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San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (cond. Eric Dudley) Recorded in Herbst Theater 6/12/24 as a recipient of ARTZenter Emerging Composer Grants Program notes: In my experience, people tend to treat composers and artists in general with some kind of distance. "Wow, I don't understand what exactly that was or how you did that" (hopefully followed up with "but I'm glad you did")! The truth is...

Piano 1 - Ben Rieke Piano 2 - Matthew Schultheis Percussion 1 - jc clancy Percussion 2 - Will Hopkins Video shot by Michael Grebla Program notes: “For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must rem...

In a lecture later titled “The Order of Discourse”, Foucault claims that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.” There is discourse in this piece too, as wit...

Technically, this piece is an aggregate of ideas that I have worked through elsewhere-formal iteration, visible process, and an emergent relationship between foreground and background. More foreign to my music, but present here, is a single explicit expressive goal: observing the situation, seeing the outcome unfolding in real time, and being unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Whateve...

Flute: Phoebe Rawn Oboe: Joeseph Jordan Clarinet: Anju Auto Horn: Andrew Arloro Bassoon: Caleb Hutchings Conductor: Tengku Irfan I. Anodyne? - 0:00 II. Anodyne? - 3:00 III. Anodyne? - 7:15 IV. etc and - 9:46 Program notes: What does it mean to “write what you love”? As much as I would like the “success” of my work to be a purely personal measurement-how well my execution matches my intention, p...

Performed by Cameron Chase This piece is notated in such a way that it can be played on violin, viola, cello, or bass (good luck with the last one though!) Program notes: Isn’t the concept of pitch in string music kind of weird? There aren’t any frets! Vocal chords are strings too, but we think of speech as sliding up and down through a frequency spectrum rather than cycling through a collectio...

Performed by Jeffrey Milarsky and the Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall on 3/27/23 as one of the winners of the Juilliard Orchestra Composition Competition Program notes: Orchestral music is particularly vulnerable to market forces: hiring performers, renting a large space, marketing, administration, etc, all necessitate a large flow of income that, at least in America, is largely supplie...

Thanks very much to incredible cellist and new music advocate Jaemin Lee for whom this piece was written. Ford Hall, Jacobs School of Music, Bloomington IN 12/3/22 benrieke.com

Performed by The Rhythm Method at Lake George Music Festival 2022 as part of the Composers' Workshop. For me, strings have a unique circular quality; the oscillatory components of bow movement, finger pressure, the physical curves of the instrument body. Accordingly, Rounds circles through different dimensions of motion, repetition, and simplicity. 2:53 - funny boat horn

Catch this while it's here because the moment I produce better recordings is the moment it becomes unlisted! Program: Timo Andres-Old Ground (0:00) Ben Rieke-Etudes 88 no. 1 (13:05) Knife (14:24) Calamari (16:57) Kick (20:10) 88 no. 2 (23:30) (eloquent speech (27:20)) Elliott Carter-Piano sonata I. (28:17) II. (38:00) Please don't miss the chance to listen to a good recording of the Andres and ...

Bb Clarinet - Noah Pujol Bb Clarinet - Yurong Bao Bass Clarinet - Jake Pierson Contrabass Clarinet - Garrett Nichols Violin - Bryson Karrer Viola - Maeve Whelan Cello - Jaemin Lee Bass - Grant Thomas Keyboard - Ben Rieke Conductor - Andrew Downs melting is a deliberate act of compositional self-sabotage. After becoming hyperaware of my repetitive tendency to structure pieces in a narrative, lin...

Recorded by the IU Concert Orchestra at the New Voices Competition winner's concert, Jacobs School of Music MAC, Nov. 14 2021 Violin soloist - Yeajin Kim The title of this piece is the subtitle of Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian. Described as an "anti-western", the book follows the unnamed "kid" as he joins a band of sadistic bounty hunters on a bloody rampage through early 19th century ...

A power set is the set of all possible subsets of a given set. In this piece, I have a set of three ideas: A. A constant 16th note pulse B. An ascension in pitch C. Gestural/rhythmic unity across the ensemble Power Set starts with a presentation of all of these ideas at the same time. Over the course of the piece, the striking of the woodblocks variously takes away and adds one idea to the set ...

Recorded by JACK quartet as part of New Music on the Point 2021. Program note- Spring is a vague season for me. As is the case with many others, my mood usually improves with the lengthening days and new buds returning to dead branches, but it comes with an existential flavor much more visceral to me than that of autumn. Seeing the life return to the world around me every year does more to erod...

joycon piece 1

Six Sketches for Two Cellos - Ben Rieke

"S Is" for String Quartet - Ben Rieke