estuary

filmed a minute and thirty eight seconds of the train journey from totnes to exeter I take every morning to rehearsal for Eliza and the Wild Swans. recorded a soundtrack during my lunchbreak.

A Something Else That Stirs Man

‘A Something Else That Stirs Man’: A Fourth of July Appreciation of Charles Ives

(written for Stockhausen Syndrome)

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them…

-        The Declaration of Independence, 4^th July 1776

Music is one of the many ways God has of beating in on man –

his lifes, his deaths, his hope, his everything –

an inner something, a spiritual storm,

a something else that stirs man

in all of his parts [and] consciousness, and "all at once" –

we roughly call these parts (as a kind of entity) "soul" –

it acts thro or vibrates or couples up to human sensations in ways

(or mediums) man may hear and know:

that is, he knows he hears them

and says (or thinks or feels) he knows them. –

further than this,

what this inner something is which begets all this

is something no one knows –

especially those who define it

and use it, primarily, to make a living. –

all this means almost nothing to those who will think about it –

music -- that no one knows what it is –

and the less he knows he knows what it is

the nearer it is to music – probably.

-        Charles E. Ives, memo on notepaper of the St. James's Palace Hotel, London, June 1924

America was less than a century old when Charles Ives was born. Hearing his work, which is rich with quotations, you’d guess he spent his childhood lapping up music; folk ditties, popular hymns and the patriotic tunes his father’s marching band probably played are heard alongside key motifs from European classical compositions. As the critic Christopher Ballantine noted, Ives’ use of quotation was interesting because he seemed to choose his sources for their semantic connotations rather than their musical qualities: their meaning and associations outside of their musical context. They relate to ‘a way not only of hearing,’ Ballantine suggested, ‘but also of responding, feeling, relating, thinking.’

   There’s little doubt that, as a composer, Ives was ahead of his time. As Leonard Bernstein said (when introducing a performance of Ives’ Symphony No. 2), Ives ‘experimented with atonality way before Schoenberg, with free-dissonance way before Stravinsky, with quarter-tones way before Alois Hába.’ His work remained obscure for most of his lifetime, with many of his published works going unperformed until after his death in 1954. But looking at Ives’s music and his writings, it’s clear that his particular modernism was an exploration of his own Americanness: still a new idea in Ives’s time, and by its nature an idea that embraced newness.

Bernstein introducing Ives’ Symphony No. 2

   Ives looked to the literature and philosophy of his nation for inspiration. Responding to the Transcendentalism of Emerson, Thoreau and Alcott, he dreamt of a music that (as he wrote), would be ‘a language so transcendent that its heights and depths would be common to all mankind.’ He wanted a music free even from its physical boundaries of what can be played or what can be heard –

My God! What has sound got to do with music! [And] is it the composer’s fault that man has only ten fingers? What can’t a musical thought be presented as it is born – perchance ‘a bastard of the slums’… That music must be heard is not essential – what it sounds like may not be what it is.

This glorious, impossible ambitiousness is there in his unfinished ‘Universe Symphony,’ which was ‘to be played by at least two huge orchestras across from each other on mountaintops overlooking a valley’ and would tell the story of the creation of the universe.

   But for me, Ives is addictive not only for his astonishing ambition but also for his ability – like Whitman’s – to contain his vast ideas within understated, deceptively simple forms: the ‘Alcotts’ and ‘Thoreau’ movements of the Concord Sonata, for instance, or the haunting ‘Unanswered Question’. Their glorious strangeness, their sensitivity, reflect the best qualities of American identity, worth celebrating on the 4th of July.

The Unanswered Question

Concord Sonata: Movement IV: Thoreau

there go the warm jets

Hollywood studios refused to finance Soderbergh's - totally brilliant - Behind the Candelabra - a biopic of Liberaci, as seen through the eyes of his lover/employee/[almost]adoptive-son - because of its subject matter. In Britain, you can watch Matt Damon getting it on with Michael Douglas on the screens of mainstream cinemas, but American cinemas have decided they aren't ready.

