Playlist

Preface

"Imagine, I say to myself, that each time you listen to music, you are hearing it as if it is being
composed, invented, impromptu, for you, each time you listen. Clearopen your mind and ears and listen to what you hear as if you've never heard anything quite like it before. You are the traveler who does not prepare for an approaching journey by reading every book on places to be visited or sights to be seen, the traveler who awaits what there is to be discovered and who might not mind getting lost once in a while -- not the traveler for whom descriptions and reproductions and photographs become, or subsequently remain, the reality.

And here I am reminded of a quip I came across last year: A grandmother is wheeling her grandchild in a carriage. A stranger stops, looks in, and exclaims, 'What a beautiful child!', to which the grandmother replies, 'Yes, but you should see his photograph!'"

Elaine Barkin "In Your Own Verse: a.k.a. 'An Alice is Lost'" from "e : an anthology"

Texts

Recorded

August 24, 2019
So Sad About Us - The Who [from A Quick One]

love the luh luh luh luh luh luh luh bridge

Donnerstag aus Licht Act I - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Rundfunkorchester Hilversum, Peter Eotvos, Robert Gambill, Michael Angel, Paul Sperry, Markus Stockhausen, Annette Meriweather, Suzanne Stephens, Elizabeth Clarke, Matthias Holle, Mark Tezak, Alain Louafi, Majella Stockhausen, Michel Arrignon, Hugo Read, Simon Stockhausen, Chor des Westdeutschen Rundfunks Kolne

They sing past each other.

All those resources harnessed, disciplined, brought to bear, and in the end it seems, largely, to be an exercise in exactly that: resource accumulation, hoggery.

not particularly anything ever at any moment nor in any part

dead pan plastering of the infantile upon the impenetrable

opacity upon opacity exhaustively exhausting of any energy

nothing feeds back
nothing touches

one way communique
out

August 25, 2019
Assembly Rechoired 6 - Karen (Meyer) Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [August 1986]


Historical Note: This is probably the last half house session ever.

trademark bell clang then du then the music box given to me by the jerk of a landlord when I was living in the barn in Red Hook drummer dog cymbal ape entertainer given (music box) by Tina at work choo choo train

That sound is probably the rock played by the bone.

the rock gong the bone I found as a kid in Freeland on Holmes Harbor the pickeldu the chinese oboe my mom gave me for Christmas one year (now the "Obo Roi") the bug guitar (garage/yard sale, Freeland) the alligator that lives in the bathroom given to me be Alison W on my birthday conch shell given to me by my parents african horn given by parents for Christmas 1985 3 little bells (junkshop in Kingston, New York) with trademark bell for $20 shopping with Charles Stein bamboo flute my brother gave me bass ocarina that Karen once played for an entire session the whistle bought the same day I bought the guiro AND the funmaker 5 string guitar the funmaker or a march in d minor the swing real slow.

It can do lots.

but we have limited time harmonica (my brother) train whistle (parents)  boatswain whistle Karen's uke the one with the notes on the front so you know how it's tuned the recorders (my brideprice, inventory of) claves (Nogales, my mom's) bell (little brother)

This bell has the white house and the capital building souvenir stand outside of the commerce building in Washington DC toy piano (Jaymar (now destroyed)) the one string indian ukulele gourd rattle (Nogales) drum rattle on a stick given to me by Pam from San Francisco guiro sacrificed to the loft

the clavichord the right maraca and the left maraca bunch of beaters and it in turn is playing the guitar should we play the march? el march, el Aaronsbundler

Even Flow - Pearl Jam [from Rearviewmirror]

the sound you get when you dive right in fuck it all rimshot backbeat

Rex Tremendae - Hector Berlioz - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

remember :: first tenor :: high C

Shaw is getting some interesting theatrical tempo effects, and now I am interested in what he was thinking for the whole Requiem. He plays every event as an interruption, which is actually a pretty amazing moment by moment elucidation of what he was digging about this piece.

