Playlist

Recorded

February 9, 2019
Male Content - Thomas Simpson - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

empty set?

an ordered texture of durations
several orders of embedded ordered textures of durations

Alla Polacca in G, Wq. 116/8 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

scraps cut to not fit quite just so

The City Never Sleeps at Night - Nancy Sinatra [a Rescued Record]

wide-eyed cinematic distance

I Mean You - Thelonius Monk [from The London Collection]

a pickup of three eighth-notes and a downbeat played as
a pickup of three quarter-note triplets and a downbeat, all offset by half of a quarter-note triplet
or fairly like that

October - U2 [from October]

brief
the piano figuration could turn in upon itself intriguingly
but won't

Banned Rehearsal 90 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Doug Haire, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Wally Shoup [June 1986]

the third of seven sessions made on June 7, 1986, in the attempt (successful) to get to 100 by the time Neal left for San Diego later that month

back at the half house

microphone placement
tape to the window
sacrifice the television

Wally is reading from my listening journal which I had been keeping for 3 months at that time and of which this blog is an extension 33 years later
working backwards bloglike

instructions for the Realistic mixer
Karen's going to make cookies
run the output through the ox
back in time we are in two
at once of times
time travel
time's return

sounds of us recording sounds
life within the veil
all the objects this signal has passed through
as it passes from skull to skull

mix thoroughly
combine ingredients

Salute to John Philip Sousa - The Canadian Brass [from Red, White & Brass]

what was the first military force to have a band?
or has music always lured us off to war

you can almost smell the outdoor air

On/Off - Tom Baker - Tom Baker, Keith Eisenbrey [from Preludes in Seattle, May 2006]

in which
I perform on piano
exciting its harp and board
by amplifying recorded other musics
into its underparts

by signaling to Tom
who operated the ingoing sounds
with my hat
on the music rack

February 10, 2019
Dhunki - Mere Brothers Ki Dulhan [from Bollygood Vol. 1]

with so much money evident in the production the question of heartfeltness seems inappropriate
like one of JKR's "farts in church"

Banned Telepath 49 Mississippi River Brewery - Aaron Keyt [June 2016]

sounds glinting off the echo shiny walls
a box of jewels flashing

Mascharada - Nicolaus Blyer -  - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

the multiple tempo changes make this seem a much bigger piece than can quite fit in a minute twenty four

Fantasia in G minor, Wq. 117/13 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

fabulous instrument (fortepiano?) seems to have a damper pedal
Bach the J.S. used music to exert intellectual control
Bach the C.P.E. used music to consider music

or
given the tremendous gifts of B the C.P.E.
personal, peculiar
what must it have been like to have B the J.S. as dad?

Hitch Hike - The Sonics [from Boom]

rhythmhornB3 has a luscious fuzz all through it

Introspection (take 1) - Thelonius Monk [from The London Collection]

the melody
within itself
loses itself in itself
finds within itself
melody itself

February 12, 2019
Wild Wild Life - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

it's so clean!
so clean the words don't even register
except as placeholders within the songwritery songwriting

Can You Dig It? - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]

showcase: I'm what you got left (all of it)

Time Stratifications I Through a Glass Darkly - S. Eric Scribner [from Stormsound Cycle, May 2011]

sounds recur
flirt with adding

up to a sequence
resist

congealing into
a texture might be

commentary mostly
mutter art

Tetua (Jai Gangaajal) - Sukhwinder Singh, Salim- Salaiman [from Bollygood Vol. 1]

mid
distant
too close

February 13, 2019
Mascharada der Edel Frawen - William Brade - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

a genteel quicker but not really quick bit
a breathtaking slow few phrases
rounded by quick slowing to slow

Keyboard Sonata in A Major, Wq. 65/43 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

master of do-overs and sharp turns
sudden shade

in this music the weather changes always

I Met Him On A Sunday - The Shirelles [from The Shirelles Anthology]

cycling through voices
one for each day
great clapping part!

Introspection (take 3) - Thelonius Monk [from The London Collection]

recorded to make you feel like you're in the keyboard seat

low left
high right

Playlist

Recorded

February 12, 2017
Morris Clyfford - Arthur Margolin, J. K. Randall [from Inter/Play]

Two voices, call them Plain and Fancy, make attitudinal micro-adjustments to each other, each chomping at the bit to engage, but neither desiring the other to give up an inch of what they are. Dog bark in the next room joins the rhythm, and suddenly the co-agonists find themselves occupying a mutual corner. That's just about when the tape ran out.

Who We Hatin' Now, Mr. Reagan?- The Center for Disease Control Boys

Broad political comedy, mostly for each other.

One7 - John Cage - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Muttered in secret || DECLAIMED!

February 14, 2017
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

I love the quick-echo between the vocalists. Grooving on the texture of close-packed material.

Banned Rehearsal 608 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Spiral up incline slow vista shift toward intimate familiar || radio fog dissipates, as the.

Do the Stomp and Drag - Glorious Day [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

In punk-face: If you are treated like a zombie you may as well dance the dance.

Isaiah 6:1-5 - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [recorded at University Temple United Methodist Church, on December 21, 2014]

The recording linked above was done in the studio. The live version was recorded during the Offering, which adds a great deal of extraneous noise.

High Plains Drifter - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

The pages of this hand-scrawled book, a bit narrow for the lines, are full and generously so. The letters give each other room to sing.

February 16, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus 6 - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Two fugues crammed so tightly together that stray bits extrude suddenly into oddly contoured voids. Quartz in schist.

Menuet in D Major I and II Wq. 116/3 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Lighter than air, the glance into minor thrills, a mutual stillness.

Symphony in D Major (#96) - Haydn - Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer

What might break out into the open from within the polite.