According to Soderbergh, 'they said it was too gay.' Maybe they imagined walking through a foyer that advertises Man of Steel & Pacific Rim & decided they'd overdone it. Anyway, the result is that it's gone straight-to-TV in the USA, premiering on HBO. Some critics have said this 'may mark the moment when TV overtakes film in the cultural relevance stakes.' I guess it might; some people think that's already happened [well, in my mind, TV's kind of on the way out too, & I'm just hoping some really good books get written soon, & that everyone starts coming to see theatre productions & gigs a lot more].

Aside from my sadness at the conservativism, bigotry & pessimism that such a decision implies... I'm just sorry that many people will miss the glory of the sound design in this film. TVs & laptops aren't going to do it justice. The moment when applause begins just a few seconds before the scene in which the crowd is clapping - but starts on the left speaker, only to pan across gradually as the shot changes - alienating us as listeners, making us deal with the sound as this strange, rippling, disconcerting thing; the subtle shifts between sound quality in the schmaltz-virtuoso piano-playing; the moment when a long take - one of many beautiful long takes in this film - follows Liberaci out of the jacuzzi but then stays with his lover, Scott Thorson, as out-of-shot Liberaci switches off the water jets - so the gorgeous bubbling that had underscored their conversation abruptly vanishes into a kind of stunned silence...

I urge people to go hear this film in cinemas.

[NB - the Eno's only here because of the coincidental title - as far as I know, he had no involvement in this film - this is a beautiful song though]

Chasing Beckett: tension and sound

As of today I'm starting work on a sound design and pre-recorded score for Chasing Beckett, a dark comedy showing at the London Theatre in New Cross from the 9th to the 14th of October.

It's a very enclosed piece - a hostage situation in a small but classy upstairs flat, and the dialogue between the hostage and the captor.

Reading the script I thought of Hitchcock's Rope - a very different piece but with a similar tension to it. Rope's use of sound is truly inspiring: almost all the sound is diegetic, with the exception of the music at the beginning and end of the film. Within this diegetic sound are key instances of music, most notably a recurring piano piece that one of the main characters plays, Poulenc's Trois Mouvement's Perpetuals. It's a beautiful piece but a very strange one, a mix of constancy and surprise that perfectly reflects the experimental intellectual criminality of the narrative.

Here is Poulenc himself playing it - a little faster than others have interpreted it:

The fact that a character plays a piece that itself is a perfect soundtrack marks a brilliant merging of diegetic and non-diegetic ideas - the effect is to heighten the realism of the performance through stylisation, rather than detract from it. Stylising represented reality in this way - as in expressionist painting, or poetic prose - has the effect of placing sensation and emotion on the same level as image and sound; arguably, the position they occupy in actual perception. The tension between the two characters, the hidden knowledge and secret motivations, the clash between social convention and expectation and a fascistically anti-social acceptance of violence - all become elevated to the conditions of music; no longer replicating or imitating reality but creating it anew; 'all the others translate,' says Auden - taking on musical qualities takes us beyond translation to creation.

There's a brilliant essay on way that music in Rope corresponds to subversive sexuality, Unheard Sexualities.

working from pictures

Standard procrastination when you need to write music for someone else is to end up writing music for yourself. New song down at the bottom of the page.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned 
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

(William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the fall of Icarus)

Remembering in flashes

The stings and the rashes
(I lie when I tell you I don't)

soundtrack to medical melodrama

Doing some more research for soundtracking Kill The Beast's The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, on at the Lowry in Manchester later this month. Today: the music of medical melodrama -

General Hospital was brought to you by Wizard Room Deodorizer...

newspapers, cops, operas

Touched... Like a Virgin: composing after Madonna

From next Tuesday night onward I'll be performing alongside actress Sadie Frost - a bit of a hero of mine because of this video - and singer Dave Wickenden - of the legendary Four Poofs & Piano, formerly Jonathan Ross's house-band and Edinburgh Fringe stalwarts - at the Soho Theatre in London. The production is a play called Touched... Like a Virgin, by playwright Zoe Lewis, produced by Sally Humphreys Productions.