August 26, 2019
Gradus 106 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [October 2006]

still back in the 30 minute session mode
completion of the first 6 A naturals
yet another riff on the stretches where nothing happens but waiting  for the stretch where nothing happens to be done, and dogma.

vis-a-vis 4'33", i.e., the sounds that are out there in ambienceland are part of the music

well, possibly. but what if I deny it?
as in, why insist on that way to take it?
what if those sounds out there in the ambience just don't cut it for me? as music? fall flat?
frankly, what I find more interesting is the development of pitch composition within these limited sets of notes, intentionally maximizing potentials
the very antipode of emptiness

August 27, 2019
Tumbi Medley - Balvinder Mast [from Bollygood vol. 1]

a stringed instrument plucked and light percussion with some fluid roll to it
too bad it's stuck in pop four four

Focus - St. Rage [at the Common Good Cafe August 2016]

and now
Barbara's back!

Sonata in A Major, K. 39 - Antonio Scarlatti - Pieter Jan Belder

clown act

balance pole

structural ornamentation

Symphony in D minor (#3) - Gustav Mahler - London Symhony Orchestra, Georg Solti

the deeper harrumph
bottoms out

I'm so dired

operatic songform overladen with dramatic context

the chorus of
interrupted by the chorus of
upted by the
up

stretto interrupto
now he has gone and got it great with soliloquy

without a stage, this music is incomprehensible

songs in the between story
ghosts everywhere

The pleasure of Mahler, if such could ever be a pleasure, is following the twists and turns of chromatic implications within the part work

his swift changes of focus, near to far, though, never quite manage the swiftness of CPE Bach's cognitive re-groupings, it is far too elephantine to thread those mercurial needles

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 30, 2019
Aus Meine Herzen's Grunde - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey

Several years ago I embarked on a large group of works for piano, not completed yet, far from it, under the common title Études d'exécution imminent. The 12th item in the group, composed in 2017, is a set of 12 settings of chorale tunes chosen from the justly famous Bach-Riemenschneider harmonized and figured chorales. Simply put, I have used the chorale tune as a cantus firmus from which to hang pitches derived by an ad hoc cycling through of a matrix of mod-17 ordered interval classes, highlighting the strangeness of the relation between sets of interval classes and their respective inversions. This is the first of those 12.

Grant us sleep - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

August 31, 2019
Our food our lives - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

Before we got married I asked Karen to write two prayers for our future family life, one for bedtime and one for mealtime. She did. I then set them so that they could be sung and presented the scores to her as my wedding gift. The score of the bedtime grace hangs in our bedroom, and that of the mealtime grace hangs near the table. We have been singing them daily now for nearly 33 years, but had never recorded them, so now I did.

Postscripts

limited is measurement for some p such
may be independent p as e.g.
interval similitude subsets as

sliding through the splash

a striking music

of such murders

Playlist

Live

August 17, 2019
Thollem/Boschnack/Denio Trio

Thollem McDonas, Samantha Bischnack, Amy Denio
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle


simultaneous layered narratives

in a more natural way than film, for instance, can achieve by doubling the image over itself
more like split-screen
but the split is within the hearing ear

Thollem (on piano) uses the single note trill a lot
a go to performance practice
like Scriabin

one from among them suggests or ignites
the others conjoin in invention of the suggestion
which activity has both a different aim and a different result than Banned Rehearsal's active reluctance to take a lead or allow one

quick reps of finger, tongue, and embrace

has also come to peace with its adeptness and that of its participants

gestures form a path through pitch

repetition of tunes across instruments doesn't really make it more coherent
rather, it demonstrates that the layers across which repetitions are passed are distinct, which pressures against any pulling toward unified integrity.

Liszt tricks

Amy shares
balloon

[NB: a lovely evening guys! we had a superbulous time!]

