In 3/2
Recorded in 2005 at American University by Anne Ament (bass clarinet), Teri Lazar (violin), Nancy Jo Snider ('cello).
Also performed at the Edge Festival in Berkeley, CA, and Copland House Concert in Venice, Italy.
Tempo Modulation
8th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 2004
Tempo (aka metric) modulations follow a simple pivotal premise, providing an efficient way to achieve rhythmic complexity without imposing a high degree of performance difficulty. This paper formulates a general theory that integrates music-theoretic issues within a cognitive framework.
Download the PDF file.
Fernando Benadon
bio | music | papers
* news *
awarded a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship
new cd release on innova recordings
Etude
Fernando Benadon, alto sax
Berkeley New Music Project, Spring 2000
An Interview with Martin Matalon
Computer Music Journal 29/2, 2005
One of France's leading composers shares his views on technology, film scoring, and musical aesthetics.
Identification of Jazz Saxophonists
European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 2003
An experiment is presented to support the hypothesis that well known jazz saxophonists can be recognized by their sound alone (i.e., without any calligraphic information).
Download the PDF file here.
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Quamer
Brooklyn International Film Festival (2007), directed by Preeya Nair.
Other screenings: San Diego International Children’s Film Festival, International Women’s Film Festival of Barcelona, Connecticut Film Festival, Lucas International Children’s Film Festival of
Frankfurt, ...
Fernando Benadon (b. 1972) is a composer and theorist who thrives on the exploration and integration of diverse paths. The New York Times has praised his music as "engagingly forward," "a perfect curtainraiser" of "ear-grabbing invention."
He is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Tanglewood's Fromm Commission, Copland House's Aaron Copland Award, UC-Berkeley's Ladd Prize (two years in Paris), the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Jaap Kunst prize for the most significant publication of the year, a film score premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and fellowships from Tanglewood, Aspen, the MacDowell Colony, Fondation Royaumont, and the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory.
A native of Buenos Aires, he studied jazz at Berklee (BM) and composition at UC-Berkeley (PhD). He is an assistant professor of music at American University.
Meet Café
New York New Music Ensemble, conducted by James Miller.
Also performed by: Aspen Con- temporary Ensemble, Continuum Contemporary Music (Toronto), Tanglewood Music Center, Con- tinuum Ensemble (NY), Berkeley New Music Project, Towson University New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Green (Los Angeles).
Winner: League of Composers/ ISCM 2005 composition competition.
Time Warps
Music Theory Spectrum 31/1, 2009
Complex rhythms in 1920s jazz are analyzed as temporal transformations of metric templates. Includes analyses of excerpts by Louis Armstrong, Bubber Miley, Coleman Hawkins, and other early jazz greats.
How Hooker Found His Boogie
Popular Music 28/1, 2009
Co-authored with jazz historian Ted Gioia, this article draws on psychoacoustic to uncover some of the sectrets behind John Lee Hooker's hypnotic boogie.
Búgi Wúgi
recorded by Ivan Ilic at American University.
Also performed at the Phillips Collection (DC), the National Concert Hall (Dublin, Ireland), M.I.T.'s Killian Hall, Florida State New Music Festvial, and more.
Quicksand
Wellesley Composers Conference Orchestra, conducted by Efrain Guigi.
Winner, Nicola DeLorenzo Prize, UC-Berkeley
Gridless Beats
Perspectives of New Music 47/1, 2009
Jazz performers shape their rhythms using intricate temporal nuances derived from spontaneous invention rather than music notation. This paper shows how some "jazz rubatos" can be simulated using standard music notation.
In 3
Tanglewood Music Center Fellows, conducted by Ilan Volkov, 2001 Festival of Contemporary Music.
"Engagingly forward" - Paul Griffiths, The New York Times
5 Miniatures
Thelema Trio (2005): Marco Mazzini (bass clarinet), Peter Verdonck (baritone saxophone), Ward De Vleeschhouwer (piano).
Venues: Society of Composers National Conference, Rode Pomp (Gent, Belgium), Western Oregon University, Contemporary Music Festival of Lima (Peru).
Arimpara
Cannes Film Festival (2003), directed by Murali Nair.
Other screenings: Seattle, Melbourne, Dublin, Edinburgh, Vancouver, Pusan, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Bangkok, Festival of 3 Continents (France), Film by the Sea (Holland), Commonwealth Film Festival (UK), NHK Asian Film Festival (Japan), Film fra Sør (Norway), Festival Inter- nacional de Cine Contem- poráneo de la Ciudad de México, Los Angeles Visual Communications Festival, ...
Speech Rhythms
Conference on Mathematics & Computation in Music, 2009
This work extends phonological research on speech rhythms into the realm of music theory.
Slicing the Beat
Ethnomusicology 50/1, 2006
This paper examines the expressive connections between melody and microrhythm in jazz, using a digital sound editor to analyze long-short ("swing") eighth-note ratios in solos by soloists such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
A Circular Plot
Music Theory Online 13/3, 2007
A graphing method designed to aid the study of rhythm and expressive timing in beat-based music. The circular plot can be used to re-interpret complex rhythms, partition tempo curves, and summarize rhythmic profiles by making beat subdivision details apparent to the naked eye.
Link to the article.
intuitivo is a collage of free improvisations.
I recorded seven amazing players improvising freely and separately. They received no guidelines, and they did not know what the other players would record or had recorded. Then I trimmed and juxtaposed the improvisations to create an imaginary synchronized performance.
I was aiming for a natural sound, so I used only basic edits: cuts and time displacements. The edits range in size from single notes to multiple minutes—in fact, one fascinating aspect of this project was discovering how extended segments of supposedly unrelated music by different improvisers can fall into place with complete naturalness.
— Fernando Benadon
more compositions here
Crater
June in Buffalo Chamber Orchestra (1999), conducted by Efrain Guigi.
5 Riddles
Les Jeunes Solistes (2002) at Voix Nouvelles, Fondation Royaumont.