Playlist

Preface

"So my social-ideological problems with musical theorizing really arise entirely in the mistaken ascriptive use of texts whose coherent relation to musical experience is, on my account, descriptive. This problem is probably at its most lurid and blatant in the music-devastating ontological transference that typifies traditional ear training, and most other forms of traditional music-learning, music-studying, music-understanding, music-theorizing practice, all of which lead inexorably - and familiarly - to musical expression-destroying experiential reductiveness: hearing analyses, hearing serial structures, hearing complex time-pattern relationships, hearing motivic transformations, hearing adumbrations internally and inter-textually and historically, hearing ideologies, hearing anything which is ontologically in the verbal - or symbolic - referential-linguistic domain rather than hearing music in its own fully ontologized experiential-intellectual language, is not only to freeze and paralyze the cumulating evolution of a person's inner music-experiencing history, but threatens to annihilate the entire intuitive music-experiencing history a person may have already accumulated."

- Benjamin Boretz "Experiences With No Names" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"

Texts

Streamed

Wayward in Limbo

"With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series now moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is curating and commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of exclusive material. Many of these will be essentially “live” performances recorded at home for this occasion. Others may create a mix of pre-recorded material that has not been previously released elsewhere." 

- from the Wayward Music Series website at https://www.waywardmusic.org/.

September 5, 2020

Steve Barsotti

being in many places at once
feeding back within their orbital cross references 

[[child's play is unselfconscious being, retrievable fitfully as adult socialized citizens in: music, war, dance, sports, inebriation, dalliance, theater]] 

heard space is the apparent whereness of a sound moment,
the perception of a sound moment's immediate surrounds
or the perception of the immediate surrounds of sound moments. 

we come, we go.
gather, disperse.
retire to the nest. 

distant door slams shut.

September 6, 2020

Stephen Fandrich

The Water Way: Variations on Artii-Sayir, a folk melody of Central Tyva

Improvisation

there is a call
to join one by one
they arrive
and one by one
they groove in 

what are we ringing about today fellas? 

an organized activity
synchronized motions
comfortable sociability
continually adjust
to be
social wellness 

[in the thicket of repeating metrical geography hallucinatory reminders of other musics entirely arise such as here Rock Island Line] 

he brings out the piano's inner dulcimer orchestra

September 7, 2020

Keith Eisenbrey

16 Clavichord Improvisations

irregular proceeds
variants accumulate accelerations
and likewise
peopled 

takes itself apart by putting parts together 

a clown march for Aaron
thinking to myself out loud
(let's evaporate) 

subject matter: our music ear as pitch in a playhouse full of sound

Recorded

September 5, 2020

Symphony in A Major, K. 134(134) - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music, Jaap Schroder, Christopher Hogwood

winds (flutes and horns) provide body to the sound 
but body that can be re-haunched
with clever fingers to emphasize in the inner vocals
but the strings are what plays the piece
{experiment: play just only the wind parts of this} 

cheerful and competent stage manager
has got it all together
as though having it all together
were show business

did his competence come across as insolence
to the thems that might have hired him?

Sonata in B-flat Major, op. 8 #3 - Muzio Clementi - Howard Shelley

cooking on all the burners at once
stirring each pot as needed
quite clever

Sonata in G minor, op. 49 #1 - Ludwig van Beethoven - Emil Gilels

Emil takes a fascinating slow tempo. 

it does breathe
inhabits
settles down for a long pipe. 

emphasis on resolution elsewhere than where resolution became required. 

It is interesting to hear these two (Clementi and this early van B): one can hear the affinity. As with each, the melodies are only what they need to be, and often that is not a song-like melody (operatic) that they need to be.

Symphony in B minor "Unfinished" - Franz Schubert - Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Münchinger

1
an upheaval has heaved things over
the orchestra breathes a new air
we can sing
we wish
eternally returning
for good or ill
they do not fight it out
they fester
its battle scenes insist on unfinishment
rather than fragmentment
round and around
there's a dramatic tale
even of how it finally ends
a Dramatic Overture 

2
cloistered serene machine
pompous puffed chest march
its those long held notes you gotta watch out for
they'll suck you right into their own drama
here comes bed check 

shh passion anguish
strange doings in this convent
so picturesquely déshabillé
lights down
curtain drawn in slowly
no swish

September 6, 2020

Nocturne in E minor, op. 72 #1 - Frédéric Chopin - Claudio Arrau

pitch class voice leading between those arpeggiated accompaniments
notes are ornamented twists on the tune
they don't just happen

Symphony in D minor "Reformation" - Felix Mendelssohn - Vienna Philharmonic, Christoph von Dohnanyi

picture book drama
the news spreads far and in secret
I'd watch this movie 

sneaking around under cover of night 

everybody loves a dance
such happy peasants
bucolic
beatified
Ein feste Burg
takes over
occupies  
the music
describes
the picture

Davidsbundler Dances, op. 6 - Robert Schumann - Peter Frankl

about the problem between 16 and 12:
16 ? 4 ? 12 |
| 16 - 4 = 12 |
| 16 = 4 + 12 |
| who are you 4 ? |

counting beats won't cut it
it's a whole body thing
like Scarlatti
he is about the particulars of direct repetition
and dis-sequiturs that hold
how strong is this music's lock?
four squares off against three
(the succinctifier) 

when a Schumannian sound world ends
(movement over)
how far into the next new thing
does
the exact moment at which
that followed thing
extending
end?

how far distantly
does (it) persist?
[it, (the former Schumannian sound world)] 

we to sleep now in peaceful arms

September 7, 2020

Roméo et Juliette "Dramatic Symphony" - Hector Berlioz - Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa

always so much better than remembered it ever was
Berlioz, like Dickens, brings his entire stage machinery along with him
right into their respective elsewise stageless medium
sound and poetry 

Berlioz saw the play as a literature of scenes and situations
not words necessarily 

how much of the English did he pick up,
and/or which translation was he familiar with,
and how good is it really
in comparison to Shakespeare?
and so he came up with what a symphony would need to be like
if it were like the play
Romeo and Juliet 

(what Wagner and Berlioz had in common: desires about the theater and the symphony) 

a new kind of musical experience

aural IMAX 

saw himself in a very large stage
melodies and instrument groups are his characters
is really into his special effects

off stage
back stage
scrim stage 

something Tim Burton about the glee in the macabre
pantomime peace
between the houses
lots of sermon 

turns it into an uplifting tale of political alliance
laying down the law on it too
with spear pounding no less 

"Your sacrifice has been accepted.
It is with gratitude that we (not you) triumph."