Recorded

August 17, 2019
The Honeymoon is Over - Harvey Schmidt - Mary Martin, Robert Preston [from I Do! I Do!]

Something is bubbling back there in the orchestra, boiling water sounds perhaps? They play domestic friction for
show biz spectacle.

Caribbean Wind - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

A background sound in one segment is
"ssshhhh (pause) hhhhse"
whispering in, whispering out

careful handling of the ends of lines, the ends of stanzas
what lingers on when the thought pivots around

Nowell-Dieus vous garde - The Boston Camerata [from A Renaissance Christmas]

The means of written music's elaboration, at that time, was just being invented, and was limited by the features of that notation system. This overcompensates for the paucity of its means by the sheer wonder of its fancy.

Trophy - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]

"M----- F-----" and the other profanities serve partly as rhythmic filler, a fall back stance within a sophisticated rhythm speech.

August 18, 2019

O magnum mysterium - Tomás Luis de Victoria - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

as architecture
this composition is designed to waft sound explorator sounds into it
into architecture (the space formed by brick&mortar or stone&wood)

this music is composed
to inhabit the space
with us

|||| an aside ||||
a possible issue with electronic music arises here:

:: It can be, if it allows itself to be, designed with a null space in mind.
but can it be heard if the space of its hearing is null, or is that another take on Ben's an-echoic chamber?

And I stood . . . soul to soul - Bob Dylan [live at Key Arena October 2006]

song title anyone?
occupies the emotional "My Way" spot in the set list

a positive virtue: Bob doesn't easily feel uncomfortable in any American genre. The blues is the music we breathe.

vis-a-vis the space this was performed in (Key Arena):
It is simply not possible to occupy it with sound
No sound can illuminate this architecture, designed to be dead

Banned Rehearsal 796 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2011]

The Tintinabulary, however, as a space, as an architecture, has going for it:

:: the use of proximate space, i.e., the microphone is not a neutral co-occupant of the music's chamber box. the instruments we play, in playing them, talk back. but the talk back ought not always to be obeyed ::

|||| an other aside ||||
a possible issue with parametric composition:

:: sometimes the sound of the pitch parameter detaches from its source, its time point parameters ::

some duck call playing the roll of cartoon baby crying
a duck telling long-winded jokes

a scherzo of a type

I believe I am doing most of the keyboards, but I'm not sure who was playing the push button toy guitar

a lovely session, in fact

some sounds are made by a thing and sound like it
some things sound as though grounded nowhere, parametrically disjoined

Fickle Sun (I) - Brian Eno [from The Ship]

Ambient in that it hopes to transform one's ambience
colonize it completely

pounding beat, honest, quite violent too
but occupies that space in a way very like that of de Victoria

that being
its architecture is a space to occupy

ambience enfolding engulfing submerging

August 21, 2019

Sonata in F, K. 38 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

Classical tonality, as here, privileges scale degree function to the point where register becomes transparent, mutable

more parametric mind games

Etudes-Tableaux (selections) op. 39 - Serge Rachmaninov - Evgeny Kissin

The role, in the structure, of the individual note, has been subsumed, Lisztified, beneath chordal sonority, i.e. the sonorities made by simultaneous strike of multiple pitch events.

(The gooey symptom of which pointillistic practice was or could be or could have been a cure)

proliferation of voices and histories
these voices here arise from the dead
(but)/(and) quite entertaining from a strictly pianistic point of view

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 19, 2019
Banned Rehearsal 987 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer



on the porch
we make another attempt
to merge with the neighborhood of noise

Postscripts

spirit as well by reason of the

lowliness and the condition of this life

known nor possible obtained to john pater

muffled
oblique voice
circle voice

Playlist

Preface

"Music journalism survives through the continuous propagation of compositional 'movements',
endlessly contending in mutual exclusion and hostility for some ultimate 'supremacy', the achievement of which creates, for a brief Hegelian moment, a new Establishment that is, in its turn, opposed and overthrown. In this our journalists are the victims of their own dedication to hyperbole and generality; for they are frequently left unable to describe a musical work except as a type, a pawn in an ideological conflict whose 'outcome' is the only evident substantive issue. And when works are so regarded, they are described only in terms of their most immediate 'typical' characteristics, whose significance seems to lie only in their contrast with some other, contending 'school'. Perhaps this tendency results also from the considerably greater ease of describing a composition in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is as a unique realization of particular musical ideas."
Benjamin Boretz "2.26.68 Journalism" from "Music Columns from The Nation 1962-1968"

