Lawrence Ball

Infobox Musical artist
Name = Lawrence Ball


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Background = non_performing_personnel
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Instrument = Electronica, piano
Genre = New Age, experimental, classical
Occupation = Composer, musician
Label = Various
URL = [http://www.lawrenceball.org/ www.lawrenceball.org]
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Lawrence Ball is an English musician and composer who currently lives in North London. For over thirty years he has pursued the creation of composed and improvised music, from a meditative base, or a mathematical one, or both together. He also produces multi-media compositions, and works as a private tutor in mathematics, music theory and physics.

Musical career

Lawrence Ball has proved to be a versatile and innovative composer who has collaborated with healers, therapists and counselors as well as writing for dance, film, popular music, orchestra and choir. His work is tonal, contemporary, related to minimalist and often considered New Age. His compositions often use the technique of looping and repetition pioneered in the musical innovations of Terry Riley and LaMonte Young.

Building on the work of film animator John Whitney and working with quantum physicist Michael Tusch, Ball developed radical techniques ("harmonic mathematics") to generate timbres, melodies, counterpoint and moving/changing 3D visual forms and colours, and also to integrate visual imagery with music. He collaborated with Dave Snowdon, who created the software "Visual Harmony", to explore and further evolve the visual side of harmonic mathematics.

Ball has recorded well over 2000 piano improvisations, as well as performed live in Canada, the U.S.A., France, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, Switzerland and the U.K. He has accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena, and has performed marathon improvisations with them at John Calder's La Fonderie in Paris and The Blackie in Liverpool, as well as a Planet Tree Festival appearance. He performs with Sri Lankan master singer Manickam Yogeswaran and Californian sarod player Lisa Sangita Moskow in improvised music on Indian raga scales.

Ball has worked with healer Isobel McGilvray in composing harmonic tonescapes to aid relaxation and insomnia, and has worked with choreographers Sheila Styles and Rebecca Ham on several dance projects. Ball has composed for pianists Yonty Solomon, Mark Swartzentruber and Tim Ravenscroft, violist Robin Ireland, The Smith Quartet, the Electric Symphony Orchestra and female vocal quartet Rosy Voices. His scores so far total 144 works in manuscript form. He also composed music for the film "The Eye Of The Heart", a biography of the artist Cecil Collins. Other collaborations include work with Emily Burridge.

In 1996 Ball founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which he continues to direct, being particularly supportive of the composers Alan Hovhaness, Kaikhosru Sorabji and Jean Catoire.

In 2006 Ball worked with composer and songwriter Pete Townshend on recordings for The Who's album "Endless Wire." From 2004 to 2007 Ball also collaborated with Townshend and Dave Snowdon to set up a project called the "The Lifehouse Method", an Internet site where applicants can sit for an electronic musical portrait made up from data they enter into the website. The website musical team expects to choose some of these portraits for further development into larger compositions or songs that will be presented in a concert or concert series.

On 23 April 2007, Ball released a double album on iTunes called "Method Music - Imaginary Sitters, Imaginary Galaxies" which is part of Pete Townshend's Lifehouse Method music project.

Influences

Composers that Ball lists as influences include: Erik Satie, Terry Riley, Alan Hovhaness, Arvo Part and LaMonte Young.

Harmonic mathematics

Ball has an interest in algorithmically generated sound, music and visuals. Lawrence Ball, with the help initially of Michael Tusch and James Larsson, was inspired by John Whitney's pre-computer and computer generated films to begin work on a branch of mathematics called "harmonic mathematics" in 1984. This branch of mathematics was developed on the foundation of Whitney's "differential dynamics" and has also been applied to graphic 3D visuals, sound timbres and melodic loops which evolved from the later 1980s.

Such compositions are deterministic, all based on the weaving of very precise patterns, similar to fractal and chaos sequences, but unlike fractals structured into time. The technique deals with arrays of variables, each variable going through cycles of values at harmonically related speeds.

With this input, Dave Snowdon developed a computer program in 1995 called "Visual Harmony" which extends this work into the computer graphics area. This has and is being used as a live performance tool at musical events.

In the 1980s Ball developed a series of harmonic-math generated "timbral transforms" tones which produced compositions co-authored with healer Isobel McGilvray, and marketed as "ShapeTapes".

Many of Ball's scores (from 1984 on) feature harmonic maths processes that he created by hand (i.e. without computer programmes). The Method software uses harmonic maths exclusively in its generation

A technical explanation of "harmonic maths" and their use in music composition is available on Ball's website.

External links

* [http://www.lawrenceball.org/ Lawrence Ball Official Website]
* [http://www.visualharmony.org/ Visual Harmony Website]
* [http://www.lifehouse-method.com/index.html;jsessionid=720235506319D2CDE2047C9017AAEDC6/ Lifehouse Method Website]
* [http://www.planettree.org/ Planet Tree Music Festival]
* [http://www.myspace.com/lifehousemethod Lifehouse Method MySpace page]
* [http://www.myspace.com/lawrenceballmusic Lawrence Ball MySpace page]