Playlist

Live

October 26, 2018

Cristina Valdés, piano
Meany Hall, Seattle

Klavierstück IX - Stockhausen
Pièces Froides Danses de travers - Satie
Gymnopédie No. 3 - Satie
Ein Kinderspiel - Lachenmann
Douze Notations pour piano - Boulez
Gnossienes No. 3 & No. 5 - Satie
Piano Sonata - Bartók

heaven

Cristina's performance presence ought, to my mind, to be a model for other pianists (and for more than a few violinists)
not shirking in concentration nor elegance one bit
but never bringing attention to itself, as itself, as a distraction, from the real magic that's going on
and magic it is too
say it again
heaven

Satie and Couperin, soul bros in so many ways
and both French!
imagine that

Lachenmann showed up in repertoire culture after I had pretty much given up keeping up with developments abroad
in the sense that, at least in these pieces, he is being a pianists' composer rather than a composer's composer, he reminds me of the late Greg Short

Boulez in these early pieces trying on coats, not quite the one that fits yet

Bartók this barnburner was written the year my Dad was born

Part of the reason I gave up keeping up with developments abroad was the overwhelming experience that was my discovery in 1978 or so, and exploration ever since then, though certainly less so now, of the music of Stockhausen. In a way, after that, I didn't need another or very much more music from abroad. And IX was certainly among the pieces that stuck. The overt severing of the realms, the note playing realm from the resonance billowing realm, cracked a door open in my own work, a door that was already pretty loose on its hinges, truth be told. It is fascinating, now, 40 years on, to hear that wild ass music that riveted me in my seat in the UW School of Music's lower-level listening library, trotted out into the clear air in Meany Hall, right there in public as an ever so venerable hunk of repertoire. I would be more disturbed if Cristina hadn't made it so clear that what it truly is is a poem of bone and blood, awesome magic

And now if you'll allow me an amused aside
about a week ago Cristina had, as a sort of mock-desperate joke, asked if anyone would be willing to write the program notes for her and by the way they are due tomorrow. My not entirely unserious response was to ask if she had ever considered not having program notes at all. imagine then my delight when I sit down to listen and there are no program notes! My dream came true! I must be in heaven!

Recorded

October 21, 2018
Concerto in F BWV 1046 - J. S. Bach - New London Consort, Phillip Pickett

composing to show he can
he overdid it
conception beyond any possible previous experience
see, I can write idiomatically for any and each
what you can expect should you hire me
pre-figure of Pictures at an Exhibition

Quartet in F op. 59 #1 - Beethoven - Alban Berg Quartett

the ground will begin to curve downward or drop or vanish into other grounds
the long groups that eventually seem to repeat are so repletely cross-indexed with their own internal repetitions of patterns and patterns of patterns and inner levels of levels that the grander scheme is uncanny
or, what is it that Beethoven thought a movement was? anyway?
we are being ushered somewhere into some society of some kind a refined kind
but can we trust beauty and a human face?
do we trust where we are going?
we are variously pulsed into and away in waves of envelopments
like falling into sleep

Terzetto "Ah! qual colpo inaspettato!" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), William Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from The Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

hint: follow the voice closely
get right up in its face

Symphony in A (#6) - Bruckner - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

as though overturing an opera
IN YOUR SKULL!!!
even his by the book sequiturs sound like nons
naked quite starkly in his contrapuntal proclivities
a nervous keyboardist's way with figurational counterpoint
in order to proceed properly to Y one must pass through the membrane of X
it hurts but it lasts
never
lots
where you are when you are here
from within everyhuman all planes occupy every where all the time
the action is in the melodies between paired or patterned paired patterns and or patterned pairs: between
the still
within
contrary
the motion lurching through similar the stretching within obliqueness
as succinct as it gets

October 23, 2018
Sonata in F op. 99 - Brahms - Emanuel Ax, Yo-Yo Ma

the face of this collaboration is not always turned outward (usward) nor really even often
loves to linger, hold a thought in its hand, Yorick alas
tunes spill out from their vessels

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 22,2018
Banned Rehearsal 968 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Playlist

Live

December 13, 2015
Finnegans Wake Part I, Chapter 2 - James Joyce

the table is set for Finnegans Wake

Neal Kosály-Meyer, with Jake Thompson

Karen and I played a small part at the end of this production, aiming spotlights at Neal as he circumnavigated the space while performing The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly, shadowed by Jake Thompson playing bodhrán. The staging was less elaborate than last year's Chapter 1, but it really doesn't need much. He performed the greater part of it off to the side, allowing his amplified voice to occupy the dark stage alone.