Texts

Live

August 10, 2019
Finnegans Wake Part 1 Chapter 2
performed from memory by Neal Kosály-Meyer
Gallery 1412, Seattle

earth side hoist
a cad with a pipe
here comes everybody
imposing cobweb crusted corks
may his hairs be rubbed in dirt

Recorded

August 10, 2019
Sonata in A minor, K. 36 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

through-composed artifice
every other aspect of experience is banished and vanished
clarity alone remains

Way Faring Stranger - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [April 1966]

alto solo
verse with oooo's in the upper voices
then another canon
this world of woe

Around And Around - Moe Tucker [from I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998]

flat line delivery
except or also the "woo!"

not exactly a cover of the song
more a re-imagining of both the song and energy from which it sprang

Banned Rehearsal 103 - Karen (Meyer) Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [August 1986]



wound strings are like long guiros
longitudinal scraping
ukulele and ocarina comment
working it like sawing or sanding
ocarina player switches to harmonica

intent: keep sound going, all of space filled
an urgency to continue in like tempo
steady state

pressure applied for metamorphic hopes
not without some success

It just takes some time.

We can relax,
having managed to get somewhere.

We have entered that temple of chapels through which the Wurlitzer wanders, singing praise to noise! praise to noise!
flutes descanting in its train

Now it is time to operate some devices and make rubbings. Wagner is pelted by balloons and bells. O the glorious Rhein rising! We play the stage machinery.

Is it safe yet to emerge?
We do anyway. Clean up the mess. uh oh. Aaronsbundler.

August 11, 2019
The Other Level - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]

porn fan fic

Wie Lieblich ist deine Wohnungen - Johannes Brahms - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

In Chopin the strange counterpoints that shape the melody's harmonic heaving are never whole, but persist in hints and patches only. Here they are worked out to the nth, and Brahms is desperate to insist that you hear that he has worked them out as he surely has.

Gradus 105 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [October 2006]

resonance is what reaches out to us
binding sounds
testing the limits of contact

Is there a chaos between touch and not touch?
a touch at the limn of release?

August 13, 2019
Tre Duetti - Elliott Carter - Rolf Schulte, Joel Krosnick [from Milton Babbitt: A Composers' Memorial]

the heart of thought laid bare

{extraneous performance noise: humming, breathing, podium creaking, turning pages. The line between acceptable and irritating is personal. For me, any voiced vocal noise is a problem, (because it's pitched?). Herein I am more than willing to overlook the humming for the other strengths of the performance.}

Distracted Driver - St. Rage [at the Common Good Cafe, August 2016]



trending on twitter
eating marshmallow peeps

In 2016 Karen's YA urban fantasy novel "The Gospel According to St. Rage" was released. This was from the book release event, in which Karen and her brother, Neal Kosály-Meyer, posing as St. Rage, the fictional band within the book, sang the songs Barbara, her fictional hero, wrote.

And Hey! That book is being re-released soon! Now available for pre-order, and soon to be followed by the sequel, "Barbara and the Rage Brigade".

August 15, 2019
Sonata in C minor, K. 37 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

For those with ears to hear, Scarlatti thinks in naked composition with a forthrightness that neither Haydn nor Beethoven could quite manage. A perfect match of means and ends, i.e., music, as such.