September 8, 2020

Pensees des morts - Franz Liszt - Stephen Hough

every thing is presented as though already fallen apart - shattered

Isoldes Liebestod - Richard Wagner transcribed by Franz Liszt - Michail Rudy

captures the sense
in which it is a duet at heart, partner unseen. 

barely captured, through the side of the ear

Symphony in C minor, op. 17 "Little Russian" - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Seattle Symphony Orchestra - Gerard Schwarz

It is all there, but it has been subdued, not let loose.
Is its notes but not its liveliness nor its urgency.
Not among Maestro Schwarz's better moments.

September 9, 2020

Les Eolides - César Franck - Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra - Jean-Marie Martin

a mere glance removed from Debussy or Ravel
detailed orchestration
the effects are made of figures,
figures in counterpoint,
nothing under-composed. 

French "Nationalist" pride is not an aspiration, they treat it as simply due.

Quintet in F Major, op. 88 #1 - Johannes Brahms - Budapest Quartet, Walter Trampler

We are Germans, we balance, everything can be counted. 

Its pleasure is in insinuating itself through tiny cracks in the created pitch space (which is pretty darned dense, but not dense with apparent cracks)

[my Sarabande! used in a very early piece of mine: Variations on a Theme by Brahms] 

contorts itself in passage through
so indoors it is
step by step
further and further
afield

September 10, 2020

Symphony in E Major (#7) - Anton Bruckner - Staatskapelle Dresden - Eugen Jochum

we have been taught that the first period establishes the key - as Haydn intended. 

If this does that then that is a subtle key of E indeed that is thusly so established.

(establish? is that what happened there?)
Is this modulation?
Or are we stuck in a dark room?
Is there a door
or do we just go on
as though we had gotten somewhere?

stop.
do not proceed.
peril abides here. 

the first movement has an end but not one we got to, but one that came upon us 

:: 

diminished 7th harmony as both barrier and portal
can't get through
but find oneself
elsewhere
dis-postured
re-posed 

then again to glorious breakthrough 

meanwhile here on earth 

:: 

this scherzo doesn't dance or scherz, 

it adventures forthright
girded of loin
and accoutered of spear
and shield forthright
and brave
but in circles
or gently veering spirals 

:: 

we are lifted slowly
through descending and side stepping figures
or shed them
as we are lifted
the goal is not to arrive at
but to break through
as arrived, 

without taint of cadence

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 7, 2020

Banned Rehearsal 1009 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt

Keith Eisenbrey · Banned Rehearsal 1009 200907

This may be our last in-person Banned Rehearsal session until it is safe to meet in person or until the weather and light returns in the Spring. Karen has a Bodhrán which she activates (at first) by a windup robot. I have a washboard, some cans (one of which has rattle stuff in it) and a kitchen implement. Aaron has a keyboard-activated glockenspiel shaped like a toy.

September 8, 2020

Wallace Book 6 - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey

September 9, 2020

Chorale 5 - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey

September 10, 2020

Wallace Book 7 - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey

September 11, 2020

Chorale 5 - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey

A few more weeks and I'll be able to start putting together a virtual recital of these recordings, as a dialogue between Aaron's recent music and mine. The working title of the project is "Wallace." 

Postscripts

the sprung based as we have certain conditions

must be industry sinks the rapidly

to impose him sink state that it has no

the white knight

doomed in the forest

the crank in the roof

Playlist

Preface

"While parallels between THESIS and ARGUMENT abound, distinctions between language and music are conspicuously revealed. With and in music, 'meaning' lodges elsewhere and differently than in language; in music, what joins and follows next is what there is, is how music 'becomes'; if grammar or reference or syntactic structure-like back&fore&middle-ground concerns of 'meaning' crop up as I hear a music, at best they are sui generically pertinent to the particular work; music is always now and here; attachings and reference emanate from within, thens attach to and make nows, but if and as I struggle to speak of them I'm transliterating; music doesn't need what language depends on; 'meaning' and reference within do not need to give rise to reference without in order for music to be. Music as music, as recreation of experience, is totally liberated and wild and free."
- Elaine R. Barkin "reexperiencing Language ,as a Music revisited"  Open Space Magazine issue 19/20 fall 2015/spring 2016

Texts

Recorded

April 13, 2019
Narrow - Mecca Normal [from Kill Rock Stars]

oh all
that is strong

oh each
that is specific

oh so
much that is irrepeatable

a pirate legend of the mean teen seas

song doesn't get much better
than this

the Earth is Calling Our Name - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

it stays put
saturated smoothed lacquered

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded at the Tintinabulary, June 15, 2010]


patiently edging out into exposure
the small timing flaws just prove it's handmade
the Chickering's palette/timbre allows the emergence of lines to be clear inside the chords
I doubt I'll ever play this better or more patiently

Ik Junoon Paint It Red - Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara [from Bollygood Volume 1]

swing with an accent
hunky hunky chunky chunky

April 14, 2019
Banned Rehearsal 912 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 2016]

The 32nd Bannediversary on the porch
wash your eyelids
crows squabbling and sniping on the left
scrape and poke like archaeologists

traffic events: locatable gusts of wind
a band plays in the distance

We play a benefit for the bugs and critters gathered under the maple tree beside our porch

Sonata in D minor K. 1 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder

sequences extend just a bit longer into iterationality here and delighted

I'm Only Sleeping (rehearsal) - The Beatles [from Anthology Volume 2]

mostly vibraphone and some drums
rather attractive

Go Tell It On The Mountain - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director

fun arrangement how it starts by building the bed of the harmony of the tune we know

the artifactual bass boom almost makes it sound like they have a tuba back there

You - The Who [from Face Dances]

femme fatale too late
the ultradiscrete tracks work pretty well here
to hear what the players are playing