Recorded

December 15, 2015
Quartet for Winds - Arthur Berger - Boehm Quintet

Subject matter: How harmonies arise from melody's twinings, and how they persist within their further twinings.

Concerto for Oboe - Richard Strauss - English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim, Neil Black

Pleasing to the very end.

Sonatine - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Saschko Gawriloff, Aloys Kontarsky

A clever, attractive little piece from early in Stockhausen's oeuvre, with hints of Monk among his own clearly emerging voice. It is a short stylistic step from here to the music box pieces.

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra - Roger Sessions - Westchester Philharmonic, Paul Lustig Dunkel, Robert Taub

The murky motor rhythm strenuously fails to hold things together, threads slip out on their own cognizance - things to do, places to unravel.

December 17, 2015
Elis - Heinz Holliger - Klára Körmendi

Strong keyboard gestures predominate. In the middle, suddenly, emerges what is about the most effective use of non-standard (inside the piano) techniques I can easily bring to mind, subtly integrated with some exquisite pedal work.

Greg Short (1938-1999)

Twenty Four Tonal Preludes: 1 - 4 - Greg Short - Keith Eisenbrey

This was from my recital, Preludes in Seattle, of June 10, 2006, at University Temple United Methodist Church. I first encountered Greg Short in about 1970, when I performed two of his teaching pieces, Knuckle Rag and Little Rose, at a concert sponsored by one of the local music teachers' associations. His preludes are thorny pianistic puzzles in the Lisztian stamp. For a pianist of my modest technique the experience of performing them can be terrifying, but listening back after nearly a decade I find the pieces themselves to be quite attractive. I just wish some better pianist than I would pick these up and work on them. Though difficult, the piano writing is deeply intelligent, always effective, and well worth the trouble. Cristina? Tiffany? Julie? Adrienne? Anybody?

You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks - Funkadelic [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

The backing chorus arrangement features impressively reckless Bach-like stretto, ultra-quick, and is that ring modulation I hear on some of those bass tones? Gobs of great.

The Montreux/Berlin Concerts (cuts 1 and 2) - Anthony Braxton

A little jazz number of Brucknerian proportions.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 14, 2015
Banned Telepath 42 Seattle 151214
Banned Telepath 42 Somerville 151214
Banned Rehearsal 900 151214 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer (in Seattle); Aaron Keyt (in Somerville)

Wow. 900. Wow.
It took us 31 and 1/2 years, averaging 28 1/2 numbered sessions per year. My how the time has flown.

Playlist

Live

Siri and Steve

January 10, 2015
Siri and Steve
Egan's Ballard Jam House, Seattle

A year ago in September we caught this classy act at a little winery in Langley and it was with great delight that we find them now a bit closer to home. Siri is a cousin of mine, sharing a set of great-grandparents on the McAbee side. They play a selection of '60s hits - Paul Simon and The Beatles are prominent - as well as some original songs. The volume level is grown-up low, the vocals are supple, un-pushed, and well balanced. They blend easily with the intricate instrumental arrangements - cello and guitar both playing off and deftly imitating each other. A wealth of sound in 10 strings and a bow.

Recorded

January 11, 2015
Symphony #5 - Paul Creston - Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz

This is safer as a symphony than as a dinner party. They're everywhere! Nervous jitters, sliding off the table from nowhere, repeatedly. Taking runs at what starts as somewhere, were it not for it going on to where its going on is the subject. Long wandering lines of thought turning vaguely pressure cookery. Gonna blow!

Klavierstück IX - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky

Still points that don't bring stillness, but index our velocity as we whip by multiply angled attack decay envelopes. Planes intersect - subtemporally grounded.

Symphony #6 - Roger Sessions - American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies

For listening up close. Every size of joint and color precisely measured to fit and tell. Strenuously carrying the Vienna torch.

January 13, 2015
String Quartet #3 - Elliott Carter - Pacifica Quartet

poked with a thousand needles

conversing on the side

swaddled with many wrappers

a thousand sleepers tippytoe

on Mt. Pilchuck, Spring 1977
(I still have the hat, not the shirt)

January 15, 2015
Magic Man - Heart

It was probably at about this time that I first saw a synthesizer in person. I was in a high-school music class (rumor was that the Wilsons had gone to Sammamish also) and a recent alum who was studying at Bellevue Community College brought one over for show and tell. I don't remember much what I thought of it then, but the sound of the synth on this track can't be far off from what I heard. Unfortunately the "gee whiz kids listen to our new synth" spotlight doesn't fit very smoothly into the mix, marring an otherwise terrific sound. Such were the times.