Symphonie in C minor - Camille Saint-Saëns - Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, Michel Plasson

spacious
not room to breathe
but briefly
room to recall

oh the Schubert oh the reminiscence
via Mendelssohn and Berlioz and Tchaikovsky I think
the elan of chops standing in for invention
check in with past glories for the I recognize that bit jollies of the cognoscenti (the cogknows?)

but
something about the way it builds from scraps prefigures Sibelius
and it is never not lively in transfigurations of its idée fixe
every moment of every moment is melodically charged
Busoni was soon to till this same field
then it goes gleefully oratorical-finale-fugue-ish on us
Bach obsessed, but aren't we all?
grandiosity to the max maximum maximaxiest
music designed for the architecture it was meant to fulfill

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 12, 2019
Gradus 354 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

molecular soup hanging just above its atomic base
free floating melody and harmony parts
flotsam with potentialities

Postcripts

the sprung based as we have certain conditions

must be industry sinks the rapidly

to impose him sink state that it has no

pitch bent mind time
want to stop
go for a walk

Playlist

Live

August 3, 2019

Sunrise Picnic Area - Mt. Rainier National Park - August 2019

Finnegans Wake Part 1 Chapter 1
performed from memory by Neal Kosály-Meyer
Gallery 1412, Seattle

The up
and the down

of him

What a warm time we are in there

Recorded

August 4, 2019
Quickie - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]

bragging bragging
sorry, no

Gloria - Antonio Vivaldi - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

"A" is the opening tutti. It stops. Only then, after the stop, is the cadence of "A," but it is now the beginning of "B," which is the chorus. Nice!

The rest of it, for all the peculiarly dragging suspensions, doesn't live up to that first flash of a brilliant idea.

Banned Rehearsal 708 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [September 2006]



ppp for a while
then subito mp

bending the bells
gamelan of pot lids hung from a purple painted rafter

(I did not choose the pot lids by their pitch, as though I were intending them to be a transportable pitch collection to play regular music upon, but for the voice of each one, how true each one rings.)

so far, a percussion ensemble with feedback
then a flute and a twangy

all the way to the end a composition of a small range of sounds placed just so, like a rock garden

Shadow Lake Trail - Mt. Rainier National Bank - August 2019

August 7, 2019
Tints for Milton - Wayne Slawson [from Milton Babbitt: a Composers' Memorial]

whisper vowel beat boxing
tantalizements of ringing voice

start over (helps if both channels are coming through (Obb (the cat) had fallen and been tangled in audio cables))

voicing of the whisper vowels is applied from outside

This reminds me a bit of Aaron's fallen piano piece with the blow straws.

Gradus 296 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2016]

As it just recently was in the live version, it is here, for a while, on a single pitch.

What are we waiting for? For time to elapse.

Why wait? It will elapse without waiting.

In order not to interrupt Cagean silence. That is why this is Neal's piece and not mine.

I do want to interrupt Cagean silence, from all possible angles.

Why do I? I resent the branding of it, the name tag, the personal claim.

clock time: anti-aesthetic time.
experienced time: the stuff of it.

Sonata in G minor, K. 35 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

Without precise attack simultaneity, this would fail.

See My Way - The Who [from A Quick One]

What they were doing was beyond the capabilities of the engineering they had at hand, or perhaps it was just a bad day.

Track 14 - Empire Brass [from American Brass Band Journal Revisited]

can't leave you like that, let's march! parade!
one's music's history as a recruitment tool
old as Europe
as theater

City of Dreams - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

Perhaps in the elsewhere they are more certain of their primeval blessedness than we can be here in the more freshly conquered west. Or perhaps it is just these times that make it difficult to be so hopeful, so hopeful as this is.

Punk-Bitch Game - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]

Salamander in Shadow Lake - Mt. Rainier National Bank - August 2019

sexual politics as a stage show
kind of brilliant actually

Agnus Dei (Adagio) - Samuel Barber - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

an appropriation of a sacred text for uses other than sacred, a clearly effective commercial act

and yet, recontextualized

slowest

ever

snow globe

snow fall

I remember a Seattle Symphony concert several years back, in which this piece (in string orchestra guise if memory serves) followed, and then immediately preceded Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, the narrator storming in from behind the audience, the second time, as though crying the last hour's news.