The Gift of Love - London Symphony Orchestra [from Listen to the Joy]

Pops as in The Pops
concert series for arrangers to showcase to and of publishers
taking care of business

Reaper Song - Witchy Poo [from Kill Rock Stars]

artsy
but entertaining standing laughing

Track 4 - Seattle Chamber Music Festival [from a private tape, July 2001]

could be Weill I would believe it
for a while but moves into another more magical garden
(((never trust, quite
a magical garden)
tells a story
(does not narrate a story, tells it)
happy endings)
full of feeling)

Summer Days - Bob Dylan [Key Arena, Seattle, October 2006]

Unsure of the title, not being a Dylanologist
rockabilly - the South's equivalent of Surf of the West

The Sow Took The Measles B - Train Case [Karen Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer]

pretty tight ensemble for a multi-tracked recording
(it's that blood harmony bone rhythm)

The Motherfucking Bus Part I - Chaotic Noise Marching Corps [from Zero to Lizard Man]


a sound cue
or an audio-graph as one might take a snap shot of a moment

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 15, 2019
Gradus 346 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

highest B-nat
highest B-nat and highest C-sharp
pianissimo and on down the hammer sound
predominates over the string sound
especially when the rest of the harp is damped

April 18, 2019
Yellow Line (3 takes) - Your Mother Should Know
Candy (3 takes) - Your Mother Should Know
Don't Know How to Start Over - St. Rage
Summer Girl (2 takes) - St. Rage
Regular (2 takes) - Your Mother Should Know

In about an hour and a half, including set-up: eleven takes for two bands, six tracks each, two PZMs taped to the wall, one decoupled stereo condenser mic down near the drums, one wide diaphragm con-mic for Neal [Kosály-Meyer] to sing at, one headset con-mic for Karen [Eisenbrey] to do same. It's a good thing both bands are the same two people. I'll be working at finding the treasures of these over the next few weeks.

A note from your ever so humble recording clerk: The titles of the YMSK songs are my placeholder titles, not the official song names.

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

an embodiment of the absence of itself
an image of duration bereft
or innocent or prior to any notion of pulse

Playlist

Preface

". . . what is the 'music-ontological core' of musical experience, and how do we reach it? The answer resists discursive felicity; it is a multiplicity, always in motion, involving flows of intensities between experiencer and experienced object—as experienced, but in a way that is sensitive both to the kinds of meaning-generative flows from the object (as both a temporally-constituted and -constituting musical reality), and to the knowledge that one's experience is situated and incomplete, that every effort to contact the music in its putative wholeness only reveals new transcendental lines and new epistemological possibilities."
- Chris Stover "Walking Up and Over, Approaching Boretz's Qixingshan" Open Space Magazine issue 19/20 fall 2015/spring 2016

Texts

Recorded

Maryhill Stonehenge

March 30, 2019
Cheyenne's Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

from under the warm snug blanket
release tension release ease
tummy full

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from a home recording of 3/1/2007]

my bits (added to Ben's now withdrawn solo piano piece Liebeslied (for a pianist alone))
schematically interlaced with his bits
in order to underline the schematic image within his bits as my bits unlace them

for me: it gave me a performance version (for a pianist among others)
this was a pretty strong performance, one of the last I made on the 6' Yamaha my folks bought for me when I was in high school
necessary time is given
but it doesn't lag either

Light It Up - High Class Wreckage [from a pre-release copy of High Class Wreckage]


pumped for mayhem

Loser - St. Rage [June 2016]


St. Rage is a fictional band in my wife's novel The Gospel According to St. Rage (soon to be re-published by Not A Pipe Publishing). They are played here, as always, by Your Mother Should Know, which is my wife, Karen Eisenbrey, and her brother, Neal Kosály-Meyer. I did the honors behind the recording device and final mix.

nice job guys!

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Taxman - The Beatles [from Anthology Vol. 2]

once each track could be recorded clean the parts could be treated as replaceable, optional, swappable. ultimately, it swaps the compositional focus from an arrangement of chords and tunes performed by folks to an arrangement of tracks laid atop chords and tunes

Nutty (take 2) - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

loose and playful

Some Other Time - X [from Wild Gift]

expression on face: grim, stiff, determined

Radio Head - Talking Heads [from True Stories]

toy orchestra in lego land

Make You Come - Kicking Giants [from Kill Rock Stars]

we do love our guitar players round these here parts

Track 3 - Seattle Chamber Music Festival [July 2001]

artifacts of nasty splatters
nothing like digital to point out its own flaws
made me jump every time

No Condemnation - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]

just the blues
the blues almighty
and with a bonus song as part of the track

Sow Took The Measles (A Reverb) - Train Case [June 2011]

If I did put any reverb in there it is nicely minimal
Train Case is also Karen and Neal, in a more acoustic homegrown idiom

Wave, Beach, Pebbles Large, Close Extreme, Surf, Storm, Foam, Ocean Roar, Intense, Sizzle, Crash, Impact Puff - Pete Comley [from Ocean Ambience Rocky Coastline Vol 1_1]

This was all of 2" long. I'll need to rethink how to listen to this album so that I actually have time to sit down after pushing play.

March 31, 2019
Little Lamb Who Made Thee - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [April 1966]

Baker City, Oregon

a really nice setting of Blake's poem
it captures some of its divine innocence
even in its Hollywood style

Ruby My Dear - Thelonious Monk [from The London Collection]

superb brushwork back there on the skins and pans Mr. Blakey!

