Playlist

Live

July 9, 2015
Earshot Jazz presents - Jazz: The Second Century
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Triptet - Tom Baker, Greg Campbell, Michael Monhart

enteringing to fill the front space with ringy hang (within which) to (or upon which) to elaborate (or from within which) to descend (like mist) or breeze or (with which) to (begin to) incise. {sound and its digital double} || colonization complete. look up the double. gallumpher gallumphing. squeak playset swings sloshing after loud big (settling) but sloshing calms leaving as entered - ringing but having brought forth and taken from: a melodious prize, a true tune.

Bloom - Brennan Carter, Levi Gillis, Mark Hunter, Jarred Katz

First: from melody (overlapping descending harmonies)
Second: from rhythm (all the places)
Third: from root moment (diaphragm accent)
Fourth: from air (breath of cymbal)
Fifth: from walking (-----)

July 10, 2015
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Keith Eisenbrey
Another - for solo piano

signs for Another - by Isaac Eisenbrey

(Sphinxes can appear most anywhere)
(Scarabs love to scuttle among the sphinxes)
(Pools stay put)
(Potions can be mixed together, bit to bit or batch to batch)
(All options remain open)
(Smoke is where it ends)
(As an alternative, try not filling the clavichord with ping-pong balls.)

Nadya Kadrevis

Nadya continues in her heroic quest to get it all down, all of it, beginning to end, top to bottom, as a lyric chamber work - modelling a mythology in melody.

S. Eric Scribner

Steve and I made a bunch of noise to some of his pre-recorded sounds. Having been on stage (having a grand time) I don't have much to say about how it came across out in the hall.

Kam Morrill

A work for piano trio full of faith in clear linear progression. Marvelous perturbations as the lines gently veer far and close.

Recorded

July 5, 2015
Ionisation - Edgard Varése - Juilliard Percussion Orchestra

a poem that is an army passing

July 7, 2015
Symphony in A minor op. 44 (#3) - Serge Rachmaninoff - St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

The soundtrack to some music. It has the uncomfortable feel of a staged scene of happy peasants engaged in pleasant peasanty behavior.

July 8, 2015
Alleluia & Fugue - Alan Hovhaness - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

As a pairing it's a bit of a bust. The Alleluia is a canon, so there are two contrapuntally derived forms in a row. This might work if the fugue were as colorful as the canon, but it isn't. The last bit of the Alleluia is especially nice, when the mix of vertically presented intervals shifts just a bit. It's a subtle technical change that has a profound impact on the sound.

Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra - Benjamin Britten - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy

Trapped by it's own orchestrational conceit, many an opportunity is missed.

Queen Bee - John Lee Hooker [from The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948 - 1954]

planet fat || daddy-long-legs delicate

Quartet in G (#6) - Dmitri Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam String Quartet

watched at all times (a pleasant face must be shown)

Hit the Road Jack - Ray Charles - [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Song writing/arranging reduced to focus alone.

Little Latin Lupe Lu - Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels - [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

That sloppy party feel, band in control.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

July 6, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 889 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

In which we meshmeld with the trafficsound.

Playlist

Live

March 6, 2015
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jeremiah Lawson

Jeremiah presented two sets, in C Major and C minor, of his 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo classical guitar, finding a personal place among several venerable instrumental traditions at once. In response to a question he stated that working the counterpoint out on paper as though it were for voices and then transcribing it for guitar worked well because the restrictions of vocal writing were more strict than for guitar. Fancy that!

Ann Cummings

In Three of a Kind for string bass, piano, and banjo, Ann and her collaborators Jesse Stout and Ethan Subotta aspire to reinvent gamelanic polyrhythms from the ground up. The spectacular result here sounded like a giant autoharp. What fun!

Clement Reid

Each of us has their particular life within the music we know, our peculiar histories within the music that fascinates us. A large part of the value, for me, of the Salon is its function as a sharing of those histories and those lives. For me as a habitual composer of solo piano music, Clement's music underscores just how varied those histories can be. Dreams and Improvisations are composed of six (if I heard correctly) pieces fully of splashy inside-the-piano sounds and un-fussy tunes. I've said this before, but his approach reminds me of Greg Short in its easy acceptance of all manner of crazy within a familiar setting. Its strength is not in its newness, but in its imaginative amiability.

Nadya Kandrevis and Jeremy Shaskus

Part One - Creation for cello, piano, and soprano saxophone. What is clear is that something of vital importance is being worked out. The arena in which the work occurs is as personal and private as it gets, that is to say, it is of the greatest possible vastness. Some comments were made about the relative temporal segregation of the instruments. To my ear (as it was to others I think) this feature was its power. If I have a comment I would suggest drilling this segregation even further, down into the individual parts. The less like regular music this was the more I was digging it.

Recorded

February 28, 2015
Concerto in C (#3) - Prokofiev - Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrei Chistyakov, Evgenyi Kissin

A music of two lives or spiritual locations - one workaday, busy, vigorous: a public face; the other dreamy, sentimental, languid: a private face.

Concerto #1  - Bartok - London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis, Stephen Bishop

Tight canons to startle and scare. The patterns increment stepwise to plateaus. In terms of treating many of the instruments as percussion it follows the example of Stravinsky, but in a more linear concert piece trajectory - the new ensconced in the comfortably established. It gets pretty interesting when it reduces itself to little more than a field of colored impulses.

Arthur Grumiaux

Violin Concerto in D - Stravinsky - Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Ernest Bour, Arthur Grumiaux

A still picture, framed, An evoked place rather than a story to tell. Energized stasis by means of constant misdirection.

March 3, 2015
Quartet #4 - Schoenberg - LaSalle Quartet

From under a crab's carapace a tiny window looks out upon a dingy yard. What is possible is only so for a moment, at each moment it is more of a struggle.

A Pixie From Dixie - Fletcher Henderson

Sounds are arranged in pairs (brass / reeds :: piano/guitar / string bass) with a Haydnesque sophistication. We can dance because our place here is clear, socially unambiguous. Subversive role reversals occur within careful bounds.

Quartet #3 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam Quartet

a comic song (don't look

behind you)

chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk

see

I'm being good 

looked didn't you

lament is perilous

(if it can be imputed to the soul it can be pathologized)

back to comic song

good boy

unwilling to ever

ever ever

leave

In Session at the Tintinabulary

March 1, 2015

like the one on the left -
but I think I paid more for it

Silvertone 150301
Silvertone 150301 folded
Silvertone 150301 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvising on my first electric guitar, a hollow body with three pickups. Pretty sweet.

March 2, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 880 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer

No accompaniment from the snowy east this time.