Shadow Lake Trail - Mt. Rainier National Bank - August 2019

August 9, 2019
Obsidian and Ironwood - Robert Tree Cody and Will Clipman [from Heart of the Wind]

I find myself incompetent to judge
in this
what might be authentic
and there might be some authentic in there, I do not know

I have doubts about it in many aspects of it
but am unwilling to brand it as inauthentic
without lengthy and perhaps total equivocation

Gradus 194 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [July 2011]

In the latter days of just only A naturals.

Under the fundamentals emerges

a sense that a lower cavern still

presists as a presence behind

How long does it take for a piano wire, once struck, to settle into stable cyclic progression?

And does that cyclic stability persist right into null motion, or does some form of chaos guard silence from sound?

big drum roll bell clang roar

to find standing wave space

Cellar Door - Robber's Roost [from Live in Minneapolis]



if you don't get your way
quickest tempo psalm tone tune smithery

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 5, 2019
Assembly Rechoired 59 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

Shadow Lake Trail - Mt. Rainier National Bank - August 2019

When Karen and I were first left to our own improvisatory devices, back in 1986, we decided to name any tapes we made in which no other charter members of Banned Rehearsal were present "Assembly Rechoired." On this night Aaron was on his way back from Alaska and Neal was stuck late at work, so here we were again. Steve brought over a miniature banjo he had recently procured at a thrift store for about $4. We played the porch.

Postscripts

happened her entire honored so would
have scorned her or at the very least sent
her ball awry and it had her mightily

open olive lakes

nascent arid tactics

everything cold

Playlist

Live

August 2, 2019

Songs from the Exotic
Emily Ostrom, voice
Peter Nelson-King, piano and trumpet
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Six Poemes de "Vocabulaire" - Guy Sacre
Ball of Sun - Richard Wernick
Fool - Peter Nelson-King
Consolation - Gerald Levinson
Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale - Aaron J. Kirschner
Songs from the Exotic - Judith Weir
Three Elegiac Pieces, no. 2 - George Rochberg
The Valley Wind - Hale Smith

My teacher opined to me once that, if you have a problem with something, then have it right out in the open. Explain it clearly, for your own benefit. I freely admit that part of my problem in this case is that, from a certain point of view, I grew up in this neighborhood too. So here it goes:

The body of music from which these songs were chosen takes a timid pride in hearkening back to the hold-outs, to the not-willing-nor-able-to-adventure-fully-into-the-modern-world generation of the early part of the 20th Century. And to be fair, it often turned out to be a pretty nasty place.

Its tell is a vain reliance on those familiar, certified hues of wallowy warmth to haul back, intact and unsullied, a simulacrum of comprehensibility, which is attributed wholesale, as though it were a sensibility and not a struggle, to the sepia scented past. But comprehensibility, to be at all, must be constructed from within, each time around. It never existed any other way.

Aside from being an intrepid uncoverer of old books, obscure poetry, and other odd arcana, Peter is a pretty mean pianist, and an interesting and thoughtful young composer. I rather liked his own song, accompanying Emily on trumpet rather than on piano (oh yes, he plays trumpet too) to a poem by Evelyn Scott. It was easily the best of the evening, though to my ear the treatment of the last line was a bit of a kiss-off. I suppose that's partly the poem's fault, but it could be an interesting opportunity to pull something unpresupposed from the bowels of its snark.

Emily has a lovely mezzo voice with a juicy alto range power up. I understand she's leaving Seattle for other regions, but I hope to hear her again one of these days.