This is exciting not only for the obvious reasons but also on a personal level: my mother, playwright Marta Emmitt, was Writer-in-Residence at Soho in 2000; her play Cadillac Ranch was performed there. This a place that excited me when I was twelve years old, and now I'm performing there, which for me is the most amazing thing about this.

It's also extremely challenging, not least because the play is about an obsessive Madonna fan and - while it is emphatically not a Madonna musical - it calls for a selection of Madonna's songs to be used as musical interludes, as well as original music to underscore the scenes.

Writing after Madonna is very interesting: if you want to read a really great piece of musicological analysis, try a wikipedia page on a Madonna song (e.g.): you can see how the songs display different styles at different points, how they move between textures and vocal registers, etc. I've been trying to arrange the songs in ways that reflect the various mental states of the protagonist. One challenge is choosing which aspects of the piece I can bring out with the minimal set-up I've got (a loop pedal borrowed from sound artist Sholto Dobie, a glockenspiel borrowed from Sleeping Passengers bassist Will Kerr, an upright piano and an acoustic guitar). While I wouldn't normally do this, I'm putting up a demo I've done - with help from fellow Sleeping Passenger Nina Scott - of Material Girl; I'd be interested to see what people think of it.

the feast of st patrick (bugbites & beestings)

so, I have indeed been writing everyday for lent, though of course not blogging. not all of it has been songs, though there have been a couple here and there. something longer has emerged as well, among the short stories.

anyway, for the first Feast Day of Lent, the Feast of St Patrick (which was actually yesterday), here is a new song. I am very ill right now, my voice will tell you as much, so I may try to record this again when this is not so clearly the case: but here is
Bugbites and beestings by Ben Osborn

next week perhaps I can branch out into non-fiction.

the early Christians were an interesting bunch, oscillating between brutal tribalism and a kind of proto-communism of the soul... you might say... so here is St Patrick's Prayer:

I bind to myself today The strong virtue of the Invocation of the Trinity: I believe the Trinity in the Unity The Creator of the Universe.

I bind to myself today The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ with His Baptism, The virtue of His crucifixion with His burial, The virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension, The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day.

I bind to myself today The virtue of the love of seraphim, In the obedience of angels, In the hope of resurrection unto reward, In prayers of Patriarchs, In predictions of Prophets, In preaching of Apostles, In faith of Confessors, In purity of holy Virgins, In deeds of righteous men.

I bind to myself today The power of Heaven, The light of the sun, The brightness of the moon, The splendour of fire, The flashing of lightning, The swiftness of wind, The depth of sea, The stability of earth, The compactness of rocks.

I bind to myself today God's Power to guide me, God's Might to uphold me, God's Wisdom to teach me, God's Eye to watch over me, God's Ear to hear me, God's Word to give me speech, God's Hand to guide me, God's Way to lie before me, God's Shield to shelter me, God's Host to secure me, Against the snares of demons, Against the seductions of vices.

Ash Wednesday

as per 2009, I'm giving up non-writing for Lent.

here's today's effort; a song for a friend:
Don't go off the radar by Ben Osborn
Don't Go Off The Radar

The smartest thing I
did in my whole life
was to keep on swimming
when I couldn't see the other side.

further things and furthering things

Paul Klee - obsessed with light and colour, and he used to design the insignias on the wings of planes in the first world war. Biplanes? Hope so.

The Biplane, such as it is, and it kind of isn't - observantly you might have noticed that November is over; the novel isn't over, it's exactly 1/3 finished - but such as it is or isn't, is about Dante's ideas about light, in a way. More on this later... but I think light is quite interesting, well obviously light is quite interesting.