Quartet in B-flat op. 130 - Beethoven - Amadeus Quartet

Gets going by never quite having been got going so that each :: place from which :: never is a place deflected || from this we persist || systemic flaws and their extensions

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 12, 2017

Ghosting Doubles (first) (after Amy Denio's "Ghosting") - midi realization

I had been working since late last year on the next part of a long project, an extension of my Etudes

d'execution imminent, and had gotten pretty far along on a hunk of sound generated by a pretty ferocious chart. When I heard Amy Denio's fabulous solo accordion piece, Ghosting, recently I immediately thought that I would use that as the basis, in some way, for the next part. But on Saturday I had, as Ben put it once, "a better idea", and the above is the first of three (?) sets of doubles upon her tune. For those with a quick ear, the middle voice in the above is a simple transcription of Amy's original. ("Ghosting", copyright Spoot Music, ASCAP, is used by kind permission of the composer.)

I rather like the bald, frill-less, un-finessed midi sound of this version, though I do plan on learning to play it myself as well.

February 13, 2017

Banned Telepath 54 Seattle 170213 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

February 15, 2017

Banned Telepath 54 Anchorage 170215 - Aaron Keyt

Banned Rehearsal 929 (170213-15) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Aaron's bit is a wonderful 19-second long Moog-App twiddle. Neal speaks of cabbages and death. Steve and I find a new way to torture the atomatone. Karen rings bells.

February 17, 2017

Partita - Benjamin Boretz - Keith Eisenbrey

Kingston Bridge, New York, ca 1982

I have been attempting to learn this piece of Ben's, composed in 1955, for decades now, on and off. This version, recorded yesterday morning, is a pretty good picture of how well I'm doing this time around. I think I could still fix some of the more egregious bits of rushing, and clean up a not-quite-together attack or two here and there, but beyond that I'm not sure I'll ever play it much better. It always has been just a bit past the limits of my available technique.

Playlist

Recorded

February 5, 2017
Der Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus V - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

Strenuous clarification: like ripping out brush.

Menuet I & II in C Wq. 116/15 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Exact.

Symphony in D Hob I:96 - Haydn - Academy of St. Martin-In-The-Fields, Neville Marriner

How very like a concerto this is, playing orchestral configurations off each other, punctuated by big tuttis that wipe the slate clean. Or: as asides, the tuttis act as interlinear translations of what is more politely said in the smaller ensembles. Or: How very like a machine of men Haydn's orchestra is!

February 7, 2017
Grosse Fuge in B-flat Op. 133 - Beethoven - Quartetto Italiano

Cramming the entire universe into a fugal frameworkspace, but the second subjects will have none of it. Dissonance flickers throughout like old movie aperture instability. Has anything ever sounded so busted up?

Brother Low Down - Bert Williams [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Occupying a middle ground between comedy act and musical act. Certainly leaning toward the music, but just as certainly not letting go of the shtick.

The Bible's True - Uncle Dave Macon [from Goodbye Babylon]

Bunny Berigan

Elbow room between voice and guitar. Unhurried whooping.

Wild Man Stomp - State Street Ramblers [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The tune ascends stepwise just only so far before whumping back in line.

Mama Don't Allow - Bunny Berigan [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Such a soft touch!

The Star Spangled Banner - arr. Stravinsky - CBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Fesitival Singers, Stravinsky [from The Original Jacket Collection]

Square shouldered and muscular. Clean lines and sturdy feet.

Something to Remember You By - Benny Carter [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The figuration is subservient to following the melody whither-so-ever it goes, breathed seamlessly from player to player.

February 9, 2017
Ezz-Thetic - Miles Davis, Lee Konitz [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Independently tethered to the same anchor. An arbitrary aesthetic completely worked out, the ultimate 'screw you'.

Jesse Belvin

Goodnight My Love- Jesse Belvin [from Original Oldies from the 50's vol. 13]

Fancier than it lets on to be, the voice is as controlled as Billie Stewart, but doesn't whip out the flash. Jesse is on top of the song's every twitch.

What'd I Say - Jerry Lee Lewis [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

I love the authoritative sound of the piano at the opening. Sitting tightly wadded at torso's end. Nothing gets out.

Ain't Too Proud to Beg - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Spacious enough to imagine that it goes on much longer than it does, as though it were merely a sample or advertisement for an experience we might have.

Fearless (Interpolating You'll Never Walk Alone) - Pink Floyd [from Meddle]

Sprawling, relaxed, whole.

An Alice Symphony - David Del Tredici - Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Oliver Knussen, Phyllis Bryn-Julson

(the orchestra tunes) (the singer says words) (the orchestra blats scenes) (we hear of cruelties) || the argument duly announced and duly made present. A hint of Peter and the Wolf in its film-cue characterizations. What is salutary: instruments playing their notes never transcend their actualities - until they do - and until they evaporate back into  (the orchestra tunes) (we understand absurdity as a form of cruelty) (we witness integrity violated).

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 6, 2017
Gradus 306 170206 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Stars blink on as though night appeared as dawn. Some constellations are habitations, distant or near. || the flooding waves ripple closer || dikes and levees permeate the ripples || reflexive co-infusion

Playlist

Recorded

January 14, 2017
I Fought The Law - Bobby Fuller Four [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Nice triplets in there. I love the dipthong on "law", curling back on itself as though hitting resistance. Almost appropriate: Karen and I recently watched "I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", which has some truly amazing sound events in it, as well as a fascinating view of the connection between the penal system and slavery.

Samuel Barber

Prayers of Kierkegaard - Samuel Barber - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Schenck

The solid tonal sensibility loses grip in places, it works to break free, struggling slowly, manages to unsettle the more settled.

John, I'm Only Dancing - David Bowie [from Changes One]

Technically perfect song-writing. The voice pushes at the instrumentals, as though it were trapped in their cage.

You Better You Bet - The Who [from Face Dances]

Postural pullback, only to return to full frontal, hiding the low point of tenderness from prying eyes. Or letting it hang.

Violin Concerto - Henri Lazarof - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Yukiko Kamei

Icy spreads its arms and twists 

acrobatique 

aerialesque 

orchestral circus stage 

big top fire breathing peril 

here come the clowns sardonic 

self regarding self 

chatty nervous

Janaury 16, 2017
Adagio (3rd Movement from 11th Symphony) - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

Triumphal weariness, as settling to the ocean floor's deepest trench, through its subtle gradations of dark.

