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Unstained Melodies

by Ben Harper

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about

I started out with the urge to test music to destruction, removing structure, context, all momentum and teleology from existing pieces of music to see what musical qualities may still survive in the desiccated remains. (This test was to prove that musical 'meaning' is an irreducible quality induced through any phenomenon being perceived as music.) I had previously composed a piano piece titled Benches, made entirely from the final bar taken from a large number of compositions. Each quotation was taken from a point at which all supposed momentum had been exhausted, yet when pieced together they could not help but form a new continuity. Unstained Melodies is a set of piano miniatures designed to test internal continuity in harmonically-structured composition. The source material was a found object: a very old and damaged edition of pedagogical organ pieces demonstrating "Stainer's Organ Method." (I do not recall if the book was by John Stainer himself.) Taking only what was presumably the least valuable material, I systematically extracted only the last beat of each bar from each piece. To disorient the material, the extracted up-beats were reassembled in reverse order. In fact, I started with the last intact page and steadily worked backwards through the book, assuming that the pieces would tend to become shorter and simpler until the process ceased to be viable; a study in regression. This recording is a crude realisation of the written music, using computer-controlled piano samples, playing from algorithmically edited MIDI files. No physical keyboard playing was involved.

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released September 9, 2017

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Ben Harper London, UK

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