Orchestration Postdoc Blog (OPDB) #11
Project Blog | Postdoc | Ben Duinker | October 12, 2022
Hello everyone! I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many of you in the ACTOR community already, but to those for whom I’m a new name or face, I’m Ben Duinker, one of the two new ACTOR postdocs (2022–2024). I come to ACTOR from the University of Toronto, where for the past two years I’ve been employed as a SSHRC postdoctoral researcher studying the intersection of analysis and performance in 20th and 21st century music. I’m interested in how the notion of music analysis—as understood by music theorists—can be broadened to encompass the interpretive and creative work of performers, and how the modes of analysis that theorists practice can become sensitized to the music-making process itself. Before U of T, I was right here at McGill, working on a PhD in Music Theory, where my research focused on hip-hop flow—the rhythmized delivery of vocals. This work used music analysis to stimulate broader discussions of perception, Black vernacular traditions, and racial dimensions of genre.
I’ve been a member of ACTOR for just over a year, in which time I’ve been involved in the TiPS (Timbre in Popular Song) project, a subgroup of the Diversity Workgroup. In addition to continuing my work with TiPS, I plan to develop a new hip-hop project at ACTOR, concerning the defining roles of timbre, texture, orchestration, and language in trap music—a genre borne from Southern hip hop that has now pollinated local hip-hop genres worldwide. Specifically, I plan to explore how timbre, orchestration (including sound spatialization), and language mediate locality and globality in trap music. Further to this project, my other research goals at ACTOR include plans to conduct perceptual research on texture and orchestration of chord voicings in choral music, and to investigate how timbre is felt physically by performers in their kinematic engagement with their instrument.
In addition to my research career, I have nearly 20 years of professional experience as a percussionist and choral singer. I am the artistic director of Architek Percussion, a Montreal-based quartet, with whom I frequently record, perform, commission and premiere new works, and tour internationally. Montreal has felt like home to me for a while; I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else now. It’s where my two boisterous sons were born, and it’s where they’re rapidly becoming more bilingual than I am. My partner Jessica is McGill’s Scholarly Communications Liaison Librarian and a former musician herself. It’s great to be back in the McGill community, and what better context is there for that than ACTOR?
I look forward to bringing my experience as a researcher and performer to the ACTOR community and am excited to learn from the great scholars and artists that have worked to build this community. See you around the Schulich School of Music, in the Music Technology Suite, on a Montreal terrasse, at an ACTOR workshop, or on Zoom!
Ben
Photo by: Alex Tran
