My curiosity got the better of me and I kidnapped Kurt, Andy, and Eric during the workshops for a little chat.  (If you’re wondering why there’s a soap dispenser in the background, that’s because the only space we could find was inside a small dressing room next to the toilet.) Unsurprisingly, they were all charming and intelligent, but as different from each other as their pieces were.

Each year the festival commissions one or two new works for 8bb to premiere. Last year it was pieces by Michael Barnhardt and Ashley Fure; this year it was a new composition by the polite, soft-spoken composer Frances White, called The Ocean Inside. As you will hear on a forthcoming podcast interview with Frances, since 1995 the composer has studied the shakuhachi (a Japanese end-blown flute). She particularly loves “honkyoku, the traditional meditative music for this instrument.” These melodies function in their culture rather like Gregorian chant did in ours: “like chant, they exist not so much as “pieces of music” but rather for the purpose of devotion.” In her slow, soft, lyrical piece, The Ocean Inside, Frances used one of these tunes as a cantus firmus, and as such “it is the hidden melodic heart out of which the entire piece grows – ‘the ocean inside’.”

Here is that interview, including excerpts from The Ocean Inside. Enjoy!

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“We have some music of this type, then, meanwhile, there is something else going on here. Meanwhile, over there there is something else entirely.”

This is how Stephen Hartke describes the origin of his new piece Meanwhile, a set of six character-pieces that 8bb premiered several weeks ago at University of Richmond, as part of an all-Hartke extravaganza. You can hear him talk about the genesis of the piece, and the experience of working with eighth blackbird, in the second of 8bb’s Composer Chit-chat podcasts, below.

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Hartke wanted to turn 8bb into an imaginary “court orchestra” from a non-existant non-Western culture, of which the composer himself is master. So the work deploys a bucket-load of odd-sounding percussion instruments, lots of unusual musical gestures and an endlessly creative instrumental combinations.

Hartke was inspired by a number of interesting sources to create his often truly madcap music. The wildly disjunct melodic contours and extended techniques of the hysterically dramatic bass clarinet solo in Meanwhile’s third movement, Narration, is inspired by the unique sound of Japanese bunraku narrator. Check out some fascinating video clips of Bunraku performances here. Hartke wants the shrill, thrilling C-major end to the work, in which two antiphonally placed flexatones, a prepared piano, cymbals and gongs throw clangerous sounds at one another, to sound like “a Chinese wedding celebration.” The Spike-fiddling movement turns the viola into an instrument like the Kamancheh, a thin, nasal-sounding 4-stringed Persian instrument that has melodies played both above and below a constant drone.

Boyish good looks, aw-shucks charm, laid-back good-naturedness, serious composition chops. Ben Broening sure has it all goin’ on – but, hmmm, haven’t you always wanted to know about the history of his renowned 3P electroacoustic fest at University of Richmond VA, where he (and 8bb) teach? Haven’t you been burning to find out why he was in Estonia for 6 months in the spring? Don’t you feel dirty for not being made aware of a possible new direction in his compositional style? Aren’t you just palpitating at the thought of a new flute/electronics piece to be premiered by 8bb’s illustrious “T-Money” next year?

Welcome to the first in what will hopefully, according to my introduction to Ben’s interview, “be a long and illustrious series” of amusing, insightful, gripping composer chats. If Ben sounds slightly distracted, it is because the interview took place during last-minute preparations for the 3P festival a couple of weeks ago.

Music extracts come from Ben’s work for clarinet and electronics, Arioso/Doubles, performed by Arthur Campbell, clarinet.

Next week, Frances White on how the shakuhachi changed her compositional life! Then, in episode 3, Stephen Hartke and the pain of working with a completely invented instrument – the “flexatone gamelan”!

Enjoy. Your comments and suggestions would be most welcome.