“More recently, a lot of what I’m really interested in is: how can music help us engage with time in different ways? Help us perceive these non-human timescales, on which a lot of things happen that it would be a great benefit for us to understand better.”
Ben Richter
Ben Richter is a Massachusetts-based composer, accordionist, and artistic director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Ben’s compositions orient toward new orders of magnitude to auralise timescales we do not experience in everyday life, employing just intonation, gradual fluctuations in timbre, and the liminal space of near-unison pitch relationships. Ben’s work has been commissioned and performed by loadbang, House On Fire Trio, Hudebni Soucasnost, Nieuw Ensemble, and many others. Ben has released several albums as a solo accordionist, including Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean (2017), and with Ghost Ensemble, whose debut LP We Who Walk Again was selected as one of Bandcamp Daily’s “10 Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2018”. A student of Pauline Oliveros and active Deep Listening teacher and researcher, Ben studied at Bard College, Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and CalArts, and currently serves as music/sound curator of UMass-Amherst’s Futuring Lab.
Ben Richter’s large ensemble work ‘Holocene Keen’ was premiered at the Composers Conference at Avaloch Farm, New Hampshire, in July 2023. Whilst at the Conference, we sat down to talk about Ben’s most recent album Aurogeny (released in December 2023), time dilation, altered states of consciousness, pitch relationships, and more…
Zyggy/PRLUDES: Hi Ben! Hope you’ve been keeping well. Much of your compositional work revolves around your practice as an accordionist — tell me how you first got introduced to the instrument?
Ben Richter: In high school, I had a folk punk band. I played acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, stuff like that. My friend had an accordion in her attic, so I picked it up and tried it. And it was one of the best feelings ever, to hold this instrument and play it, and feel it vibrate. I loved it immediately; and sooner or later, I went and got one — a modest one. I played that until long after I was taking it seriously enough to get a giant, heavy one.
What was it about the feeling of the accordion that drew you to it?
You hold it on your chest, and you breathe with it, and it vibrates you. It’s very intimate. My first instruments were piano and guitar, but I was always curiously fascinated about accordion, and cello. In fact, the cello is one of the closest other instruments I can think of in terms of why I love the accordion so much, because of the way you hold it, the way you vibrate with it and feel it. It’s the feeling — the feeling of communing with this animal — it breathes, it shivers. It’s very visceral, it’s very total, you know? If I’m improvising on the accordion, all of my consciousness goes through it. It’ll keep you on the edge, because there are so many things that can happen at the same time.
How did your compositional practice develop — was the accordion the predominant influence, or were there external factors that led you to composition?
It’s hard to answer. Because I was composing before I played the accordion — including on the more “concert” side, as well as the punk bands. But the accordion definitely affected it a lot. I think a lot about phrasing based on the way the accordion breathes. The range is very fun to play with; I like to think a lot about registers, and how wide the register scope is at any given point in a piece. Playing with that as a parameter — usually getting wider and wider (sometimes narrower). And also, verticality in terms of harmony; the way that the accordion can sustain and hold harmonies. How delightful it is to sit and listen to a shimmering harmony on the accordion. [It’s] made me think about it way differently than I would have on the guitar, or on the piano.
You mentioned the idea of breath — in a lot of your compositions, there’s an emphasis on duration, time dilation, and kind of drawn-out, breath-like phenomena. How did these ideas first evolve, and how have ideas of durationality developed within your work?
It’s interesting. It’s kind of like a confluence of things I happen to enjoy listening to, and ideas that I find really interesting. It’s where the Venn diagram of those two things happen to meet. -laughs- I got really interested in time distortion, which is a phenomenon of altered states of consciousness — trance, meditation, hypnosis — how that can affect the experience of music. This is maybe fifteen years ago, now; I was thinking about the feeling that music can be healing, and how that is possible. I wrote my Masters thesis [in The Hague] on music and psychotherapy — techniques that can resonate in both fields — and I was thinking about time distortion, and time perception, as a way to orient towards states of consciousness that can stimulate new neural growth, and new neural patterning.
For me, the bottom line with this topic is that it leads to music that I find rewarding. But there are a lot of ideas that I was excited about — [of] how the neurogenesis elicited by musical experience, and particular musical techniques, can affect personality, and political attitudes. What’s clear is that music is a temporal thing, and that can affect how we experience time, and relate to time, in really interesting ways. I’m fascinated by that. More recently, a lot of what I’m interested in is: how can music help us engage with time in different ways? Help us perceive these non-human timescales, on which a lot of things happen that it would be a great benefit for us to understand better.
