This site is designed to support introductory listening and conversation related to the music of composer Ben Leeds Carson.

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

My main concerns as an experimental composer might be summarized as concerns about “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 of course it is 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 at least two very specific questions. 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.

If both of these questions sound academic (the first scientific, and the second humanistic), that’s probably because I work at a University, and I do want to contribute to that culture in some way. But I don’t ask these questions as pursuits of ‘knowledge-for-its-own sake’, rather, I see these efforts 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.

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

Brief Biography

Benjamin Carson’s work as a composer is supported by a variety of theory and research, including work in both critical gender studies and cognitive science; he has studied under John Rahn at the University of Washington and Roger Reynolds at the University of California, San Diego. 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), and at the New England Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Piano Performance (2004). Ben 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. He has lectured in the series Perception et Cognition Auditives (Paris Universite VI), at the Thurgood Marshall College Writing Program (UC San Diego), and at the UC Santa Cruz Cultural Studies Colloquium. His writing is published in a variety of areas, including the American Journal of Psychology, the Journal of New Music Research, the “Feminist Provocations” series of the Institute for Advanced Feminist Research, and the OPEN SPACE magazine of new music and art.

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 DMA program in Composition, the MFA program in Digital Arts and New Media, and as an affiliate of the Department of American Studies.

Exploring this site

If you’re a curious listener or musician, please explore the links to Scores & Recordings 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.