Planet Earth - Duran Duran [from Duran Duran]

the eighties
when they manufactured a sound
to be an image of blatantly manufactured sound
robotics

Banned Rehearsal 99 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]

Petrushka country fair in the Horse Heaven Hills
we are recording on a boom box at the Bickleton Pioneer Picnic and Rodeo
mostly, in intent, to memorialize the calliope of Meyer family legend, the calliope reborn from recalcitrant scrap, its erstwhile melodies having been re- and re- permuted into a gleeful quilt of melody parts set free of their prior moorings

tape is running
you have been immortalized

Carousel of the Calliope of Legend

that calliope, it explains so much

oh no, we're staying in Seattle for ever
giddy with penultimatricidal tendencies
Carny Vater of the Prankmaker
shacks and bunkers
but honestly, what gender is any of this?

to correct the calliope
is to silence the oracle
chaos divine incipit
how it Klings and Klangs
Kling Klang
(I guess this fits, do as well as any)
getting some pie on tape
by laws
in the sense that there are none

April 4, 2019
My Red Self - Heavens to Betsy [from Kill Rock Stars]

flipside or formerside or pastside or stillinside
of Kaley Lynn Eaton's Poem in Praise of Menstruation as heard recently at Salon
attitudes surrounding the cultural taboo received slapback into culture's face
strong and straight with a no nonsense blatancy to it like my friend Jill Borner's My Baby Left Me

Cedar Flute Love Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]

It is required that it be muddied by loop echo and smudged with bird song.
Do they make flutes with cedar? Wouldn't it be splintery? Dunno.

Liebeslied (Amended) - Keith Eisenbrey [from Preludes in Seattle Part 2, March 2007]

see above and elsewhere for what this is
I didn't manage to improve it (nor play it very well for that matter) so much as point out some if its, and my, problems. A project far more essential to me to have done than to do for any else

Hendrixesque - Henry Guiazda - Nathan Davis, cello [from Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

more loops for repeating with
mirrored halls
distant doors
hidden
(locked anyway)

The Drink I Didn't Have Last Night - St. Rage [June 2016]


Here they are again.
late night rough
wrinkled plenty

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 31, 2019
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." - Keith Eisenbrey " [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

I wrote Mrs. Ramsay, its title taken from Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse (I liked how she framed

your blogger ca 2001

Lily with roses), in 2001. It was my first large-scale composition since Slow Blues. Slow Blues was structured like a set of variations, each iteration exactly 12 bars long in a slow 4/4 meter, and each successive variation based on the same sequence of mod-17 pitch sets arcanely related to the bare-bones blues sequence I I I I | IV IV I I | V V I I, cycling through the 17 M-transforms available in mod-17. For Mrs. Ramsay I played a similar game, but the structural segments aren't all the same size or shape, vary more widely in affect, and, if I recall correctly, the various M-transforms are re-ordered according to some rule I have long since forgotten. I performed this just once, at an early Seattle Composers' Salon back when they were held at the Mennonite Church in Lake City. Tom Baker may have a dub of that performance, but until I recorded it last Friday I did not have any recording of it for my own reference. In practice this means that I really didn't know how it went from outside of playing it. And so I am ever so glad to finally make its acquaintance.

Frankie and Johnny - Keith Eisenbrey [assembled from parts recorded March 29]

Karen under Jail

For several years now, and interrupted by a self-imposed indifferently observed sabbatical, I have been working on a sequence of etudes. Big surprise: there will probably be 17 of them all together, if I should be so fortunate as to finish. Frankie and Johnny is the 13th and most recently completed. I think of it as an opera, an opera in which the main character is the traditional song itself, which is written in the score with approximate, unstaved, pitches. The piano part is a sequence of 3-note groups written as, but not intended to be played as, whole-note simultaneities. I had been practicing for about a month, trying on all sorts of voices to sing with and tinkering with various schemes of approaching the projection into figuration space of the 3-note groups. In the end I sang it in a nearly straight folk style, and improvised the figuration in the real time of the recording. Since I stopped to shuffle pages between each verse I had to piece together the takes of them, but even with that, first take best take.

April 1, 2019
Gradus 345 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

development, as a received notion, is a sequence or group of varied but related ideas
related by repetition of some kind of some aspect or set of aspects

we pick up a thought and turn it over in our ears :: of as many aspects as can be held in mind, while following the variations
it is where our focus shrinks to the immediate

Playlist

Recorded

December 8, 2018
How Firm a Foundation - Keith Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

my recording of December 5, 2018
unfinessed timing, but with great care to amuse

Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down - Sister Fleeta Mitchell, Rev. Willie Mae Eberhart [from Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1]

at ease with its confident command

Soundform II Cricket - S. Eric Scribner - [from Storm Sound Cycle, May 2011]

it is as though this weren't music we were listening to
but washes of layered ambiences
any story line focus is deliberately frustrated
so that we can experience this space without participating
a particular distance at which it grows dark

Finnegans Wake Part 2 Chapter 4 - James Joyce - aleorta [from Waywords and Meansigns]

outside inside
a quark an ark a bark
a beach of words like sand churned into filtered whorls of thematic synergistic jumbled geology
worlds piled into higglepiggle rhyme heaps
bits of precontext clinging
mucking up the whole weary moraine
repetitions
stammers
a dye has been applied to these lists of words
radio-ating

December 11, 2018
Aria - Thomas Simpson - The King's Noyse [from Mascharada]

Something about the way pitches repeat at register is more than vaguely reminiscent of Webern.

King Arthur Act IV - Henry Purcell - Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet

a musical extravaganza held together by a plot
but the extravaganza of the music is primal
which is why a dance number as a part of one of these things makes perfect sense
Wagner's through-compositional compulsion was just a way of making plain what had been developing all along, it actually lessens the importance of the music as such with which opera began its history

Schicksalslied - Brahms - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Robert Shaw

slow groundwork allows weightless lift
oops, dramas
setting a dense poem chorally adds density without contributing clarity, comes across like a movie adaptation of a book

Kansas City Shuffle - Bennie Moten [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

show dance upon which variations or doubles compete

Dona Nobis Pacem - Ralph Vaughan-Williams - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Robert Shaw, Richard Clement, Nathan Gunn, Patricia Nealon, Pamela Elrod, Sean Mayer, William Borland

much like Purcell in the knee-jerk wordpainting, but inflated by more ample resources, oppressed by the imperative to be important, National
the sentimental sanctimony of Empire
unlike Purcell in that it takes itself seriously

wordpainting fails to enhance text's meaning, it merely underlines an empty aspect of it
good for a laugh, but otherwise generally a distraction
it would help if he had any sense of timing or proportion

December 13, 2018
Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra - Heitor Villa-Lobos - Chamber Orchestra of St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Vladimir Altschuler, Marco Tsessos

mid20thcentury Display Concerto
a vehicle
for solo enhanced by orchestra
the play of sounds against each other - what makes a concerto a concerto - given lip service at best
given that limitation this is a rather attractive example, with melody up front

All The Things You Are - Art Pepper [from The Way It Was]

mumbling in close formation they scrawl a tune

Skinnie Minnie - The Sonics [from Boom]

woohoo!
hey!