Good Things - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Held close, stiffly still, simmering under pressure.

Work Architecture Unity And The ("17 Crags" 010511) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Second go at it. A sense of enforced singularity of event, severing any particular participant's interest or curiosity. Salutary to the extent we find a way to do what we always do but spread over thinner space. Or: an exercise in leaving space so that we can't always fall into the always-going-on-ness, leaving space for sharper corners?

Judith Shatin

Homemade Music - Judith Shatin [from Open Space 21]

Intervals Between Events: A Study.
Intersections of sets of distances between events as motivic cells. Clearly, so as to index the sets.

The Dancer - Patrick Marland [from Hendrix Uncovered]

Easily lovely. the bass is subtly amped, close the fingerboard.

January 17, 2017
Finnegans Wake Chapter 1.3 - Steve Gregoropoulos [from Waywords and Meansigns]

Spoken with attitude. 'scuse, with AttiTude. The music allowed to attempt to overpower, the vocal imitating the lingo of partisan journalism. Drunken sbrawling squalities. Text just one ring of a circus co-occupied by dueling Captain Beefheart Impersonators, infiltrated by multiple iterations of the Chaotic Noise Marching Corps. Babble of neverending political speech. Each music change: to enter a new room.

January 19, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus V - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

How they do crowd upon each other! At the end (and this is frequent in these fugues) there is the sense of "OK, now we're ready to really dive in, now that the preliminaries are over."

Alla Polacca in C Major Wq. 116/4 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

The purpose of ornamentation is to skew counting, to turn tables on the concept of number. These little pieces are about meter in a way that little else is again until Chopin's Mazurkas.

Symphony in E-flat Major (#76) - Haydn - Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

It is not simply that he moves in the unexpected way (surprise!) but that he gauges each unexpectedness so carefully, veering just so far along the circle of fifths, just so much further at the structural hingepoints: Where we have gotten to determines the depth and yaw of the veer. The slow movement has a focus that allows a huge dynamic range (a model for Schubert's late sonatas?) Then an extra fancy last movement.

Ave Verum Corpus - Mozart - University Temple Chancel Choir, Keith Eisenbrey, director, Howard Wolvington, organ

Last Fall our choir director, Chris Vincent, was in Italy and kindly allowed me to take the choir for a few weeks. He even let me conduct this justly famed anthem from late in Mozart's short life, for which I remain ever so thankful. What a pleasure! Listening one becomes so rapt that it is not until it winds down into the cadential trill that one realizes what a ride one has been on. A bit like life that way.

Sonata in A-flat Major Op. 110 - Beethoven - Rudolf Serkin

An earnest attempt to clearly play what is clearly there. He makes some interesting connections among the tempi in the fugal bits.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 16, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 927 170116 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Aaron is back from the far north for a few weeks. Hurrah!

Playlist

Live

December 17, 2016
Finnegans Wake Chapter 3 - James Joyce
Neal Kosály-Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

memory fragments in the dark

Recorded

December 10, 2016
Thunder Road (live) - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975 - 1985]

American Pie, bye bye
American Pie, escape from
American Pie, escape from within the language of

but hardly a moment in there that doesn't tell.

Ghosting (for Pat Graney Dance) - Amy Denio [from Tutto Bene]

Color me blown away. Barely a minute and a half long, the tonality is seeming solid but treacherously slick, and the rhythmic sense hovers between flatfooted folkish 3+3+2 and one of Cortot's floating riffs on a Chopin triplet. It would take a graduate seminar to tweeze out all the nested partitions of thirds and fourths winding around in there. All that and then a suckerpunch quasi-double-time cadence that would have made Machaut smile. Amy was kind enough to grant me permission to play around with this: Theme and Variations? Fantasy On? Riffy Etudes? Hmm.

Anonymous - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Buried in the mix, a guitar's bare hint at reflection, like the dull glint on a gun barrel.

Banned Rehearsal 607 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer - April 2001

prolonging the lead in, the sense of getting ready to start. The sound world: percussion is in front drums bells wooden bars, guitar in imitation; slipping around inside strands of sustained tones sliding around, back into the percussion chattery. Inventing a mix, an instrumentation, a pattern of weedy tangled sounds. Regularity emerges, but always challenged by some angular, obtuse momentum. Doors open and close. A healthy hang-in-there attitude. Winds down even more prolongedly than it wound up. In the end we present multiple short fragments of possible mixes bending toward the oh-so-composed, long fades perpetually reawakened.


Just Keyboard Respect - Mark Zuckerman - Peter Winograde [from Open Space 21]

Beautiful keyboard writing! (and beautifully played). A clear, delightful, but frightfully quick game of Randallian pinecones.

December 11, 2016
And The Wind Still Cries - Randy Raines-Reusch [from Hendrix Uncovered]

An undulating drone and what gets pulled from it.

Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 - Mr. Smolin and Double Nought Spy Car [from Wayroads and Meansigns]

Recited, for the most part. Music enters though the relation between the reciting and the various musics over which it is recited. The big thunderclap near the opening joins the two. As deeply embedded in the humanities as the text is, this take on it comes across like stitched-together missives from space aliens, or as though on latenight downchannel TV. Or: brazenly neo-modern: the old text surrounded by ready-mades. Defiantly not integrated with itself.

December 13, 2016
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus IV - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Clotted keys, knots of partial centrality. Occasional clarifications: red herrings?

Polonaise in E-flat Wq. 116/2 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Carl finds some very peculiar ways to count to three.

Symphony in C minor (#78) - Haydn - The Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

Sequences of types, as sets, sequenced into sequences of types as sets of sets, articulating the picture of life painted for their masters by their servants. The ordered day. It's hard to imagine (if you will excuse the inexcusable) Haydn hiding anything, but then...

