Benjamin Louis Mawson:
Composer & Virtual Performance Developer
After a childhood in opera houses and jazz clubs, a youth spent building junk instruments and forming street bands, Ben's musical language is a continually renegotiated balance of encultured and discovered sources: appropriated, assimilated, translated.
Having been a chorister, orchestral violinist and nightclub pianist, he took a Masters degree in Music at City University and worked for a decade as a composer, concert promoter and general factotum until starting a furniture moving business in the belief it would be a good way to support stress-free composing. A seven year ordeal of pianos on staircases, sleeping in the truck and endless foreign motorways came to an end in 2009.
Currently composing for live ensembles and in the digital studio whilst researching live 3-D music projection with Virtual Performance Platforms ("Zones of Intensities"). |
18 May 2012
Invisible Music across the landscape
Demonstration of geo-located composition - a way for the listener to enter into a musical composition like a physical space and investigate its layers unfolding over the duration of the music.
University of Southampton's Creative DigiFest
21-22 April 2012 Première of 
"Dreaming at the Circular Ruins"
Suite for 12 computerised Player Pianos and Marimba performed at the South Bank Centre festival,
"Impossible Brilliance: The Music of Conlon Nancarrow"
4 March 2012, Music Nation Day, opening of London 2012 Cultural Olympiad
Première of new commission, Turner Sims, Southampton.
"Take me by the Hand"
Virtual Choral Setting of Jeffrey Wainwright's poem
After the acousmatic performance, listeners stepped out into the twilight to walk inside the composition like a physical structure, between parts of the music divided in time segments and into individual singers, using a re-engineered version of the music heard on Android phones with escoitar.org's brilliant noTours.
Concert Hall version Geo-located version
An invisible sonic landscape changes according to listener movement, the music spread out like a carpet where listeners navigate overlapping physical zones to take differing, unmarked routes through the music as it develops over time. Each listener hears a unique version of the music, never to be repeated. . .
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29 February 2012, "Composers Group" Concert, Turner Sims Concert Hall,
Department of Music, University of Southampton.
"Memory Games for Piano",
Five short compositions, performed by Macbook / sampled Bösendorfer (I, III, V) and pianist Tom Green (II & IV).
When we listen we remember: extra-musical thoughts, other music once heard, previous moments in the composition you are hearing. When we compose we are discussing, negotiating, bargaining with dead forebears, remembered musics. The process of composing involves holding long stretches of associated ideas in mind at once, remembering, transforming, revolving them to chip and smooth them into shape. As we remember we translate, transform, we refer sideways, we associate opposites and blur reality with dream. These short pieces spring from these ideas and are a continuation of my interest in how fragments of memory are at the centre of the creation of narratives, musical and otherwise.
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Four short convolutions: a soundtrack to solitary dislocation • improvising with a Saxon shepherd • Obama's speech on the capture of Bin Laden reconstructed • whlist he performs, the pianist remembers music - historic and from yesterday, at the piano and on radio - his performance is partly the piece he came to play and partly composed of memories that intersperse it 
android pianist (03.2011) revised March 2012
and a 3-D plunderphonic from sampled medieval and modern sacred chant with piano, harp and string orchestra: an examination in motion of devotional music from many faiths. Listen
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8th December 2011: Hansard Art Gallery, Southampton.
Collaboration with conceptual artist Terry Smith: PARALLAX.
Terry Smith, Caracol, 2011.
Courtesy the artist.
Photograph: Lisa Blackmore
Re-examining the premise for Alvin Lucier's influential "I am sitting in a room" this piece takes the composer's (BLM's) speech and transforms it into asomatous instruments of confusion: words and vocalisations as notes, voices as virtual instruments, the auditorium as playroom, R o o m |
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