Crepuscle With Nellie (take 2) - Thelonius Monk [recorded in London on November 15, 1971]

syncopation can be accomplished by playing ahead or behind the felt beat
or, as here, by moving the beat to where you need it, stretching and squeezing the flow into a taut rubato

Tomorrow - U2 [from October]

pipe tune
builds up
only to get to where the fade is

Rock and Roll - The Velvet Underground [from Another View]

trying different vocal persona, demo-ish, (or self study)
rough song, smooth coda
what might this sound like if we were to do it this way?

Playlist

Recorded

July 22, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 78 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]


the legendary push to 100 begins in earnest

Anna had decamped to San Diego, Neal to follow in a few weeks
we figured we could fill 23 sides if we got together as often as possible and made several sessions every time

with dulcimerian strum and guitar and funmaker
distinct presences playing pitches
vaguely downhome funmaker bend button to imitate saw or bee swarm

the relation between the metaphor of steady beat and the metaphor of click track clock time
each is a kind of virtual reality

Neal sings a sudden song Strange Animal interrupted by a wicked great funmaker effect
Sprite in punkissimo overdrive

clocktime is a metaphor of objectivity and reproducible results
beat is a metaphor of inner time - heartbeat breathing sleep
to conflate them is to sell beat short
to measure the rightness of a beat by its adherence or not to a click track clock time timepoint is to utterly mistake its subjective essence
trading image for fact

clavichord even gets in there most sinister of sounds

disproportionality is our speciality
does it go on too long?
experiments should not halt upon receipt of desired result
desiring a result is an ur-error

Stay Away - Nirvana [from Nevermind]

ferocious bass playing back there
sure like that fuzz box

Downtown Hangaround - Blank Its [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

minimalist patterning
nice focus
power suit

"...woe my road is spoken..." (first midi draft of May 29, 2006) - Keith Eisenbrey

another in a series of drafts of a set of variations for string quartet

affect is carrier wave for pitch set transformation

Life in a Marble - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

just a young man and his strummer joined by kin on cello and voice

Gradus 288 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2016]

the highest G

if the acoustic machine that is the piano
strings soundboard hammers frame harp dampers
could be adequately modeled algorithmically

then one could design interfaces for the dampers
on a gimble or as independently operated as the keys themselves

one to play the hammers
one to play the dampers

could virtual strings break?
algorithmic modeling of the sound of a string breaking?
virtually?

if it doesn't then the model is inadequate
limitations are important

the E comes in as though it hadn't really

July 24, 2018

Cavatina "una voce poco fa" - Rossini - Failoni Chamber Orchestra (Budapest), Will Humburg, Roberto Servile, Sonia Ganassi, Ramon Vargas, Angelo Romero, Franco de Grandis, Hungarian Radio Chorus [from Barber of Seville (Highlights)]

how exactly weight is adjusted to articulation

Don't Fish In My Sea - May Rainey, Jimmie Blythe [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

celebration within complaint
irrepressible right hand comments

Ubangi Stomp - Warren Smith [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

copping to racial thievery (N word trigger warning)

What A Sweet Thing That Was - The Shirelles [from Shirelles Anthology]

as crowded as the words are
there is lots of time for spare my my my my to spill out

Septet - Arthur Berger - The Contemporary Players [from Form]

long tones doled out sparingly
to tell
we search them out where they cling
past woods edge
a guide will be wanted
to return

Barefoot School - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Children's Choirs [from my Mom's tape of May 6, 1971]

I shared narration duties on this, and so it becomes one of the very earliest instance of recorded sound recognizable as me

our charming pious tale of spreading the benefits of civilization

July 25, 2018
I've Never Been In Love - The PK's [from a private tape]

history: the night before Karen went off to UPS at the end of the 1981 Summer in which we (she and I) happened to have both been in the same room at the same time for the first time Karen and Neal and Yvonne made this recording of their (really proto-PK's) collaboration. It was supposed to be a good tape.

Shut Out The Light - Bruce Springsteen [from Neal's mix-tape Six B-Sides]

story ballad family retrieval

Banned Rehearsal 268 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Paul Eisenbrey, and Aaron Keyt [September 1991]

clams up
big honk speaks across the spiral tape as it lies on its reel
J clears his throat
nervous sort of explosiveness
chatter
all the doo dah day yes sirree doo dah
buddha baby
imitates squeaky violin squeal
failure to incandesce but many many colorful bits
bug call

July 26, 2018
Haunted House - Fall-Outs [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

politely overdrawn accusation
gaslighted
never trust a breakup song

Song From The Storms and Winds - S. Eric Scribner [from Storm Sound Cycle, live at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, on May 21, 2011]

tone held through thundernuk place
within place within place

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 27 - July 6, 2018
Two Pomes Play - Keith Eisenbrey


Most of June and into July I was working on getting an adequate recording of these short two-voice

piano pieces. The first is one of my takes from June 27. I finally got the last one pretty well on July 6. These began their lives in the mid 90's as duets for clarinet and bassoon. In 2000 I transcribed them for piano solo.

July 23, 2018
Gradus 336 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

. . . and the fifth B
perihelion swerves of many kinds
lit up the bubble of now in etheric mind nowhere hidden

Playlist

Live

March 24, 2018
Études d'exécution imminent (as it stands)


Recent Solo Piano Compositions by Keith Eisenbrey

March 24, 2018, 8pm
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

10. Corollaries (Up's Up)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

11. Ghosting Doubles (first sighting) (after Amy Denio)

10. Corollaries (Down's Down)

9. Second Thoughts
                Aa
             Ba Bb
          Ca Cb Cc
       Da Db Dc Dd
    Ea Eb Ec Ed Ee
 Fa Fb Fc Fd Fe Ff

11. Ghosting Doubles (second sighting) (after Amy Denio)

10. Corollaries (Down's Up)

9. Second Thoughts
 Gb Gc Gd Ge Gf
 Hc Hd He Hf
 Id Ie If
 Je Jf
 Kf

11. Ghosting Doubles (third sighting) (after Amy Denio)

10. Corollaries (Up's Down)

"Ghosting" is composed by Amy Denio, © Spoot Music, ASCAP, and is used by the kind permission of the composer.

