An Interview with Ben Grossman Conducted and Transcribed By
1 “Taste is the Great Enemy”: acoustic instrument with roots in the European An Interview with Ben Grossman Middle Ages. Through extended techniques, live-looping, and processing, I’ve seen you use Conducted and Transcribed by Paul Watkins it as a physical interface into improvised sound creation, spontaneous composition, and the PW: I’m here with Ben Grossman. He is a exploration of acoustics, form, and extended musician, composer, and improviser living in aesthetics. I’ve also heard you play a lot of Guelph, Ontario. Having been exposed to a traditional music. What drew you to the hurdy gamut of music from a young age, he spent his gurdy? Happenstance? It’s this really old and youth building homemade synthesizers, effects specialized instrument, and yet you do all sorts and tape loops and playing electric guitar in his of contemporary and innovative stuff with it— parents’ suburban basement and with various or perhaps it has always been an innovative groups in warehouses around Toronto. Through instrument. percussion and his interest in non-equal tuning systems, Ben became involved in the study, BG: Yep, I think it probably always has been. performance, and recording of traditional It’s an instrument that never really completely Turkish, Arabic, Irish, Balkan, and French disappeared, like other instruments have music. In 1997 he studied Turkish music in disappeared, and have been revived. It certainly Istanbul, and since taking up the vielle a roue, has had its ups and downs. In terms of it being aka, the hurdy gurdy, he has done workshops an old instrument, I think in some ways it’s and lessons with some of the most renowned actually a fairly new instrument in the history of artists working in contemporary and creative Western music.
[Show full text]