DEEP LISTENING WORKSHOP with Ben Richter

Come to the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY for a very special workshop for poets, artists, or anyone who might like to listen more deeply. No imstruments or musical experience needed!

The workshop will be led by Ghost Ensemble‘s Ben Richter. It precedes the 7pm Sonic Meditations Ghost Ensemble concert (for tickets for both the concert and workshop together, purchase tickets here).

Deep Listening, the radically inclusive practice developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness, and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth. This workshop is led by longtime Oliveros collaborator Ben Richter, and co-sponsored by the Center for Deep Listening.

[photo by Kyoung Eun Kang]

Ben Richter is an experimental composer, accordionist, and director of Ghost Ensemble. Inspired by nonhuman consciousness, Richter’s compositions orient toward new orders of magnitude in musical parameters to auralize the vast and infinitesimal timescales we do not experience in everyday life, marking humanity’s transient yet vital role within the immensity of geologic time. As the founding Artistic and Executive Director of Ghost Ensemble, Ben also creates innovative new work with a diverse host of experimental performer-composers. The ensemble’s debut LP We Who Walk Again features music by Pauline Oliveros and Sky Macklay alongside Ben’s Wind People, described as “a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite) and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread” (Brian Olewnick). As a solo performer, Ben explores the extended microtonal and timbral potential of the accordion; immersive just-intonation accordion work Panthalassa: Dream Music of the Once and Future Ocean was hailed by Stephen Smoliar as “likely to offer a profound impact on the very nature of listening.” A student of Pauline Oliveros and teacher of Deep Listening, Ben Richter holds a DMA from CalArts and serves as music/sound curator of UMass-Amherst’s Futuring Lab.