Recorded

March 25, 2018
Outlaw Drag - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

scholars of the sound the Puget Sound sound
reverb just so - check!
Hammond B3 - check!
all done up in 90's sound drag
an original instrument craze outside of ancient music fandom

Malevolent - Chris DeLaurenti [from Sonicabal 2001]

invisible thread narrative

Oboe di Morte - Brad Anderson [from Dark Energy - Interstellar Pianos]

the uninflected plainness of the oboe tune not unsubtly played but subtly laid out flat
behind it a roar not unlike wind noise
whatever it is it is coming nearer
how many oboes are there!! AAIEEEEEEEE!!!!

Assembly Rechoired 53 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [April 2011]

Rejiggerment after removal of the Mighty Wurgelitzer (sic)
drums first start with the throne
vacuum made of motor
quietly in the background a lovely capture of airplane
air in tube
engines winding their sounds around each other
or the differential arrival and warp through air mass the echo field
arrayed a raid
setting up the electric keyboard stand
plug it in
makes noise!
an assembly required assembly rechoired

High Goodbye - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

art school rock, but in the best possible way
in that the vocals are never straight sung but used to cause a mic effect
to cause a certain sound

The Second Grownde - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

O the joy of figuration!
a pleasurable hand twiddly activity
a pleasurable texture in the earbrain
as though fingers touched with tunes dance playfully
love the little cadenza tag

Brotherly Love - Elgar's Creole Orchestra [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

slapstick soundtrack showtune

Please Please Please - James Brown [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

invested in every repetition
low in his blues town register

Waltz for Debby (take 2) - Bill Evans Trio [from Waltz for Debby]

laid back for where it gets to

(I Know) I'm Losing You - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Othello post Iago
studio fade quick out

April 3, 2018
Unlabeled Track 7 - Tillicum Junior High School Band - Bob Runyan [from my mom's tape archive]

more jazz band - what is it about the transfer trajectory that so booms the bass?

Jamboree - Walt Wagner [from Caprice]

fast playing to no end at all

Adult Books - X [from Wild Gift]

X as Talking Heads if Talking Heads were X

April 5, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 73 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Wally Shoup [April 1986]

It has been a full couple of weeks in our family, which is why I missed blogging last Saturday. I got through 20 minutes of the wrong cut before I realized my error.

start over this time with Wally
history lesson
silent
announcer voice
as though the face of what is announced is in a universe with the what of what is announced

lumpy and clogged
exploring what does not flow
musicology of stagnation

mirror battle
insectoid exoskeletal
hive-y drone
seething mass
no let up
forever scribbling sound
until it does
respite

a brief cliché

discourse on polypulse

this was elsewhere
the ice storm the night Wally Shoup was in Barrytown
forgotten factoid recalled!

caw caw caw caw caw
where it goes after energy dissipates
loose mooring loose moorals

use fresh water
bring to a furious boil

Whirlpool - The Young Fresh Fellows [from Electric Bird Digest]

of whom?
friend done gone lost?
outside inside

(a solid grown-up song, if you're interested in my opinion)

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 26, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 955 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Live

February 2, 2018
Capella Romana, with guest conductor Marcel Pérès
St. James Cathedral, Seattle

Messe de Nostre Dame (with propers for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple and

the Purification of the Virgin Mary) - Guillaume de Machaut

The class in Ancient Music History that I took as, I think, a Sophomore, at the UW, was humming along without making much impact until the prof dropped the needle on this 14th Century wonder. My ears perked right up. A few weeks later Ockeghem produced a similar effect, but that's another story. I don't really know where to start, but even more so live than recorded (and I do have M. Pérès's Ensemble Organum recording) this is some seriously weird shit.

Unimaginably consonant spaces open up suddenly, like frozen dragons or sci-fi time bubbles. Beneath, in the murmur, multiple layers of articulate thinking, in scholastic process. Invention inventing itself anew.

Or: With one voice these ten men speak with all possible readings of meanings, a synthetic poly-voice, beyond any individual's utterance. A sense of meaning that only ten voices speaking as parts of one voice can speak. One thinks forward to Schoenberg's polyphonic voice of God in Moses und Aron, or (now bear with me here) to a completely integrated version of what David Bowie was up to with his multiply layered lead vocal tracks on "Stay".

Recorded

January 28, 2018
Rebreather goes octophonic at the Seattle Art Museum - Rebreather [from Sonicabal 2001]

sci-fi highway traffic, signal interceptions.

Gradus 96 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [April 2006]

The choosing of the particular distinction we make between 'the music' and 'the noise outside the music' as being the most problematic, or, that this is the distinction of all others that is the most virtuous to not make, but, leaving all the others, presumably, intact, becomes less a spiritual mode and more a cheap parlor game mind trick, like somersaults. That is, which part of the complex of which that complex distinction is made is it important to somehow not make? And how could I know if I were successful in not making that distinction, if I couldn't somehow specify the nature of the distinction I was not making - thus somehow putting myself in the position of focusing on the distinction that I must, virtuously, force myself not to make. To not make the distinction is to posit that music, all of it, is noise, and that noise, all of it, is music, neither of which positions I choose to hold. Neither music nor noise benefits from the nullity of the distinction. For me it is no either/or case between them. It will always be an open question, with ramified implications.

Your blogger, battling driftwood dragons

Very Nice Things - Youth Rescue Mission [from Youth Rescue Mission]

A recitation of privilege and grace, a self esteem bolsterer that veers, oddly, into humility, or, perhaps, satire of subtle sort.

Jerseyville Illinois (demo 160310) - Your Mother Should Know

Over there, in paradise.