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 12, 2016
Banned Telepath 51 Seattle 161212 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

December 13, 2016
Banned Telepath 51 Anchorage 161213 - Aaron Keyt
Banned Rehearsal 924 161213- Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Playlist

Live

November 19, 2016
Finnegans Wake Project
Gallery 1412, Seattle

Chapters 1 and 2 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In case we had forgotten, Neal brings us up to date on the story so far. The body laid to rest and the crime rumored about. Chapter 3 will be performed at the Chapel on December 17, 2016.

Recorded

November 20,2016

I did not pay the price on the label

The Best Of Times - Styx [a Rescued Record]

A full Las Vegas style production. Strangely timely.

Guess I'm Falling In Love - Jad Fair, Moe Tucker, Kate Messe, Barry Stock [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

Focus guaranteed. That firehose is, in fact, directed at your face.

Self Portrait in 69 Shades of Grey - Michael Leese - Burning Dog Music Ensemble

Nothing whatsoever to do with the recent infamous book and movie: this predates all that by nearly 25 years. This begins in late 20th century chamber music territory, flute, harp, some brass. An electric bass enters and some cages are rattled and it wanders into jazz band land. ML was a composer I became acquainted with back on CompuServe, when that was a thing. This was one of several tracks on a cassette - transportable medium of choice at the time. We lost track of each other at some point. I was sorry to discover that he had passed away several years ago at the age of 49.

Little Mouth - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Lust and Disgust shout each other blue in the face.

Doomsome Otherings (reading session unedited) - Keith Eisenbrey - Seattle Creative Orchestra, Roger Nelson

Freefloating passages in a partly clogged rehearsal bay. The music's parts, set adrift, have jostled loose. What comes through, even early on, is the orchestral palette, and a sense of how the colors shift.

Get Daddy A Chicken Sandwich - The Trashies [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

A screenplay written as a prank or novelty song. Self-parody in the mold of Black Flag or The Dictators, perhaps even leaning toward the full-on satire of Full Toilet.

Xtet: Last Dance for Milton - Elaine Barkin [from Open Space volume 29]

The space between the notes is full of mischief or tenderness. A music of teasing affection.

November 25, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C


A conversation in pantomime, aiming at what just eludes text.

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus III - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

A typical sequence might be expected to climb up or down a ladder. These spin on tilted axes. Organ sounds tend to take up residence within architectural space, in a way that nothing else does that I can think of. Among other things this separates the voices of the fugue along different lines than implied by the score.

Alla Polacca in D Wq. 116/6 - C. P. E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Ostensibly in 3, but I was hearing the meter as a sequence of 4-beat measures overlapping like fish-scales so that beat four and beat one occupy the same temporal location.

Sonata in E Major (#31) - Haydn - Anton Nel

Once again, the sonata that my friend and collaborator Aaron Keyt reworked into a thorny and thoroughly modern semi-pastiche, and once again it wasn't until the opening of the middle movement that I recognized it.

Concerto in A K. 622 - Mozart - Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Mariner, Jack Brymer

A Mozartean imitation is never direct, he delights in subtle differentiation - a narrower ambitus here, a modal shift there, ornaments full of attitude sprinkled liberally. He fully inhabits the means of his own expression, much as Ken Griffey Jr. fully inhabited his home run swing. This more than anything was probably the achievement that left the Romantics gasping for breath.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 21, 2016
Gradus 303 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Among the poking around are frequent bouts of pretty sweet timbral composition.

November 25, 2016
Ravenna Park 161125 A - Keith Eisenbrey

The sun was out yesterday morning so Karen and I took a walk down to Ravenna Park. I recorded two stretches. This first started at the top of the ravine, at 20th Avenue Northeast, and proceeded east along the North Trail as far as the ball field (where there was a game of Kick Ball in progress, what fun!) We heard and saw several winter wrens, and crows, gurgling brooks, and a conversation among our footfalls. I still need to find a good way to silence the microphone handle I'm using, but the extra noise isn't too distracting.

Ravenna Park 161125 B - Keith Eisenbrey


Once we got above the ball field, heading back along the South Trail, we heard a squeaky swing in the playground. I turned the recording back on and we marched up the damp concrete steps (a really nice sound!) and recorded a little bit of the swing in its weary complaint.

Playlist

Preface

"The aspect of aesthetic imagination of real presence becomes especially vivid during long but time-limited events having the character of a performance (e.g. calme étendue by Wandelweiser composer Antoine Beuger, 1996/97, which lasts up to nine hours). A piece of music of nine hours' duration necessarily eludes perception as a whole. The knowledge of its actual performance at the moment is available to an audience member who is absent from the room solely as an aesthetic image. Here the uncertain element of truth in such a projective image is in antithetical tension to the phenomenological structure of perception and imagination. When I leave the room, I can assume at any given time that the performance is going on, and something is happening in the performance space that follows the score (with which I'm familiar) and/or is similar to what I perceived at an earlier moment during the performance. This uncertainty nonetheless points to the uncertainty of any given perception, which can always deceive me. But my imagination cannot. Imagining, as a synthetic act, is always certainty, for rather than telling me something about the world, it is solely the product of my assumptions." Volker Straebel - "Aspects of Conceptual Composing", The Open Space Magazine Issue 10 Fall 2008

Texts

Recorded

July 23, 2016
Rockin' In Rhythm - Duke Ellington - The Harlem Footwarmers, Freddie Jenkins, Arthur Whetsol, Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton, Juan Tizol, Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges, Harry Camey, Fred Guy, Wellman Braud, Sonny Greer [from Ken Burns' Jazz]

How seamlessly can the ear be led? Are you sure you had your wallet with you, sir?

Density 21.5 - Edgard Varèse - Lawrence Beauregard

Billie Holiday

Ascending strenuously through the several realms, not disregarding that of pitch, reaching at last for the last of reaching.

All Of Me - Billie Holiday, Shad Collins, Leslie, Johnakins, Eddie Barefield, Lester Young, Eddie Heywood, John Collins, Ted Sturgis, Kenny Clarke [from The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]

An encyclopedia of syncopation at its most sophisticated.

