Roasted Vegetable Dashi, Briased Kombu Hakurei Turnip, Crisp Dandelion Leaf with Liquorice Powder

Togarishi+Drone

Birch Bark Consommé de Volaille, Szechuan Ham, Hakurei Turnip, Crisp Dandelion Leaf with Liquorice Powder

Zingy+Drone

Chicken Galantine au Foin Lions Mane Mushrooms White Sage Peach Confit Broccoli Leaf

Meaty+Drone

I found this amazing text in the book "Finest Legends of the Rhine" by Wilhelm Ruland, which I picked up in the used bookstore Lorem Ipsum Books in Inman Square, Cambridge, MA.  Since I was about to marry a woman named Jutta who is originally from Cologne (on the banks of the Rhine), I could not resist setting this to music to premiere as a wedding gift on Aug 17, 2013.

Die Brautwerbung.  Auf Rheinstein hat einst in ungebändigter Fehdelust ein Rittersmann gehaust, Diethelm geheißen. Der hatte von einem Beutezug ein zierliches Mägdlein mit nach Hause gebracht, Jutta mit Namen. Wie weicher Efeu sich um die knorrige Eiche schlingt und seine rauhe Rinde in schimmernden Samt verwandelt, so hat dieser Jungfrau frauliches Gebaren aus dem rauhen Recken nach Jahr und Tag einen mannhaften Ritter gemacht, der Räubereien und Gelagen entsagte und der schönen Jutta als Lohn ihrer Tugend und Anmut die Hand zum ehelichen Bund reichte.

The Wooing.   In Castle Rheinstein once lived a knight called Diethelm, who devoted himself without restraint to all the excesses of the robber barons.  From one of his pillaging expeditions he brought back a charming maiden called Jutta. As the delicate ivy twines itself round the rough oak and clothes its knotty stem with shimmering velvet, so in time the gentle conduct of this maiden changed the coarse baron to a noble knight who eschewed pillaging and carousing, and ultimately made the fair Jutta the honoured wife of her captor. 


Die Brautwerbung

Text from Song of Solomon 2:1-11

I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley;
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley;
As the lily among the thorns, so is my love among the daughters,
As the apple tree, the apple tree among the trees of the wood,
so is my beloved among the sons, so is my beloved among the sons.
I sat down under his shadow with great delight,
And his fruit was sweet to my taste;
And his fruit, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

He brought me to the banqueting house 
His banner over me was love,
He brought me to the banqueting house 
His banner over me was love.

Stay me with flagons,
Comfort me with apples, for I am sick,
for I am sick, for I am sick of love;
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roses, and by the hinds of the field,
That you stir not up,
That you stir not up,
That you stir not up,
that you stir not up, nor awake, awake,
awake, awake, my love, till he please.

The voice of my beloved,
Behold! he cometh,
leaping upon the mountains skipping,
skipping, skipping, skipping,
leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

The voice of my beloved,
Behold! he cometh,
leaping upon the mountains skipping,
skipping, skipping, skipping,
leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

My beloved spake,
And said unto me,
Rise up,
Rise up,
Rise up,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,
the rain is over, the rain is over and gone.
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

I Am the Rose of Sharon, William Billings

16 Background vocals
This was so hard.  There’s 12 of me singing tight, four-part harmony (in falsetto!) on the bridge.  Not all the cutoffs are quite together, but in the context of a bigger mix you can’t tell.  Reverb also helps.


My Heart Is a River in Flood 16 (Vox BGV)

Rain and Thunder
	I don’t seem to have the rain and thunder track I edited together for my recording anymore, so I’m just including the original source files, to do with what you will.  If you’ve got Vegas, I can send you the Vegas file, and you can try to re-attach them (and if you’ve got Vegas, can I have a copy, please? :) ).  The Rain sounds are a bit messy; you can hear handling noise as I’m trying out different mic positions, a few taxi horns, a boat horn or two.  But I think there’s enough good stuff there to be useful.  I think the big boom at one minute in on the Thunder track is what I used for going back into the second bridge section.  (Both files recorded off my 23rd floor balcony with my M-Audio Microtrack, I think; no time to get out the good mics!)