January 30, 2018
The Passing Mesures, "The Ninthe Pavian" and The Galliarde to the Ninthe Pavian - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Each voice is an independent elaboration of exploratory elaboration. Query: did the notion of 'full score' arise out of the keyboardists' imitation of vocal counterpoint? I love the non-functional pitched sounds of harpsichords' releases at the ends of things. The Galliarde is a page of time spans crammed with curlicues.

Must Be Born Again - Rev. J. M. Gates [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

elbows all in

Ramblin' Round - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

The concept of gleaning and the mythos of the migrant worker, of internal refugees. Political note: Is it not ironic how the anti-immigrant rhetoric currently rampant among us fails so utterly to remember that, we are and always have been a nation of internal immigrants, and of internal refugees?

Matchbox - Carl Perkins [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

Early electronic music, as practiced outside of academic journals

Big Leg Women - James Easley, Guitar Pete Franklin, Raymond Holloway [from The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

A part (a big part) of what the blues always was: bend it up, bend it down. An improvisation-bent rhythm sculpture.

Mexico - Allen Toussaint [a Rescued Record]

Circling arrangement, a novelty riff that could go on forever, were we drunk enough.

Track 2 - Tillicum Junior High School Band [from my mom's tape of a concert given on March 3, 1971]

A march, sprightly!

Father Death Blues - Allen Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]

No more tune than necessary to transform either poem or song out of either poem or song. Depends on where you start.

February 1, 2018
Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey (recorded January 2010)

I wrote this set of tiny little pieces in 1981, while studying with John Rahn at the UW. They became,

Your blogger, in the past

after a fashion, my parting shot to undergraduate study. They are serial, being based on 5 note segments of a 10-tone row, and (if I remember rightly) quasi-Stravinskian rotational arrays. It was a 10-tone row, rather than 12, because I left two pitch-classes out entirely, creating a lumpy (or hole-some) aggregate. They were the first pieces I had presented in a while that came across like regular music: witty, melodic, full of stylistic references. Some members of the faculty at the time, who seemed (to me) to be regarding what I had been doing with increasing dismay, approved of my new-found musicality with relief. John couldn't, I think, resist the moment and announced that they were "probably the most sophisticated serial work any of his students had ever written." I don't think he really thought that at the time, but it was a pretty funny line, and I appreciated his support. Systems aside, I got quite a bit right in these: scale, proportion, lyrical wit. I will be performing them as part of my recital in February.

Hey Mr. Rain (version 2) - The Velvet Underground [from Another View]

Perfect title for a damp February evening. Mr. Cale's scribbling can't avoid sounding, occasionally, like it's about to go all concert virtuoso on us.

Banned Rehearsal 259 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 1991]

Stand back! It's right there big in your face when you push play. No intro. Then ultra-delicate sensations of reverb. Un-on-going flatly presented. Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite was no Hammond B3 but it had a sexy charm about it. Daddy's going to read Dante. Parenthood is an improvisatory art form. The concept of 'whole', i.e. completeness, as in beginning, middle, and end, is an unnecessary construct, an infliction upon music, alien to it. Activities can abort with salutory abruptness. Amid the reed and bow the quiet of nursing baby breathing. Contrasts made big with tape. Motto rhythm. Be wary of: It could have been done better. Often a hidden way of saying it could have been done so that it sounds more ordinary, or more professional. gag.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 29, 2018
Banned Telepath 59 Maple Leaf - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

January 30, 2018
Banned Telepath 59 Lake City- Aaron Keyt
Banned Rehearsal 951 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt Neal Kosály-Meyer

Those are Aaron's crows, in mid murder.

Playlist

Live

November 11, 2017

Amy Denio
Truth is Up for Grabs
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Pre: Neal tells us that 2/3 of Neal's & Anna's wedding brass ensemble is participating. Packed! All the chairs are brought out. Big enough to be a murmuring, luscious in this space.

The governing vibe is of a pit orchestra, rather than an art orchestra. That is, there is no concerted attempt on the part of the performers to transcend themselves and become else than a group of musicians playing this music.

Full tilt expression, nothing held back, nor humor nor sorrow nor low nor high nor ought nor else.

How they end (the songs): not quite abrupt(ly).

Recorded

November 11, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 620 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey,  Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [October 2001]


Snare drum springs soften the sax. I revisit an old thought. Weighty massive thoughts dimple the ground. Tattered banners bothered in a chilly wind. Dampers off the strings prolong sax bleats room eloquence. Frivolity kept away. Every thought is a palpable mass.

O Mary Don't You Weep - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

As (though) recorded live in a big living room.

Banned Rehearsal 787 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2011]

bits of sound barnacle the border
hints of vastness in the near distance
held back
drums guitar and bass a rock band
in the same sense we were ever a jazz band
"banned rehearsal" pronounced "scribble scribble"
eloquence feeds back has been trying to escape into glory
irreproducible results Neal sings!
It Was a Monday Evening
narrative church rhythm thank you very much
done found some groove we never found before and never will again
pure

Bulleya - Amit Mishra, Shipa Rao [from Bollygood Volume 2]

Values production value. What is this without its bells and whistles? Full throttle is the base line setting.

November 12, 2017

Your blogger, ca 2001

Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Recorded so that, or is it always that, harpsichord sound is more specifically localized than piano. It is lighter, pointier. Immense intellectual heft, lightly borne, tales within tales within could finish and be done several times but then continue on, again, into ravishing beauty.

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

To be inside this fuguescape fuguemare fugeuedral aware of the granular harmony of the spirit.

2nd fugue like a chapel echoes the cathedral and looook! we can open up this wall and create a third midsize space - and finally 3rd fugue here's the choir with our Orgelmeister Kappelmeister - an architectural tour, all the sites singing. Surely if this had gone on JSB had a grander weirder place for it to get to than any such place as it had already been.

Karen and me, 1986

November 13, 2017
Lazy Drag - Thomas Morris [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Light touch on the beat at the start, allowing them to fatten it up or thin it out as needed. Patterns of same.

Columbia's Waters - Woody Guthrie [from Columbia River Collection]

Conceit: this song is a job application in which many of WG's stock phrases are trotted out again. A window into a process of making.

For Minors Only - Chet Baker, Art Pepper [from Playboys]

Clearly, this track is a product, an object, quintessentially commercial.