It Might As Well Be Spring - Sarah Vaughan, Clarence Brereton, Buster Bailey, Russell Procope, Bill Kyle, John Kirby, Bill Beason [from Interlude: Early Recordings 1944 -1947]

In singing the tune she also, or perhaps she sings the tune so as to, illuminate(s) harmony's innards.

Turn Over A New Leaf - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]

Call and response: voice to guitar. Stomp the floor.

Love Is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia [from Original Oldies From the 50's Volume Thirteen]

At some point in the early 80's I was turned on to The Shirelles' dynamite debut I Met Him On A Sunday. I found the track on a cheap 7" 33 1/3, upon which I discovered this justly celebrated single by Mickey and Sylvia, with its wicked 'syl-vi-a' 'sweet-ee-pie' guitar licks. This song makes me smile every time.

Stravinsky

Anthem - the dove descending breaks the air - Stravinsky - Festival Singers of Toronto, Elmer Iseler [from The Original Jacket Collection]

Has SATB ever sounded so weird?

Shake It Up (Remix) - Paul Revere and The Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

Almost a straight instrumental, were it not for the demonic laughter buried deep in the mix.

A Woman Left Lonely - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

It isn't emotion or emotive qualities she adds as it gets going. All that drains away as she aligns with some prevenient energy field - as though she finds the exact warp of voice that will lock in and resonate on the soundboard of solid blues.

Bowles' Blues - Eddie Bowles [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

Some interesting ways that triplets can halt in midair and still be triplets.

Intermezzo - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt

Aaron Keyt and Sky of Destiny

Aaron and I go way back, and this recording is among the earliest of our collaborations, stemming from when we were both undergrads at the UW. The score, for two pianos, only rarely has the two pianos sounding simultaneously. Most of the time phrases rock or rocket or reel or wobble back and forth between them. A Brahms Intermezzo is chopped up and shuffled, as though a new tale were being told with the fragmented trajectories of an old. A clown parade wanders through (in bits), and among it all emerges an intimately delicate inward pondering. This piece got a certain amount of flack when we played it for the faculty - perhaps there was discomfort with his perceived irreverent use of Brahms (heck, he can take it). I like it more now even than I did then.

July 24, 2016
We Three Kings of Orient Are - London Symphony Orchestra [from Listen To The Joy]

What does it take to make an old carol suitable for the aspirations of middle class American homes? Ditch the words, first. Arrange it to sound as much like Tchaikovsky as possible, without going so far as to sound like anything alarmingly particular. Hire a great band and sell.

Octanphonie - Eugene Bozza - Rainier Chamber Winds, Kathleen McFerran [from Out and Back]

An attempt is made to: convince a stubborn horn player; subdue the energetic; relax in spite of troubling thoughts; hold it together in the face of giddy inebriation.

Little Bird - Motorhome [a Rescued Record]

Roomfilling guitar, more bass-heavy then REM, vocals a bit more focused. Toward the end is a quick break followed up by a new tempo coda. Nicely misshaped.

Banned Rehearsal 603 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, March 2001

Even an ironically oratoricalized question is an anxiety. The Banned preserves our demeanor of formal silence. What good is brick wall music? Is its value exactly in the fact that it doesn't answer questions?

You're Way Back Down - The Fe Fi Fo Fums [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

The vocal shouts over the shoulders of his guitar-thugs.

Rux?: Gumbo - Bob Priest - Stu Dempster, Joanna Hood, Bob Priest [from Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

Stu Dempster, cleaning house I think, gave me this CD ("not for sale" its cover announces) at his birthday celebration concert earlier this month. I haven't seen Bob Priest in years (I started keeping a listening journal in the mid-80s and some of the first entries are from Bob's "Marzena" concerts) and I was delighted to hear in this odd little piece that he's still busy making interesting sounds.

July 25, 2016
Banned Rehearsal 902 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, January 2016

The sound of a declaiming voice will silence even its own text. Music doesn't stand a chance.

July 26, 2016
Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt BWV 112 - J. S. Bach - Gächinger Kantorei, Helmut Rilling

It isn't until the second time around that we realize just how introductory the blatant non-introduction really was. We are given a guided tour down through the tessituras, then ushered back into daylight.

Keyboard Sonata in C Major Wq. 54/2 - C. P. E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

C. P. E. Bach was working at a time of flux, when the emphasis on contrapuntal elaboration was waning in favor of combinations of tunes and chords. It often seems a bit haphazard and gimcrack, but fascinating in its moments, deeply invested in each twist and turn. This music is being taken apart as we listen.

Keyboard Sonata in A Major Hob. XI.30 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

This music is putting itself together.

July 27, 2016
Le nozze di Figaro, Act IV - Mozart - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

This, the end, begins at the lowest of the low: a servant girl. Following this are the several big arias, a veritable bloodbath of competitive "R" rolling, and the payoff ensemble to finish.

July 28, 2016
Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 60 (#4) - Beethoven - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

Pairs of tenuous threads spin light out of darkness, with and without layers of shadow bright.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

July 25, 2016
Gradus 294 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Recorded

July 12, 2016
Falsche Welt, dir trau Ich nicht BWV 52 - J. S. Bach - Gächinger Kantorei, Helmut Rilling
Keyboard Sonata in B-flat Major Wq. 54/4 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Segmented, like a puppet.

Keyboard Sonata in E Major Hob. XVI.31 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

My long-time collaborator Aaron Keyt wrote a Sonata a few years ago that uses this as its measure-by-measure basis for pitch collection roil. As an analysis, it can be heard as an abstraction that maps pitch-content without also mapping interval content. Interestingly, the sense of narrative also remains, but in absurdist vein, i.e. a narrative without content. Christine plays it on a multi-keyboard harpsichord.

July 13, 2016
Le Nozze di Figaro Act III - Mozart - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

An act of small arcs, an intermezzo, an aria sublime, a delicately hushed ensemble, a chorus.