Recorded

July 27, 2019
Sonata in D, K. 33 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

The phrase lengths as counted
and the chunks of density textures
balance on different fulcrums,

the figurational fluidity on yet another.

my Mom, Betty Eisenbrey b. 1927, and her sister, Dorothy (Dotti) Buetow b. 1929
both coming up on the 20's for the second time.

Summertime - Gershwin, arr. ?? - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [April 1966]

sung as an opera chorus, rather than as a pop standard

that is, Gershwin is approached (from this culture) as though he were a high-art thinking composer that used street-hit material, rather than as a street-hit thinking composer with high-art ambition. Historically, of course, he was the latter. But is it even fair to think of him as abiding within that narrative?

Adrenaline - Throbbing Gristle [from Greatest Hits]

flat affect vocal
layered over layered synth vamps

paper thin
adrenaline

Backstreets - Bruce Springsteen [from Live 1975-85]

The piano intro starts right out in armpound full out anthem-chorus mode.
Relaxation is allowed into the verse, retelling its past as a tale of Heroes (as the Beats did as one of Angels).

We certainly do think highly of ourselves don't we. In self defense. Nothing short of glory is acceptable.

Ain't With Being Broke - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]

Song from angry starvation of everything we are instructed that we need.

Alleluia - Randall Thompson - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]

ungrandiosity stands in for tasteful sophistication
choir: bells peal

It is not unattractive, and it's probably lots of fun to sing if you have sopranos who can nail the high end. It's just so non specific.

Highway 61 - Bob Dylan [Key Arena, October 13, 2006]

truck bed bounce blues bumpety bumpety b'bump
rough truck rough road rough speed to make distance

Forest of Thorns - Your Mother Should Know [Live at the Funhouse, July 18, 2011]

Now it is time for the altar call. (Altar Call, that is, as a genre, a genre that is characterized by a near self-parodistic reliance on hypersell of charisma. Of course were the charisma really there it wouldn't need all the bright lights, wouldn't need to hide its lack behind all those wailing strings.) Here though, it is treated as a genre, rather than as an item that might be a sample of that genre in the wild.

En-Lightning - Robber's Roost [from Cuatro]


I think we heard Mark Paschen of Robber's Roost sing this very song for us when we found him sitting on top of a trash can in downtown Ellensburg, busking, after our supper at the late great Valley Cafe: kazoo, dancing dog (Charlotte!) and all. It's still a winner.

July 31, 2019
Sonata in D minor, K. 34 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

in media seq
i.e. the subject is a melody of sequential progressions
and it jumps right in

Flaming Agnes - Harvey Schmidt - Mary Martin [from I Do! I Do!]

Now's the time for that hat! $85!

Nobody's pipes pipe Broadway like Mary Martin's pipes pipe it.

How Still My Love - Stevie Nicks [from Bella Donna]

still steel
steal still
mood song, but unfinished, stops before it quite becomes much of anything

Retrato de Euchababilla - Keith Eisenbrey - Paul Eisenbrey, clarinet [November 1986]

My 1986 composition ably translated from the oboe into the clarinet by my brother Paul. It was one of the first pieces I wrote without recourse to a keyboard (my more usual practice). It was written in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia, in April of 1986, while drinking Tooheys on the porch of the time-share we (my parents and Paul) had booked. We were there ostensibly to bear witness to Haley's Comet (saw it). Its long long notes and ample spaces concern themselves with distance and the idea of being on a continent a wide ocean away from anyone I knew especially from my then fiancee, Karen, far away in the Pacific Northwest. From the comet's perspective we were standing right next to each other.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 29, 2019
Gradus 353 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Pitch classes are sets of partially matching pitches, not arranged as a chain, but understood as though they were parts of a chain (a partitioning, as Ben's Boretz's Meta-Variations might put it). Partitions of partitions of partially matching pitches.

Postscripts

and naked ran out hair screaming might suck

breasts dry with want o mother husbands give

us the heart give us body and soul speak

but the lion turned away
no causation
only isomorphism