Far and Wide - Brahms - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, Joanne Deacon [from A Musical Souvenir: The Lake Washington Singers Spring Concert (April 11, 1961)]

Some fine piano playing there, Joanne!

Hymnen - Stockhausen

Karen and Isaac, 1996

What is a theme within such a thicket?! A prop, a focus, a thread to follow, a placeholder: NOT THE SHOW.

I think to myself "this is the Stockhausen that got on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's." Extreme Ivesian quote festival. (I started composing about 10 years after this was made, and it only took me about 4 years to find it, for it to find me.) I spent a lot of time with it back in the day.

Sounds we follow as they variously incarnate and morph toward other veering incarnations.

Electronic music was what it is now, a bunch of folks playing with new toys. What sounds can we get on this? What are its sounds? Its voice? As it concerns radio: radio waves, invisible light, dark light, another dark, another sleep, another night, another wake. Front loaded: an active eventful texture, signals in transit, the harrowing descent, breathing human sleeping.

". . . nur eine Erinnerung": What does that actually do as an excuse for the böses Blut es gibt?

Some events are discrete moments, note-like - hard edged short events. Others are episodes of flange and sweep - long events. Flange-y buzz-hum-y waves rhythmed syllabically. We hear the timbre shift as a quasi-vowel shift. Thuds of war episode in third region where whistlers imitate the whole of what they are of in mimicry, in mimicry as a kind of abstraction. A full range of immediacy(ies) articulating murk.

November 14, 2017
Trust Me - Janis Joplin [from Pearl]

The plea goes on and on circling inside around the instrumentals, pleading never ending changes.

Still Crazy After All These Years - Paul Simon [from The Essential Paul Simon]

In a warm keyboard bath. Is it just me or did I really catch a partial quote of Bridge Over Troubled Water in the strings?

We're Desperate - X [from Wild Gift]

Structural density of the guitar/bass complex: leave space in the verse for the words, leave none in the chorus.

Banned Rehearsal 67 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 1986]

In the little Greenwood half house, sneezing, heater, hooting: slide show? Conversational, sort of, in that we are doing activities and also being with each other as just folks a little bit. Bumping around is up front, music as such, in deep background. Woozy but not unpleasantly so. Making spaghetti, it sticks good. Slow swing dinner in B-flat minor. This is our trademark DING! from a junkshop in Kingston NY. The tape machine has an eraserhead button (still does, long unpushed). "I hope that was intentional or not." My dad shows up, must have been something to do with my passport. Karen may have moved up to live with Neal & Anna while interviewing. Tri-doxology, para-para-doxology (hindsight) a hindsight. It is very nice it just slips underneath the skin. Berry-ness is discussed. Wild sound on acoustic guitar.

Polly- Nirvana [from NevermindWordblurbs in exact syllabic count fitted into soundblurb segments with pitch trajectories, a partial song. (Schumann's inescapable ghost.)

Banned Rehearsal 432 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 1986]

Paradise

We try to get something to work. Got those wah-wah tech blues. Aaron's synth, I believe, we struggle with the extent of our tech-savvy: this has an "in" that fits the guitar patch cord, therefore if we plug in the guitar to it we will automatically get magnificence. At the time it seemed, oddly, that nothing was happening, that the guitar strumming had no effect on what was coming out of the synth. The jury is still out on it, but the sounds of us struggling with it are fabulous. "It is my firm belief that with five more synthesizers we could achieve total silence." And yet, between the synth, the Mighty Wurzlitzer, and our direct to cassette mastering, I wonder if any prog rock band has ever sounded as good? the Tintinabulary at its finest. We don't do nicety.

Banned Rehearsal 621 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [November 2001]


Nothing to hear but you. You make the sound. In our digitally produced era there is more air between the sounds, which allows more expanse of surface with which to mess, more coast to invade. Plunks and hums tiny sounds of extreme interhearing. Down to pianississimo violin tremolo and small frame drum, ocarina moving between their soundboxes' resonances, articulating a shiver whistling in the dark.

November 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 698 -Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2006]


Testing the waters. It generally doesn't take much to get it going, inert as it is, (though it be), just takes the right gentle push prolonged just so long. After several false-like leads: snare drum, flute and buzz, but that also falters . . or wait, now it's moving. Reasons to hang in there. Seeping into other sounds groundwater invisible under cover of underground it sneaks past the carousel skimming the feedback fence, flirting with skimming it under cover of skimming past it we flirt under darkness with the broad light of it, of past days.

Goodbye Amsterdam - Rachel Harrington [from Celilo Falls]

Relations among people occur in landscapes. How much we leave - its expanse of sorrow - when we leave each other. Gentle stutters in the guitar figures.

Banned Rehearsal 906 -Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [March 2016]


Neal learns himself speaking. Tiny construction workers hammering miniature hammerings. Wallace watches o'er, duets across the continent with cowbell. Lightweight sphere rolls the texture of the drumskinhead amplified by circular tension applied. Copperpipe in syntheticfoam insulationtube squeak like balloons.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 12, 2017
Rain Traffic Crabby Crows - Keith Eisenbrey


Our best guess is that the crows were complaining about the rain.

November 14, 2017
Kitchen - Keith Eisenbrey


For the record: I didn't break anything.

November 15, 2017
Second Thoughts - Keith Eisenbrey

I finished composing the first eight Études d'exécution imminent in May of 2014. In terms of the original chart this was the half-way point, but I needed a break to re-think myself, to consider where the composition of these had gotten me, so I took a self-imposed sabbatical from composition - indifferently observed: news of the death of J. K. Randall brought forth a response in the form of J, (September 2014), I was asked to contribute to Ben Boretz's Festschrift (Another, December 2014) and I arranged a traditional hymn tune for Karen to sing just after Christmas (Hail the Blest Morn) - altogether a fairly productive sabbatical. In the spring of 2015 I started working on these disassembled piece parts, which together constitute the 9th Etude, finishing in August, 16 months later. That was a long time for just a few notes, but I flatter myself they are densely packed. Arranged as in this (not quite perfect) performance, one after the other, the piece parts play out the re-writing of memory as it is remembered and its eventual, inevitable, loss.