July 14,2016
Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 60 (#4) - Beethoven - Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter

Less a drama than a location, a locale, a here in which to apprehend the time.
Time as place. Now as here. Here as now.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

Gradus 293 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

The rungs go by so quickly here.

Playlist

Preface

"We are experiencing an intimate, self-reflexive and interpersonal touch: beneath your and my hardened forms of self-representation in public situations we experience our obsessions and internal contradictions as being touched, understood and identified; and only in this process do we experience being in transformation. We thus come close to each other through understanding the same deep-seated inhibitions or forms of desire. An access to one another is revealed,a possibility for change, a convergence. As possibility. Intimate utopia, folie à deux. You and I." - Helger Schulze, (translated by Laura Schleussner), Berührung (Touched by Sound) - The Open Space Magazine issue 8/9 Fall 2006, Spring 2007

Texts

Live

June 18, 2016
The Spectrum Dance Theater
Cornish Playhouse - Seattle
The Minstrel Show Revisited - Donald Byrd

DB and company are not shy to reveal what we successfully forget. Black face in your face. Let's share racist jokes. The permeable skins between the bodily languages of clowning subservience, and the bodily languages of self- and other- identification, and the bodily languages of desperate aggression are co-opted to grind our faces into the shards and sparks of our minstrel show past still present among us, barely transmuted: jazz hands, MJ's single white glove (a coded reminder?), white liberal church choirs trying to sing gospel told "to be more black", hip hop's posturing choreography and on and on ad nauseam and beyond. Intentions were and are well and ill on and from all angles, but clearly, the code of silence has failed.

On a more strictly aesthetic note, the inter-disciplinary play among dance, song, spoken word, direct address, audience participation, and reportage (not a complete list), was seamless where it needed to be and abrasive where it needed to be. SDT is a dance theater, but one that takes the theater part seriously. Dance theater for thinking people.

Recorded

June 15, 2016
Keyboard Sonata in E minor Wq. 65/30 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Each note's decay envelope is so steep (we are hearing a clavichord) that their inter-relative weights, both their dynamics and their agogics, is packed with at- and in-tentions. Climbing a cliff on the merest of holds.

Keyboard Sonata in B minor Hob. XVI:32 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

And now we are orchestral.

June 16, 2016
Le Nozze di Figaro Act II - Mozart - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

It opens with a drop-dead killer song then dissolves into recitative - first among the female voices and gradually adding (through Cherubino pants role mediation) male voices, during which Mozart constructs an elaborately elaborating ensemble. It is no surprise that the recitative, the ensemble, and everything in between is awesome in the extreme (listen to that recitative again, dig that crazy rhythm!) But we the audience also undergo a shift in perspective, from fly-on-the-wall clinical observer to fully immersed (or enmeshed) co-operative - or more perhaps: over the course of the act the action has moved from out there on the stage to entirely within each of us, overwriting what is us with what is it. A brilliant insurgency.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 13, 2016
Gradus 291 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Every couple of weeks Neal comes over and improvises two 20 minute rungs on a new combination of piano keys. This session ended with a rung made of all the A naturals, all the E naturals, all the C sharps, and the highest G natural. I am allowed 40 minutes to consider how music is put together, or to think critically about how I habitually regard music as being put together.

What signals 'start over': repetition as return || end of long duration || novelty
What signals 'moving on': increment || transformation
(double whammy 'start over and move on': non sequitur)
What signals 'working on it': parametric invariance || not starting over, not moving on
Pointillism: each moment starts over, each moment of each moment starts over. updown backforth allthesame.

Playlist

Recorded

May 8, 2016
Keyboard Sonata in G minor Wq. 65/17 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

This one must have been written specifically for fortepiano, because it makes heavy use of the damper pedal. One imagines the composer saying to himself "Cool! Let's see what we can do with that." I suppose it was a bit like getting a new synthesizer.

The first movement is a twisted psycho recitative, the second a wide ranging emotional landscape, echoing repeated notes from register to register, the third brings itself up short. Clearing the sound is optional, stability is not the norm, safety is not in sight.

Keyboard Sonata in E minor Hob. XVI:34 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

The space left open by twitchy articulation is leveraged into ornamental and rhythmic expansion. Where CPEB stops short, JH pivots gracefully in finetuned variations, always in exquisite taste.

Le Nozze di Figaro, Act I - Mozart - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

Invites you in, sits you down, hands you drink. On this big canvas the large gestures can breathe, cartooning in the relations of power: male to female; noble to servant - and revealing both the sexual lust that drives the plot and the deep social cleverness that will, for a moment, resolve the whole.

In Session at the Tintinabulary - Remote Outpost

May 7, 2016
Lincoln Park Beach Walking North 160507
Lincoln Park Beach Walking South 160507 - Keith Eisenbrey

My recording device was turned on accidentally on the walk north (along the path), so there is more handling noise, but intentionally on the walk back south, along the beach. Lots of Salish Sea breakers and kids.

May 14, 2016
Riverview Park Playfields 160514 - Keith Eisenbrey

We took a morning walk to catch the sound of baseball in its native land. We saw hummingbird perched, being very quiet, though I might have caught its itty squawk before it noticed us seeing it.

Playlist

Live

April 2, 2016

Stillness, Concentrate - Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Welcome to my planet. I come in peace. - Keith Eisenbrey
Another - Keith Eisenbrey
J - Keith Eisenbrey
".....such words as it were vain to close....." - J. K. Randall


Leaving aside such words for a moment, it is gratifying in listening to the recordings of these recent pieces of mine to discover how much more clearly they come across as a thing to hear than they do as a thing to perform. That is, I spent a good deal of composing time inventing ways for each of them to do some particular thing - Welcome to slowly pass two independently spinning pitch matrices through each other, Another to . . . (I'm still not sure what exactly Another does), and J to pour attenuated contrapuntal lines through a mutually illuminated space - but the performing of them involves so much ferocious counting and focus on what's coming next that it is difficult to hear what's actually happening, and nearly impossible to get a feel for how it's going as an experience.