Rain

Here’s a performance of John Cage’s ONE7 (1992) that I recorded around 10pm on March 15, 2014, in Valencia, Spain.  It’s the Saturday before Fallas, the big annual party where streets are blocked off and huge sculptures are erected at intersections to be burned at midnight on March 19, somehow historically linked to a celebration of St. Joseph.  I left my windows open while performing this piece, so you can hear the street noise and the firecrackers that have been going off pretty nonstop since the beginning of March.  I live near the Falla Dama De Elche, and right outside my window, they’ve erected a tent for all the people who worked on the falla over the course of the last year; you can hear them testing a sound system and preparing for a group dinner, I think, or something.

ONE7 doubles as the Player 1 part of FOUR6, a piece for four performers making any kinds of sounds; you select twelve continuous sounds in advance, and the score indicates which sound to play when (within a range of possible time brackets).  There are a couple of quirks (I’m tempted to say oversights) in this piece, one of which is the fact that the score (written with the aid of a computer program using random numbers to choose which sound should come next) only calls for 10 of the 12 sounds to be used.  For this recording, my sounds were as follows: a plastic bag that once contained a loaf of bread I bought, flipping through the pages of Don Quixote (the Edith Grossman translation), a large bell tree we bought in Greece on our honeymoon last summer, a smaller set of bells bought on the same trip, a Tibetan prayer bowl I bought in Shanghai around 2005 (the same as is featured in my piece Psalmus), some finger cymbals (also bought in Shanghai around 2005 and featured in my piece Psalmus), blowing on a bottle of A. K. Damm beer (note change in pitch over the course of the piece), a vocalization, a paper bag that once contained another loaf of bread I bought, and pouring water between two pots.

ONE7 lasts 30 minutes, but the sound from outside was at such a lovely point when it ended that I didn’t want to interrupt it, so I tacked on a performance of 4’33” as an encore.

Rather than use the paper score and a chronometer, as this piece is typically performed, I wrote an iOS app to pick the start and end time for each event, so I could just follow the on screen instructions, which include countdown timers for sound starting and ending times, plus a preview for what the next sound is going to be.

For a while I’ve been interested in the idea of writing software to generate real-time cues for live performers to interpret, allowing for the introduction of coordinated, generative processes into live performance without requiring performers to do excessive record keeping that might distract them from the sound producing duties at hand.  Previous pieces of mine that investigate this subject include Mobile 4 (2011, for khaen, accordion, guitar, and electronic sound, presented at the San Diego Museum of Art), the Zhujiajiao Drinking Game (2009, for five beer drinkers; note subtle reference in my ONE7 recording), and the software I developed to aid me in performing Christian Marclay’s Screen Play at the Shanghai eArts Festival in 2008.

Another quirk in this piece is that sometimes the number brackets really don’t work; in some cases the maximum end time of one time bracket exceeds the maximum start time, or sometimes even the maximum end time, of the subsequent one.  This could have been solved a number of ways; in a typical performance, I suspect a performer would sort of just even things out and squeeze everything in.  Instead, I wrote my software to follow the instructions literally, and if that means that the subsequent event doesn’t have time to be played, I drop it.  This seems to be a good solution for a real-time app; in this case the sequence of events is fixed, but it’s easy to imagine a situation in which they wouldn’t be (responding to user input, data from a sensor, information from the internet, etc.), so I want to explore this design strategy.  It’s also in keeping with Cage’s famous dictum, “A ‘mistake’ is beside the point, for once anything happens, it authentically is.”

This semester (spring 2014) at Berklee Valencia, I’m leading an ensemble we’re calling an App Choir.  Real-time score generation is one of the foci of our ensemble, and I’m using this iOS implementation of FOUR6 to teach basic Objective-C programming.  We’ll be performing the piece later in the semester.  Perhaps there will be a recording.

John Cage, ONE7 b/w 4'33"

This short excerpt attempts to succinctly convey the experience of being at Bondir during one of our food operas.  It begins with a single music texture, such as would emanate from a single speaker in the restaurant.  The perspective gradually pulls back to encompass other musical textures, such as one might hear coming from neighboring diners' speakers, until all twenty-six channels are playing.  It's impossible to convey the full effect with a single stereo recording, but this rendering provides at least some sense of how each of the individual textures was coordinated in rhythm and harmony to produce the overall soundscape of the restaurant.

