buffalo's 2023-24 Visiting Artist Series. Carson's opera merging a Star Trek teleplay with historical renderings of the Orpheus myth was premiered (June 2016) in a workshop performance directed by acclaimed opera director and Star Trek—Next Generation actor John de Lancie.

Since 2003, Ben has served the UC Santa Cruz Music Department faculty, where he is Professor, and Inaugural Director of Creative Technologies. He is a recipient of grants and awards recognizing excellence in teaching.