I'll have my performance of such words available privately on my soundcloud site (since I don't have permission to make it public), so if you would like to hear it please get in touch with me and I'll send you the link. Part of the mystique of the piece is a notion that only Jim could ever really play it right, so playing it at all might seem futile. But I hope that even the little pianistic wisdom I've managed to glean over the decades allows me to at least share a glimmer of what's there to be discovered.

Rescued Records

Recorded

April 5, 2016
Wig Wam Bam - Fantasy Four

This was from a box of 7" vinyl disks that Karen brought home from work, after they had been used as party decorations, after having been remaindered from a used record store. There was very little information on the disk itself, and the jacket for this one wasn't in the box, so even figuring out the name of the band took some sleuthing. All I had were the titles of the tracks and "F4". As best I can tell they broke up in 2002 or 2003, so I guessed this came out in about 2001. It isn't a great record by a stretch, but it's enthusiastic and good humored. One could easily imagine them sharing a bill with any number of local bands at some dive bar, in the same vein as Prom Queen or Can You Imagine, but with more of a Tyrannosaurus Grace exuberance.

Nobody Makes A Monkey Out Of Me - The Bugs [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]
Ferocious Alphabets - James Romig [from Milton Babbitt: A Composers' Memorial]

A single twisted twine, segments of which, due to the oddly contoured timespace in which it is cast, can only be observed through past or future portions of itself, refracting its singularity into many.

Tambourine Quintet - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

The tiniest shivers in space, making like speech.

S'io non miro non moro - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Taffy pulling. I kept thinking of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

Singet dem Herrn ein Neues Lied BWV 225 - J. S. Bach - Concentus Musicus Wien, Bachchor Stockholm, Nikolaus Harnoncourt

A knockout concerto grosso for voices and continuo - the seventh Brandenburg.

Keyboard Sonata in C Major Wq. 65/16 - C. P. E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Miklos plays this one on fortepiano, rather than clavichord. It lives in a gothic splendor of twisty narrow passages, dark yawning chasms, and dank dungeons.

Quartet in C minor Op. 17 #4 Hob. III:28 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

A well-ordered life in the age of reason. Stately rooms. long straight halls, courtyards bathed in sunlight. Proportion. Balance. Decorum.

April 7, 2016
Rondo in D Major K. 485 - Mozart - Lili Kraus

A counterfact to the dogma that Mozart's keyboard works can only come alive in all their subtlety when played on fortepiano, with its wide range of timbre from octave to octave. Lili makes do just fine with a clear differentiation of touch.

Symphony in B-flat Major Op. 60 (#4) - Beethoven - Vienna Philharmonic, Wilhelm Furtwängler

WF doesn't slow down in order to relax the tempo. His ritenutos underline the phrase.

Prelude in C-sharp minor Op. 25 - Chopin - Vladimir Ashkenazy

The arpeggios here are not poet-dreamy, but nervous, urgent, coaxing out what might be remembered of another music, if only one could, if only it had ever been.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 4, 2016
Banned Telepath 47 Seattle 160404
Banned Telepath 47 Somerville 160404
Banned Rehearsal 908 160404 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy (in Seattle); and Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)

Playlist

Live

January 30, 2016
The Marriage of Figaro - Mozart
Seattle Opera - McCaw Hall

The stage set was cleverly designed, visually attractive, but not so fussy as to be distracting. The most interesting decision was to place Barbarina's cavatina about the pin at the edge of the stage, in front of the tall woodish panel wall that served as a curtain. Like setting Christ on a mountaintop, it forces attention: this is what it is all about - a lost trifle. Ironic, poignant, barbed. Something like the effect of the Holy Fool's plaint anchoring Boris Godunov.

Recorded

January 31, 2016
Merce grido piangendo - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Utterance is never simple, always at least a skein. The co-sounding harmonies are a metaphor of inflection, of placement of voice within the mouth. That particular upward chromatic shift is an eyebrow raised, a dubious query.

Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir BWV 228 - J.S. Bach - Concentus Musicus Wien, Bachchor Stockholm, Nikolaus Harnoncourt

The actual earth has dropped down half a frame and we hear the angelic chorale floating above. Meanwhile we mortals go chugging about our business.

Keyboard sonata in F Wq. 54 #1 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Single notes poke in here and there, laugh-in style. Toward the end of the 1st movement the harmony slows to an almost Beethovenian stillness.

Quartet in E op. 17 #1 Hob. III:25 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

A thought experiment: extract just the resolutions of each cadence and play only those, in sequence, in time. Then ask what the shape of each preceding and succeeding phrase does to change the sense of how that cadence sounds.

February 3, 2016
String Quartet in D K. 499 - Mozart - Juilliard String Quartet

It is lucid even when it gets gnarly.

February 4, 2016
String Quartet in F op. 59 #1 (#7) - Beethoven - Budapest Quartet

Entering the dark, overwhelming.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 1, 2016
Gradus 283 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

February 2, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 A
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 B
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C

Ivan brought his alto sax and clarinet over to meet my piano. I for my part had a blast.

Playlist

Recorded

December 27, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 414 [February 1996, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer]

These clothes do not fit. Something is about to itch. Cabin fever. Stubborn drums. Finally boils over. Returns to the sullen wall.

Lauda Anima (midi version) - Keith Eisenbrey


When I finish a piece I usually like it pretty well, but I am always pleased when they get better upon re-listening. The sense I have is that this piece builds itself a delicately balanced ladder, one stick at a time, slowly and precariously ascending into darkness. It manages to live pretty comfortably in midi, but I will always regret that there is no recording of Marcus Oldham's superb performance of it at St. Marks a decade or so ago.

Outrageous - Paul Simon [from The Essential Paul Simon]

Paul gets down to the funk.

December 28, 2015
Qixingshan - Benjamin Boretz - Momenta Quartet [on Open Space 32]

Uncanny intervals, inexorable stillness, ape rage exhausting itself on an empty landscape.