Let The Power Fall - Robert Fripp

With a limited but luscious vocabulary of (guitar?) sounds Fripp renders digital delays archaic 10 years before they were invented. Its activity is to find the music inherent in an apparatus where the apparatus is defined to include as an essential part the personality of the operator. Like Cage and his notations.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 11, 2015
Crestline 150111
Crestline 150111 folded
Crestline 150111 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvising on tenor banjo (four strings, tuned like a viola, C, G, D, A). I am quite pleased with my electronically 'rubbed' version, so I thought I'd share that one on my Soundcloud site.

January 12, 2015
Gradus 257 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

I want that first chord! Neal plays two 20-minute rungs each session, each rung a different combination of notes. He is at a point in the project where nearly every A-natural and E-natural are in play - a plateau of riches where internal distinctions subsume global progression. Temporally local subsets within each rung that are distinguished by number of tokens come across as being different not in size but in focus - narrow or deep.

Playlist

Live

November 22, 2013
Seattle Modern Orchestra, Julia Tai and Jeremy Jolley, conductors; Bonnie Whiting, percussion
Open Form
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Coeur pour Batteur - Sylvano Bussotti
Zyklus No. 9 - Karlheinz Stockhausen
Event: Synergy II - Earle Brown
Shendos No. 12 for Nine Instruments - Tom Baker
Event: Synergy II (reprise) - Earle Brown

Disclaimer notice: I was the lucky raffle winner of two tickets to their next concert, and Karen's name was picked for a second set of tickets, which we declined. Heads up to concert makers: bribing me in this manner is completely unnecessary, as is loading the concert with works written in my birth year. To the modest extent that what I'm doing here constitutes a concert review I'm usually pretty kind, and, I hope, mostly constructive. But thanks for the tickets. I'm looking forward to it.

Bussotti and Baker and Brown. O My! The patterner in me wondered how Stockhausen was included in this set of B names. Tom opined that perhaps there is an invisible B in front and we ought properly to say "B'stockhausen".

According to Ben Boretz, a score is a stimulus. It can also be a reproducible, portable, marketable artifact, culturally coded to stimulate, in a prescribed practice, a certain acceptable range of event outcomes. The musical work, then, is a complex set containing the score, the cultural coding, the practice, the desired event outcome of the score maker, the actual and postulated score-stimulated event outcomes, and the various webs of discourse, public and private, proto- and post-, pertaining. What is (or was) overtly new in these (mostly) historically significant open form works is a concern with the mechanics of scores as such and with the specific content of the individual score maker's desired event outcomes, but the resulting discursive churn focuses much more uncomfortably on cultural coding and practice. As musical works they function as questions about us, about what we do when we do music.

And what of the event-outcomes themselves? Bussotti, performed in Bonnie's riveting stage dialect, was a sharply delineated universe, vigorously explored, bravely lit. Stockhausen, splayed out and pinned down carefully across an 18 minute or so span came across as surprisingly rational and thorough. Interestingly though, there was nothing particularly unusual about the gestural or figurational content in either work that seemed to be tied specifically to their relative open-ness of form. I could imagine those gestures and figurations arising in through-composed percussion music with no loss of eloquence. This may stem from the fact that, at least in this performance, all that is open about their form was worked out by the performer in advance. She had many substantive choices to make, but they were all made by the time she began.

Not so with Synergy II. It is a box of parts and a set of instructions allowing multiple results. No two performances are likely to be the same (and these two were quite wonderfully distinct), and none of the perpetrators really know what exactly is going to happen until it does. This is by design, and Mr. Brown took a great deal of care crafting his material so that no part or set of parts could be complete in itself beyond the bare minimum individuation necessary to be considered as a part of this piece only and not as some interloper from music as usual. The care taken shows.

Tom Baker (on the right) with Stu Dempster (on the left)
 in traditional Seattle costume

Tom's (beautiful) piece struck me as much more like the Stockhausen, in the sense of being a thorough and careful exploration of something, but with a sense of lyrical wonder replacing the rational display. Where Stockhausen indicates salient points as though wearing a lab coat and expecting us to take notes, Tom's gaze pans slowly across a landscape, which would be blinding to see all at once, and which must be constructed in memory over time to be seen as the whole that it was conceived to be. It is shown little by little in a band tall and narrow. Once again the locally produced holds up quite well next to the more broadly established brands, thank you very much.