Exactly — creating ways to understand these unintuitive timeframes, on a human level.
Yeah. Or help it feel a little more visceral, or intuitive. For me, I can learn the facts of something, but it’s not until you really feel it that you actually perceive what’s happening in a fundamental way. Art, of all kinds, can really make that [connection] for me.
We recently heard the premiere of your large ensemble work ‘Holocene Keen’ here at Avaloch Farm. How did the material of the piece play with ideas of time dilation and consciousness?
A lot of the material [of] that piece is working with really small pitch differences. Zooming in on the threshold of when we perceive something as an “interval”, versus when we perceive it as a rhythmic beating. If you slide two pitches closer and closer together… When you get much smaller than a quarter-tone, you’ll essentially start hearing one pitch, that’s shimmering with this beating sound — before they reach a true unison. This is actually very influenced by the accordion; the “classic” sound of the accordion is a set of two different reeds, tuned close to a unison but with a set amount of beats per second, to create the traditional accordion’s distinctive shimmering sound. One really interesting thing to do with the accordion is to play with that tiny gap — stretch it down to a unison, or any other direction, with pitch bending techniques. In this piece, with the larger ensemble, I’m playing with this zone of very narrow intervals as well — I see it as a different order of magnitude of the pitch parameter. We don’t hear it as melody or harmony, but almost as rhythm.
‘Holocene Keen’ also utilises a singer — what relation did your treatment of the voice have to the material?
The voice part is less directly related to that idea of timescales. It’s moving through the fricatives — from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth, voiceless; and then from the back of the mouth to the front of the mouth, voiced — and then the vowels, which are voiced with [her] mouth open. And the part concludes with a mirror image of the fricatives, so it’s a palindrome phonemically, with a gradual upward slide in pitch. I really thought of that as one long arc: the parameter is least voiced, [to] most voiced, moving along the physical shape of the mouth in terms of where that sound is being produced.
That’s something I’ve been interested for a while in doing with a singer like Sharon Harms, who can really pull it off. It also means I didn’t have to bother with a text. -laughs- Text can feel like enormous pressure, because you have to get it right in terms of engaging with the meaning. I had the idea for this ensemble piece already [before composing it], and there wasn’t a text that would make “sense” — especially in the sense of wanting to listen in a non-normative, non-human way. To have a text for the voice part didn’t seem right.
Yeah, exactly — and especially if you’re collaborating with a librettist on the text. There’s like a responsibility to do the text justice, and vice versa…
Which is funny, because now that this piece is done, I’m working on two other pieces that do have texts! One is [my] opera ‘Tides of the Wolf’, which is quite far along — and the other is [a] piece for loadbang. I’m working with the opera differently from how I [usually] work with text, because I have a 36-page libretto to work with. I can’t really waste time doing a long ululation on one vowel when I’ve got 36 pages to cover… -laughs- There, I’m thinking about the narrative and characters in a much more situational way — and the music happens around that.
Whereas in ‘Holocene Keen’, the piece was not built around the voice part. This idea was more of the opposite — the voice part was more a symbol for human fragility, basically. It emerged in this very sculptural way, but it did not control the piece by any means.
What’s your relationship to durationality within your compositional process?
I always find this word, durational, curious. I think it relates to how people work with time, [more] than it does to the actual duration of the pieces. There’s plenty of classical music that’s much longer than 25 minutes [the duration of Holocene Keen]. But it’s the rate of change of certain parameters that is different, right? People use that word all the time, of course — sometimes they mean something that’s four hours long, but a lot of the time, they just mean something that has a gradual process, or slow rates of change.
I understand that — there’s a kind of dichotomy between “duration” as the length of the piece, and duration as we experience it…
Exactly — clock time versus experiential time. In terms of modeling vast timescales like the geologic, which I’m especially interested in, we can only work with these things by metaphor. You know that Cage organ piece [‘ORGAN2/ASLSP’] that they have installed in Halberstadt for like, 650 years? In every however-many years — when there’s a new note — there’ll be a huge event [where] they change one of the pitches. It’s a nice gig if you can get it. -laughs- I love that piece, but it’s literally a piece you cannot experience in your lifetime. In my own music, I’m interested in how we can work with these topics through musical metaphors.
Tell me how you’ve utilised these ideas of musical metaphor to convey that kind of durational experience — was there a piece or album where that first manifested for you?