Food Opera Taster

A setting of a found text that was painted on the walls of a construction site that I used to walk by on my way to work at Ubisoft in Shanghai around the end of 2004/beginning of 2005, somewhere on Nanjing Xi Lu. I broke the text down into different types of phrase, then set each phrase type consistently, so that the musical form is derived from the structure of the text.
Super fun doing the vocal overdubs on this. I think the background vocals are 5 parts altogether, and each part is triple tracked, so plus the lead vocal, that's 16 of me.
Lots of Max on this track, too, in the textural stuff at the beginning and especially in the big breakdown, where I chop up the sequenced tracks from the main verse into smaller and smaller chunks and reshuffle them, plus a bunch of granularization on the background vocal tracks.

Cross Ocean

My Heart Is a River in Flood

Very near to the right of the entrance to the library
of Beirut, we buried wise Lysias, 
a grammarian. The spot is very well suited. 
We placed him near to those things that he may still 
remember there-commentaries, texts, technologies, 
variant readings, volumes filled with Hellenistic studies. 
And also this way, his tomb will be seen and honored
by us, when we pass by the books.

By Constantine P. Cavafy, translation by Niko Paterakis

A setting of a poem by Constantine P. Cavafy for voice and audience mobile devices. Premiered at ICMC in Athens, September 2014, performed again at Music Acoustica at the Beijing Central Conservatory in October 2014, adapted as a Web Audio API app for the Web Audio Conference at Mozilla/IRCAM in January 2015, and presented along with a paper describing how the technology works at ISEA in Vancouver in August 2015.

More information about the piece is here: https://www.academia.edu/17060876/The_Tomb_of_the_Grammarian_Lysias_Real-Time_Performance_and_Crowd-Distributed_Music_Diffusion_with_Networked_Mobile_Devices

The Tomb Of The Grammarian Lysias

A few weeks ago, I wrote some music to accompany a whisky. The premiere was the unveiling of the Chivas Regal 18 Ultimate Cask Collection at an event in London, hosted by Chivas Master Blender Colin Scott and chef Jozef Youssef. The music was not there to simply provide background music to a swanky event; my objective was to change the way the whisky tastes. Read more here: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/tasting-notes/

Whisky, Bitter

Whisky, Sweet

50% Garnacha, 50% Graciano
http://www.azulygaranza.com/wines/garciano/
Premiered at Vinfonies, September 24-27, 2015
Vilafranca del Penedès, Barcelona
http://vinfonies.org/wp/
Read more about the project here: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/vinfonies-nessun-dorma-and-gastromorphology/

Azul y Garanza 2012 Garciano

Developed in collaboration with chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory for the launch of a new Hugo Boss fragrance in London, November 17, 2015. Composed in just intonation to help in comparing the crossmodal effects of consonance and dissonance. Read more about the project here: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/author/ben-houge/

Pomegranate & Lavender, Sweet

Developed in collaboration with chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory for the launch of a new Hugo Boss fragrance in London, November 17, 2015. Composed using Harry Partch's 43-note per octave just intonation tuning system to aid in comparing crossmodal effects of consonance and dissonance. Read more about the project here: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/author/ben-houge/

Pomegranate & Lavender, Sour

***This recording was created by Mugaritz, and Mugaritz owns and reserves all associated rights. It is shared with kind permission.***

This dish, "Mortar Soup with Spices, Seeds, Fish Broth, and Fresh Herbs," was developed at Mugaritz restaurant in San Sebastián, Spain. It is served with a mortar and pestle for grinding the spices and seeds. Everyone in the restaurant receives the dish at the same time, so that the entire room is filled with the sound of ringing mortars, like Tibetan singing bowls, creating a sense of shared space among the diners. Read more about it here: http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/author/ben-houge/

Sopa de mortero con especias, semillas, caldo de pescado y hierbas frescas

Recorded around midnight on the balcony of Spring Workshop in Aberdeen, HK, where I'm currently doing an artist residency.  Typhoon Vicente was the biggest storm to hit Hong Kong since 1999, and this recording was made shortly before the hurricane rating was raised to its highest level (Level 10 [there is no 9, I'm told, and neither is there a 2, 4, 5, 6, or 7]), so winds must have been exceeding 100 mph.  There's a big open doorway to the balcony, and most of the time the wind was blowing across it, so I was able to get this nice recording; shortly after this excerpt ends, the wind changed direction and blew my levels, but for a while it was a great perspective.  The whistling is from a green net canopy that covers the balcony area (which was blown down overnight, amongst other destruction, such as befell those poor potted plants...).  Recorded with a Zoom H4n, with no post-processing.  Check out http://www.springworkshop.org/.

Ben Houge

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