Recorded

November 17, 2013
Sonata (Partita) in C Hob.XVI:1 - Haydn - Keith Eisenbrey

Confirming - still needs some work.

Selections from Wizard of Oz - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Ensemble (?) ca. 1965

Another selection from the trove of tapes my mom shared with me.

Banned Sectional 13 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 1985

Neal reads from Genesis, then skips ahead to Revelations. I read from Brecht.

Gradus 89 - Neal Meyer - December 2005

Among the more pianissimo of sessions, its patient attenuation expressing an impatience with music as usually expressed.

November 21, 2013
Gradus 182 - Neal Meyer - October 2010

Each widely separated (in register) pitch is its own theater, and each of their jointures also. Memory and regret.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 19, 2013
Gradus 237 - Neal Meyer

Lots of Gradus this week.

Playlist

Coming Up This Week

Friday May 3, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Composers: Brad Anderson, Phillip Arnautoff, Keith Eisenbrey, David M. Shere

I will be presenting my setting of the Beatitudes from Luke. Karen Eisenbrey, and Glynn Olive will sing.

Saturday May 4, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Keith Eisenbrey and Neal Meyer at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Music for solo piano:
Eisenbrey - Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Cage - Solo for Piano

Long-time collaborators Neal Meyer and Keith Eisenbrey share a piano concert of epic stillness. Neal Meyer continues his exploratory celebration of the silence of John Cage with a performance of the seminal graphic-score Solo for Piano from Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958). Keith Eisenbrey presents his recent contemplative pitch stereoscope: Welcome to my planet. I come in peace. Two frameworks, joined at the source, phased (in specious increments), cogs and gears, mutually warped and warping, rounding space.

Live

April 23, 2013
Washington Composers Forum presents Denise Fillion, piano; Christopher Graham, percussion
The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attractors - Bruce Hamilton
Red Arc/Blue Veil - John Luther Adams
The Third Eye - Adam Haws
Kontakte - Karlheinz Stockhausen

During the summer of 1979 I spent hours in the library at the UW listening under headphones to a multi-part radio broadcast reviewing the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Aside from working wonders on my social life this served as my introduction to post-war European music of a more modernist stance. Kontakte struck me even then as a remarkably strong and clearly constructed work. Although the electronic sounds in Kontakte have a certain flatness to them in comparison with those of the more recent works on the program the piece more than makes up for it in the sheer audacity of its variety, and in the subtlety with which the loudspeaker sounds co-habit the sound and time space with the live instruments.

It is now so far from unusual to hear electronic sounds in joint performance with live instruments that, in certain circles, it is fast approaching if not recklessly overshooting standard practice. Of the three pieces on the first half I was most taken by Attractors, whose bubblous froths were flung playfully into gooey space to hang frozen for a moment before dissipating in guises various. Red Arc/Blue Veil teased a giant virtual tamtam into massive utterance, but I wasn't convinced the live sounds added that much. The Third Eye was a motoric study in slow transformation of meter. If anything its trajectory was too obvious, but the more I think about it the more I'd like to give it another go.

I was formerly on the board of the WCF, and so I am particularly pleased to be able to congratulate them for producing this superb concert. More like that!

Recorded

April 21, 2013

A hard-drive crash put my music data-base out of reach for a week, so I spent Sunday afternoon listening to these three sessions from June of 1985.

Banned Sectional 2 KEE AK - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

Another of those many sessions in which we improvise against improvisatorially chosen pre-recorded sounds. In this case those pre-recordings include not just tape and vinyl and radio sounds but also printed words (I Ching) read out into the room.

Banned Sectional 3 KEE AK - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

As I recall the idea was to sit in separate rooms, close our eyes, and describe what we saw. As with any free-association trace it can be taken any number of ways - an outing of obsessions or anxieties, prophecy, or banal nonsense. As a session it is kind of dull, but I'm not sorry we tried it, and that we kept at it for 45 minutes.

Bickleton, Washington - 1986

Banned Rehearsal 35 - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

A mix of two "Telepaths". Aaron and I made a tape in Seattle and a day later Anna and Neal made a tape in Bickleton while taking a walk. A piling on of fragmentation and dislocation: of temporality, of source, and of granularity.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 22, 2013
Gradus 224 - Neal Meyer