There were some earlier time distortion-inspired pieces in 2011-13, but ‘Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean’ was the first piece where I was really thinking about how we can model geologic time. It’s a piece I had in the back of my mind for ages — for years and years before I finally did it. I had the title in my mind, the general programmatic theme of the title; and I had the idea that it would be a slowly-unfolding, 45-minute-plus accordion piece.
In terms of the actual material: I knew, from playing the accordion, that so many things happen automatically that are interesting, all the time. The incidental phenomena of the instrument, even if you supposedly do something very slowly. Especially when there are five [accordion] parts. Each one slowly moves at a different rate from breath [to] pitch, to pitch and breath at the same time — and slowly changes in pitch and timbre, and so forth. There are so many accidental things that happen, which aren’t individually intentional; but are certainly emergent from the actions that are happening. They help it stay consistently changing, in some way.
That was the first time I was thinking of this sort of metaphoric, different order of magnitude in timescale. Even if in theory, you’re zooming in to the point where it seems like things, on one level, are staying the same — you find yourself at another level at which all these other, newly perceptible things are changing, constantly. It’s like you can see the little cells moving around in the bloodstream. That’s what it feels like to think about continental drift, which was a conceptual part of that piece — that and the oceanic [theme]. A bunch of accordions playing together always sounded like a big body of water to me. -laughs-
The metaphorical aspect of ‘Panthalassa’ is something you conceptualised and realised yourself. Contrasting that with a piece like ‘Wind People’, that you wrote for your ensemble Ghost Ensemble — was this element something you conceptualised with/alongside the ensemble?
With ‘Wind People’, it was less direct. That piece is from 2016; it came together right before ‘Panthalassa’ finally came together when I finished and recorded it in January 2017. ‘Panthalassa’ was conceived earlier, but I finished writing it and recorded it right after ‘Wind People’ premiered in December 2016. A couple of things happened. In November 2016, Trump won the election, and then two weeks later, Pauline Oliveros died. I also had a rough month for other personal reasons… You get shocked by a series of terrible things happening to the point where you‘re reminded to get moving and do the stuff you intended to do in life.
‘Wind People’ started as a short story, which I haven’t shared and don’t plan to. Secretly, I write stories sometimes… -laughs- In December of 2015, I was in Cameroon; I was in the country for a month for a friend’s wedding and went hiking to climb Mt. Cameroon — which is an enormous volcano surrounded by flat land — it feels [like] you’re on the moon on top. [I was] staying, on the way back down, in a little hut with sheet metal walls. That’s where we spent the night; the wind was absolutely howling all night, very powerfully. Although I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, that was such a striking and powerful sound experience — knowing that’s the sound of what it’s like to be in this place. And so, instead of sleeping, I wrote this story, which eventually inspired the piece.
I can imagine that’s both a harrowing and inspiring experience; how did that inform the material of the piece?
Basically, the focus of the climax of the piece is: the two halves of the ensemble are 20 cents apart. It’s zooming in on the threshold between where we’ll hear a difference between two pitches — how close can two pitches be, and we still hear them as two distinct pitches? The uncanniness of that threshold is really cool to experience. It slowly goes back and forth: twenty cents sharper, twenty cents flatter again.
The other organising element is the neural entrainment of the bass drum part. [It] starts almost to that pitch-rhythm threshold — 17 beats per second — which Chris Nappi can actually do, thank you, Chris… -laughs- That gets slower and slower over the course of the piece, until it’s down to half of a beat per second — and that maps on to the brainwave frequencies of high-alpha to low-alpha to theta and delta. The entrainment idea interested me in terms of time distortion and altered states of consciousness.
It’s interesting to think about how you can portray these within the music itself — both because music works with time, and because we have our own subjective experiences of how time flows…
Because time doesn’t necessarily flow. We made it up to try and explain all these things. I’m really interested in the science, the quantum physics theories of time. I have no actual experience in the field, I just think it’s so interesting.
One thing I always try to do is question the frameworks that we get stuck thinking in. Among those: time exists, it stays the same, it’s set, and things move along… click, click, click. There’s no real reason to think of things that way. Except that it helps things work; when I’m driving a car, I do want to go the correct speed to not smash into the other cars… -laughs- But clock time, versus experiential time, is [different]. At the quantum levels, this clock time stuff stops making sense, as far as I hear.
It almost exposes the constructed nature of it, right?
