Playlist

Live

September 22, 2017

Fantastical Sounds: Music from Tond
Steve Scribner, author, composer
Tond Band: Phillip Arnautoff (sampled), Molly Bauckham Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Carol Levin, Linda Rio, Steve Scribner, and Waterbound (Mimi and Steve Akerman).
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Fyorian:
Prologue (Folk Dance)
Reading from Book One
Excerpt from the Song of Origins
Kitál (dulcimer) improvisation
Táluwaa (Dance-based classical piece)

Karjannic:
Reading from Book Two
Srakah (classical piece)
Reading from Book Three
Tsajkoo Chaebrwakak (Epic Poem with Music)

Sherványa:
Reading from Book Three
The Sherványa Nocturnal Music

As I understand it, this project arose 40 plus years ago as an invented language, followed by (order matters not) an invented culture, an invented continent (Tond), several other invented languages with invented cultures to match, a tale (in three volumes), and, these being humans, musics, and Steve being Steve, a concert of such.

The musics are constructed, it would seem, from a grab-bag of musicological attributes of the sort one might expect musics to possess, culled from here and there: a bit of Japan, a bit of India, a bit of Steve Reich, etc. - Steve (Scribner) being a consummate taxonomist of musics I can't begin to even hint at the range of bits one might find if one took the time to dig.

To me, the idea of inventing a language seems perverse, and that of composing music from general attributes inward equally if not more so, and I find myself, considering what Steve is proposing to do, wondering how it could possibly work, how it could avoid simply being, well, lame. However, it always does work, and it always astounds me just how blisteringly well it does.

We performed with almost no rehearsal, just a quickened run-through that ended moments before the doors opened. The scores are part instruction, part graphic notation, part (minimal) standard notation, and part quasi-musicological stage setting - incomplete: one is never quite certain that a train wreck isn't inevitable. Essentially it boils down to "Here is what I imagine happening. Make it so." As performers we are not so much given agency as we are forced to grasp it for dear life. It just can't work, and yet it does. Every time. It's kind of exciting.

Looked at another way, he is simply inventing possibilities and collecting collaborators. Does it matter whether that is composition or not? Given the enrapturing results, I guess not.

Whatever's next, I'm probably up for it.

Recorded

September 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 616 - Isaac E, John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [September 2001]



inchworm turn by inchworm turn
drum led
the action is in the side-confabulations
patchy and disjointed

September 21, 2017
High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Recorded live in June of 2006 at University Temple United Methodist Church, it projects the varieties of acoustically charged stance within reverb resonance that originally caught my ear and generated the piece in the first place || that caught my ear while reading through Benjamin Boretz's O, listening to that final (0,1) simultaneity ssshhhimmer || that final (0,1) arrived at via cycle of diminishing intervals climbing into the keytops || starting there and flipping the cycle but continuing the climb, hanging higher into the keytops || from each ssshhhimmer higher gazing back downward  briefly into the brachiate undergirdings [spoiler: undergirdings made of those notes below, which contain within them the individuals of the high dyadic simultaneity as acoustic partials]: an ad-hoc etude.

Shaprece

Love Emergency - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain]

The heady imperative of young lust.









Banned Rehearsal 905 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Melody is a structure built in memory, harmony is a structure built from analysis. Music in the wild proliferates dimensions, acting not in but upon our experience of time.

A poly-sentient rattle we pick up now and again and again to shake.
A radio orchestra :: twiddlydials of musical intentions
Shortwave consciousness
Musical thinking as it happens

(as it happens)

Piano plays at either end
Poetry plain as rocks

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 18, 2017

Gradus 321 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Sounding like a chord
is a choice not often made
a prolongation of arpeggiated arpeggiation
a line protracted into the abyss