Bhyxe was written for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Fixed Media and was recorded by the Callithumpian Consort and was awarded the 2010 William T. Faricy Award and a 2011 Other Minds Fellowship. It was performed in Chicago on 2/20/11 and 2/25/11 with the University of Chicago Computer Music Studios and San Francisco on 3/2/11 by the Navitas Ensemble. Click for Press.

Ben Hjertmann is a Chicago-based composer, vocalist, and genre vagabond.  Ben performs with the  avant-folk trio, the Grant Wallace Band.  He is especially interested in writing avant-pop, choral, wind ensemble and chamber music.

Hjertmann’s chamber works have been performed by the Spektral Quartet, Borromeo Quartet, Anubis Quartet, Callithumpian Consort, Other Minds Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and many others.  His work has also been performed by top university wind ensembles including UT-Austin, Louisiana State, Michigan State, Central Michigan, Kansas State, Lawrence, Northwestern, U-Nebraska at Lincoln, and NYU.  His music has been featured at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Clinics, the conference of the College Band Directors National Association, and the South by Southwest NonClassical showcase.

Ben received his Doctor of Music in Composition from Northwestern University in 2013.  His dissertation research focused on microtonal harmonic structures derived from sum & difference tones and his final piece was an album of chamber-metal songs based on a fairy-tale narrative.  Ben teaches composition, music technology, theory, and song writing at Northwestern University, Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, and Flatts & Sharpe Music Company.  Hjertmann has been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Shell Lake Arts Center.

I run on the ceiling underwater in a tie
On a bough below the Eastertide I gaze into my eyes
And I dream of Jesus with the light brown hair
‘Round the mountain with a six-gun and a pale mare

Love is the talk of pinball orphans in a dish of barleywine
Tossing oak-cast tangerines in the back of the supermarket line
And he there in the iris of the green steeple glass
The architect asleep in the tent behind the mass

I curl myself around my mulberry insides
A reflection draped over the box on the wall
Dusty muffins and bleach

Unraveled limbs on the sidewalks
Where the elders painted lions
And the dust smoke made to dance

I read the glass cracks in your café-au-lait
And the rain, would it leak from them, and smiled
Just a place to hang my shadow just a leaning stack of limbs

O, that death would come from Alabama on a weary bleachéd steed
Have an orange, an elephant fruit as a fly of bottle green
And he there in the light brown tide of the mulberry wine
Pale and asleep in the muffin batter rime

But you were my Shrovetide my one and only Shrovetide
My boughs of barley, my sighs of beige
Dust smoke through the steeple pipes were calling
Home was the talk of insects and orphans

Just a place to hang reflections
Just a cask of masked intentions
Just a box of bleach a tent of limbs

I’m in the pipes, the pipes there crawling

In the darkness, I can hear everything
Cries of a wounded world bleeding in silence
Spirit of an ancient fire calls me to sing

In darkness, in shadows white and blue
I can hear laughing
In spider webs, I’m caught in,
I’m wrapped in dreams of spirits past

In the darkness, I can see everything
Scars of the wounded world
I can hear, cries of death, in the fires
Of convenience

In darkness, the last song of the old world dying
Dying in the fires of apathy

Be fruitful, find something to own
As our fathers are left to the dogs
In the fires
And the weasels spraying noise on the radio
And yet, not a song left for the dying
But for the lazy ones, and the conquest of comfort
Laughing and
Cries of the ancestors
I can hear the cries of a wounded world in the darkness
I can hear everything