Well, it exposes the humility of how much we actually have no idea [of]. I like to envision new [methods] of understanding the world around us.
Alongside these large-scale pieces you’ve composed, you’ve also recently released your solo double album, Aurogeny…
Yeah! On Infrequent Seams. It’s a double album; the first CD is accordion works — solo and multitrack accordion works — and the second includes a collaboration with the KOAN Quartet, who did a fantastic job with my string quartet ‘Aurogeny’ — which is the title track — and some tracks with electric guitar, drum set, piano, winds, accordion, [and] haegeum, from the CalArts crew. We recorded [the record] remotely during the height of the pandemic in 2020.
This record in particular has quite a metal feel to it; what was the process of combining metal instrumentation with the accordion?
The accordion is not even at the forefront in those pieces, I would say. I have a few black metal albums from quite a long time ago now — which do incorporate the accordion a little bit — but it’s mostly guitars, drums, and ambient electronic sounds. I’ve been in love with the sustained sound of a crunchy, electric guitar since I was 11 years old — when I got my first guitar — long before I played the accordion. There’s so much you can do with that in combination with these other instruments. What was so refreshing about these tracks was letting the heavy music that I love combine with some of the attitudes and collaborators from [the] quiet chamber music that I love. There’s no reason why the twain shan’t meet.
Is this record the first time you’ve brought both of these elements together?
I certainly haven’t done much of it, and I’d love to do more. This sort of Ghost [Ensemble] approach — a slow exploration of what’s possible, turning [an exploration] into a fully formed piece. I think early on, I had a distaste for this kind of combination, because I had seen a lot of inauthentic-feeling classical music with a wailing electric guitar on top of it — which is the opposite of what’s interesting to me. What’s interesting is a totally new sound emerging from what’s most compelling about both of these forms.
It needs the right approach. The pandemic, in a way, necessitated recording separately anyway — and that actually makes a lot of sense for this project. One of the difficulties with an electric guitar in a chamber ensemble is the amp hiss the whole time; especially if you want certain kinds of distortion and feedback, the dynamic balance can be really difficult in a room. But because we couldn’t play live anyway, this was exactly the kind of piece to work on.
Was there any particular reason that Aurogeny exists as a double album — do the accordion pieces and the ensemble pieces conceptually fit together?
It really just started as two albums that ended up being ready. I thought that the accordion works would complement the ensemble works in a really interesting way; because they engage with a lot of the same topics around order of magnitude thresholds, questions of temporal orientation. There’s a lot of biological, geological inspirations for the works. They connect very much thematically.
A lot of your harmonies — both in this record and in other pieces — centre around microtonality and just intonation. What draws you to this line of compositional thinking? Do you tend to use a theoretical approach?
I like when things sound pretty. -laughs- What on earth else? That and the theoretical interest are tangentially related in that I’m very compelled by deconstructing frameworks that we’ve accidentally built, that have been useful, but we mistake for the way the world works. Like, “this instrument has twelve equally spaced pitches per octave”. Obviously, discovering microtonality was compelling for that reason — it was a realisation that actually, the world is much broader, and more complex and fascinating. There’s so many more possiblities than that framework makes clear.
We [Ghost Ensemble] worked with Catherine Lamb, on [a] piece we premiered this past year. Her system, in this piece, uses a 10Hz fundamental; so every note of the piece is an overtone of a fundamental that’s below the range of human hearing, so that in the range of the treble clef, you’re already talking about 50th, 60th, 70th partials. My highest note in that piece is the 105th partial of 10Hz, or 1,050 Hz. And that lets us explore upper octaves of the series, and the relationships among all of those pitches — without very high partials necessarily having to be super high notes. It’s different from the spectralist way of thinking.
And it sounds really cool. I still keep realising things about the harmonic series, twenty years after acoustics class; you can really hear how these pitch ratios interact. A lot of the time, at home, I’ll just [play with] a sine tone generator [and] put a relationship that occurs to me of a couple pitches that I’m not used to — and let it sit there and drone while I make dinner. Meeting a new combination of pitches is like meeting a new person, or something. Like stars in the night sky. There are infinite intervals out there.
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Ben Richter’s album Aurogeny released in December 2023 on Infrequent Seams – you can stream and buy the record at:
Learn more about Ben and his practice at:
Learn more about Ben’s work with Ghost Ensemble:
References/Links:
- John Cage – Organ2/ASLSP (1987), performed at Perkins School of Theology
- John Cage Organ Project, Universes in Universe
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