O voi, troppo felici - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

I kept getting the sense that all these chromatic shifts would suddenly come into focus and be completely regular, if only one could find exactly the right point from which to hear it.

Konzert in F Major BWV 1047 - J.S. Bach - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan

Such a small ensemble to make so many disparate sounds. It is as though there are more groupings than are mathematically possible. The secret is that he treats each register of each instrument as a new instrument, so that any two have among them a wealth of possibilities to work with. Thankfully, Herbert doesn't over-inflate his ensemble much for this one, so it comes across more like chamber than orchestra music, which is all to the good.

Petites Pieces "La Capricieuse" Wq. 117 #33 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Breaking the stranglehold of baroque practice in the name of private amusement.

December 29, 2015
Quartet in D Major Op. 17 #6 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet
Concerto in C minor K. 491 - Mozart - English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, Malcolm Bilson

Baroque combinations interrupted by articulating cadences. The soloist's opening salvo drives a wedge into a crack in the rhythm.

December 30, 2015
String Quartet in F major, Op. 59 #1 - Beethoven - Amadeus Quartet

The politics here are of intimates, not nations - familial social.

Playlist

Live

November 21, 2015

Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Gallery 1412, Seattle

The small performance space allowed a deliciously huge unamplified dynamic range, with the piano's undampered reverberance coloring the whole in intimate detail. I've probably heard Neal perform this in public as many times as anyone he's not married to. With its stepped up pacing and minimal stage business this was easily the most enjoyable time out.

Recorded

November 22, 2015

Downtime [recorded live at SARC] - Benjamin Boretz - Ian Pace

threads of time enter fugally

discontinuities problemetize return

vast darkness

weightless strands float

delicate connections

No. 1 Phantom Killer - Ape City R&B [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

The voice in the mix is not an instrument to equal guitar or drums or bass. It is just part of the noise generated among the guitar amp fuzz and cymbal hiss.

Elizabeth Hoffman

red is rows - Elizabeth Hoffman [from Milton Babbitt, a composers' memorial] - Conrad Harris, Paula Kim Harris

Wicked open string hoedown music. Hop-up-and-down fantastic. Now that's some noise!

November 24, 2015

Ma tu, cagion (Seconda Parta) - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

obscure
through branches
a leaf

descending

mimed by a dancer's hand
in viscous
motion

Konzert in G BWV 1048 - J.S. Bach - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan

This production is conceived as an orchestra of groups, not of individuals. It keeps the listener at a remove from the performers. We can hear all the familiar bits going on, but none of it really happens.

Petites Pieces "La Complaisante" Wq. 117.28 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

A little caricature for private amusement. The human size of it appeals to the neo-classical mindset. The erstwhile subject is well fitted to the miniature sorts of social events available to music for clavichord.

Quartet in E-flat op. 17 #3 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

Concerto in C K. 503 (#25) - Mozart - English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner, Malcolm Bilson

Mozart's imagination, in default mode, is decorative: the aim is to make time lovely, to beguile and delight us. That deeper wonders can be found here is itself a deep wonder.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 22, 2015

Trio 151122 - Keith Eisenbrey

This week's trio was for tam tam, wood drum (like a small conga), and steel string acoustic guitar.

November 23, 2015

Banned Telepath 41 Seattle 151123 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

We're waiting for Aaron's contribution from Somerville to complete Banned Rehearsal 899.

Playlist

Recorded

October 25, 2015
Se vi duol il mio duolo - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Part of what seems so modern about Gesualdo is the centripetally charged architecture of the virtual space he creates. Hidden rooms and dark hallways are implied. Out can't be got. The only option is further in.

Konzert in G Major BWV 1048 - J.S. Bach - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

The halls here are brightly lit, and there are windows open to the breezes. The balanced phrases spill out in every seeming possible combination of distributive weighting.

Petites Pieces "Les Langeurs tendres" Wq. 117 #30 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

A mid-18th Century Chopin nocturne, though it would translate more graciously to lute or guitar than to piano.

Tatrai Quartet

Quartet in G Major Op. 17 #5 Hob. III:29 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

More fresh air and sunshine. Children are playing. Our music is a grace to the gracious living of others. This is the quartet from which Beethoven borrowed the recitative for the 9th.

Symphony in D Major K504(504) - Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood, Jaap Schroder

It isn't just that all of Mozart's best music is opera, either for real or in drag, but that the extent to which it is Mozartean is exactly the extent to which the music is the image of staged singers in mid-plot. The slow movement of this one pulls a second twist, in that the moment of its plot is utterly still, without beginning or end - the characters entwined for all time in freely poignant, floating bliss.

String Quartet in E minor op. 59 #2 - Beethoven - Budapest Quartet

The close regard of little tids of figuration (as transformable music substance) is the musical substance. The larger structures (phrases, sections, movements) are accidents, epiphenomena of the cross-play among micro-compositions.

October 27, 2015
Polonaise in F-sharp minor Op. 44 - Chopin - Artur Rubinstein

Played with admirable lucidity, the phrases rounded just enough for clarity without telegraphing what might be suddenly there next.

Symphony in C Major Op. 61 - Schumann - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan

This is recorded/engineered in such a gluey acoustic environment that even what sounds like it was played articulately becomes distant and blurred, in soft-focus. Ah, that '30's Hollywood glow. Doesn't do Schumann any favors though.

Deception Pass State Park, Washington

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 25, 2015
Wishes Last - Keith Eisenbrey

I wrote/improvised a song that's like a hymn, accompanied by spoons and nylon string guitar. I'll be putting this up on Bandcamp soon with a couple of other recent songs. First take, best take.

October 26, 2015
Banned Telepath 39 Seattle 151026
Banned Telepath 39 Somerville 151026
Banned Rehearsal 897 151026 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, in Seattle; and Aaron Keyt, in Somerville


Up to our usual shenanigans, Steve found a way to bow the washtub bass with a loose spring, to excellent effect.