The idea of Eddie Van Halen sharing a stage with Dmitri Shostakovich may be enough to ruffle the feathers of any blue-blooded classical music aficionado. Ben Harbert sure hopes so.
Harbert, a UCLA graduate student in the department of ethnomusicology, finds plenty of opportunities to challenge preconceived notions about music. As director of the band Los Angeles Electric 8, he reinvigorates the genre of classical music by reworking classical arrangements to be played by an octet of electric guitars.
“If (audience members) have a real conservative view of what a proper classical ensemble is, I think we shake that. I think we really start the conversation,” Harbert said.
The classical musician discovered the electric guitar’s versatility after he began to develop symptoms similar to those of carpal tunnel syndrome. Following the advice of Professor Peter Yates, Harbert gave his hand a rest by switching out his classical guitar for the electric.
“I (recovered) being able to practice and play this music on the electric guitar and really enjoyed the sound of it,” Harbert said.
“There’s a musicality to the electric guitar that the classical guitar can’t achieve.”
Harbert arranges a variety of pieces originally written for organs, string instruments and Indonesian gamelans, and the band’s repertoire ranges from Felix Mendelssohn to Nathaniel Braddock.
The unconventional combination of the music’s two genres has not succeeded in striking a chord with every audience member.
“We just performed a concert where some people left five minutes into our set,” said fellow bandmate and UCLA classical guitar performance grad student Chelsea Green. “I think they didn’t want to hear Mendelssohn played through a distortion pedal. I think our music might actually offend some people.”
Harbert is no stranger to creating music that offends his listeners. As a founding member of a band entitled OX, Harbert played music specifically aimed at driving people out of concert halls. Common features of the OX set were deconstructed fragments of Journey songs without a beat and metronomes that were not to be followed on stage.
“Some people get together with their old high school friends and go hunting for the weekend. And with OX, it’s a group of people that I like to go hunting with in L.A. Except instead of hunting, we play music that nobody likes,” Harbert said.
The guitarist feels that artists have much to teach each other through musical experimentation and collaboration, which includes more than just getting the notes right
“To me, that’s more fundamental than the sounds of music,” Harbert said.
Harbert’s most recent source of experimentation comes through film. In 2007, he directed a short film, “In a Day’s Time: Songs of the California Men’s Colony,” while researching the topic of music in prison for his doctorate. In film, Harbert has found a new medium for challenging the ways in which people relate to music.
“It’s interesting to me when that insight (into the prison experience) comes through music in a way that you could never get through language. Because I think music allows you to play with ideas and play with feelings and play with an imaginary space that then can comment on or relate to their real everyday prison life,” Harbert said.
Challenging the ways people listen to music can offend, but Harbert’s reexamination of prison life garnered a more sympathetic reaction.
“Ben’s film was very humane, made with compassion for his characters,” UCLA film professor Marina Goldovskaya said.
“Ben’s characters were in a dramatic situation. This, of course, created tension, conflict, and made the film a powerful piece.”
Harbert hopes his film will raze prejudices and help viewers to see the inmates as human.
“I’ve seen so many prison documentaries where they have this low groan of music in the background, and black and white, and they have a close-up of gates slamming and stuff,” Harbert said.
“A lot of times they treat the inmates as another breed of human altogether or an animal or something like that.”
He likewise hopes his music will influence both sides of his musical audiences to give some thought on a topic they would normally dismiss.
Trained by disciples of Andres Segovia, Harbert looks to the guitar’s transformation into a classical instrument for motivation in his own departures from orthodoxy.
“Before Segovia, the guitar was much more a parlor instrument. You could go over to someone’s living room and create something nice on the guitar. But it wasn’t a concert instrument … so Segovia took the guitar and really drew his virtuosic clang and gave it center stage, made it a formidable classical instrument. So he’s inspirational, too, in that the electric guitar, unfortunately, really hasn’t been considered as a classical instrument,” Harbert said.
But the fact that the electric guitar hasn’t achieved classical status may not be an impediment at all when it comes to modern audiences.
“I think it’s harder to get into something with a flugelhorn and a cello. It’s intimidating. But the electric guitar has a familiarity, and I hope that draws people into what they wouldn’t otherwise listen to.”