Paul Klee is part of it, pretty much everything is part of it. As a piece of writing, I want it to be like something real rather than fictional, I mean like something that could actually happen even though it is impossible and, worse yet, impossible to explain. It's split roughly into a blog, complete with emoticons, and a third person narrative, occasionally directly addressing the reader, and then footnotes that are from one of the character's diaries. So far there are only two but they are the best things in it.

Anyway I have a few days off from The Wind in the Willows, which is going quite well, there is a lot of music in it, which you can have if you like, but writing is a bit difficult again. So I found some nice things; well a lot of things have helped anyway: China Mieville's blog, which is such great writing and such a great use of the internet, The Fanclub (whose floor I'm sleeping on) being played on Radio 2, a book on Paul Klee I got for £2 in a charity shop including this print

, the discovery this morning that Donald Barthelme, whose writing I only know by hearsay from Will Kerr's song 'Die By The Seaside' which we've been gradually turning into a sleeping passengers track I think, has written about Klee's aeroplane painting job in the war, being introduced to the existence of Blackpool manager Ian Holloway (I know nothing about football, really), reading Dante's Vita Nuova (which does get a bit boring in places but is kind of great), coming back to Josh and Lewis and Alex's flat last night in the cold and dark and discovering that they were watching Iron Man with Iron Man 2 queued...

Dear Diary, how are you?

Tegid Cartwright: CtF

As an auspicious start to this blog, let me redirect you to another blog where you can hear some really interesting new music: that is, Tegid Cartwright's new CtF E.P.


Tegid is a multi-instrumentalist known to experiment with different genres; he works regularly with hip hop and urban artists in Birmingham, has composed jazz scores for theatre productions at the Warwick Arts Centre, and his fantastic Nomad Projeckt (which I strongly encourage you to check out) blends acoustic soul with Björk-esque vocal experiments. The four tracks of his solo E.P., however, stays pretty much solidly in the folky-acoustic-singer-songwriter genre, but with some intriguing experiments and roughness around the edges.

The E.P. has a neat premise: CtF has the dual meaning of being the 'Capture the Flag' videogame mode and representing the chord sequence C to F. The songs on the E.P. are actually made up of more than these two chords, but the idea of a simple repeated chord sequence is present throughout. CtF is comprised of four tracks, all recorded during a stay in a house in Wales, all using the available instruments in the house (acoustic guitar, shakey egg, and a broken pedal organ providing the bassline); a guest arrives for a weekend bringing a banjo to contribute to one of the tracks. This rough-and-ready approach is reflected in the recording style: mistakes are left in, lines are sung wrong and then immediately corrected, the organ is untunable and you can hear Tegid telling the banjo which chords to play (and having to correct himself). But the results are often both interesting and pleasing: the stilted phrasing on 'Wonder Steady' and the strange sound of autotuned organ on 'First Date', for example, highlight what this loose lo-fi style can achieve.

The broken vocal style used in particular on the final track ('CtF') owes a lot to Daniel Johnston, which is no bad thing, but it is complemented by the gentler, smoother style that dominates 'First Date.' 'First Date', the first track of the E.P., is probably the strongest: the gently played shaker is lovely, while the organ rumbles below a hypnotically repeated guitar riff and pleasantly jazzy vocal line. 'I Was Born (Two Kites)' is less together, a more Johnston-y vocal line over a shimmering guitar part reminiscent of Stornoway's 'On the Rocks' that gradually moves toward an epic vocal harmony. The third track, 'Wonder Steady', is more comfortably folk-pop, with a strong melody and a fuller sound created by the use of organ, banjo, and guitar; its awkward phrasing, however, prevents it from ever feeling clichéd by giving the pleasant sensation that it could fall apart at any minute.

The eponymous final track is a little different in feel; a passionate semi-improvised vocal over the rich sound of the organ, unexpectedly falling into place in its strong chorus. It's a fitting end to an E.P. that plays with a simple, formal approach to songwriting but then throws in a load of surprises.