Playlist

Recorded

August 5, 2015

Webern

2 Songs op. 19 - Webern - London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, John Alldis Choir

A crime scene as perceived by Holmes - that is, like a chessboard as perceived by a GM.

Violin Concerto in D - Stravinsky - Philharmonia Orchestra, Paul Sacher, Anne-Sophie Mutter

It gets down to the most disregardable detail of oom-pah, effecting an image of a complex contrapuntal texture by allowing just a few voices to make repeated stuttering do-overs to emerge from the still very clearly delineated actual on-going contrapuntal texture.

Symphony No. 1 - Barber - St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin

Having missed the boat for Sehnsucht we embark for fond regrets and reluctant resolve.

Georgia On My Mind - Delta Rhythm Boys [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Romans Ten and Nine - Bailey Brothers [from Goodbye Babylon]

August 6, 2015
Aviary - Charlie Mariano [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

After the head, solos descend until nothing is left but piano and rhythm.

Tutti Frutti - Little Richard - [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock and Soul]

Little Richard

Mostly just a quick tempo nonsense blues riding on a dynamite cult-of-personality delivery, until it ends with a devastating, final, lonely, solo "boom" that vanishes into the hollow room.

Confidential - The Fleetwoods [from The Very Best of the Fleetwoods, Come Softly To Me]

Mass market intimacy.

Let's Go Get Stoned - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock and Soul]

If memory serves, one never sees a cigarette touch lips in the film Thank You for Smoking. Likewise, one never hears Ray himself sing or speak the line "Let's go get stoned." His way is to duck and weave.

Symphony in A (#15) - Shostakovich - Moscow Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Maksim Shostakovich

One could read the musical quotations, from Guillaume Tell and Die Walküre, as a skeleton key to DS's arsenal of symphonic affects and their possible respective political derivations: from public and private revolt.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 3, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 891 - Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

On the porch again, we begin almost to approach being indistinguishable from the neighborhood of sounds. Neal decided to go home and get some sleep before we started, but Jenny joins us part way through.

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

Recorded

June 6, 2015

Preludes and Fugues (selections) - Shostakovich - Shostakovich

Rather than being at one with, and ever-creating, the tonal world in which they exist and persist, these float precariously, as on a boat perched on an obliquely gravitic tide. The sea lists around us, emptier now than in the ever-referenced past.

Blue Suede Shoes - Carl Perkins [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Each part alike aware of its balance and bounce.

Come On - Chuck Berry [from The Best of Chuck Berry]

Rock solid everything but guitar, which blows like the wind all over wheresoever.

When a Man Loves a Woman - Percy Sledge [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

How he wished he never loved thee, let him count the ways.

String Quartet #3 - Elliott Carter - Julliard String Quartet

A rain forest seen in all its particulars, from all frames of reference, at all removes, in each scale of magnitude.

Night Moves - Bob Seger [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

One of those cleverly disruptive lexical shifts that is more effective than it ought to be, as moves moves from noun to verb, as night moves from adjective to noun, the syntax of each word lurching to the left, as the song's voice moves from active ("working on my night moves") to lyric imagery ("the night moves").

Go Wild In The Country - Bow Wow Wow

a calibrated whine/tantrum.

Word Up - Cameo [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Clarity preserved by tying up all the resonances in tight little bunches, shrink-wrapped.

June 9, 2015
Syrens - St. Elmo's Choir

An album of sea-shanties (mostly I think of English origin) arranged for female voices. Reminiscent in a way of the more famous Bulgarian folk songs that made such a splash a few decades back.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 7, 2015
Duet 150607 - Keith Eisenbrey

I improvised on toy steel drum and then on wooden transverse flute.

June 8, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 887 - Pete Comley, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Our first porch session of the summer, recorded using a four-track zoom, two channels aimed at the porch, the others aimed into the neighborhood.

Playlist

Live

April 23, 2015
Nick Norton, John Teske, Nat Evans
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

New Forest - Nat Evans

We arrived about 20 minutes in, so the first experience was simply that of entering a room from which a particular color of quietness emanated. Upon this fabric was set, at long intervals, a couple of older jazz recordings. There was enough space between these that they didn't become the main focus, but operated as markers, cairns, a known place for our own calibration.

Does it help, or is it essential, to know certain facts about a music in order to perceive it most clearly? I had known a little going in: that it involved field recordings made on Nat's recent trek on the Pacific Coast Trail. In the notes it is disclosed that these particular recordings are from forest areas that had been clearcut in the '40s or '50s, and that the recordings are 78s inherited from Nat's grandfather, who studied forestry at about that time. This is all interesting from a journalistic perspective, but I remain skeptical that the knowledge of it improves the aesthetic experience.

For my part, the hardcore interaction between the presence of the forest sound as it fell into distance and the etched surface of the surfacing past of the 78s sound was the big hit. The rest is just part of what it took Nat to get there, it isn't the there. It is important to Nat's relation to his work, but not necessarily to ours.

Texture Sketch I - Nick Norton
Allison Fann, viola; Ivan Arteaga, alto saxophone; Nick Norton, guitar; Neil Welch, tenor saxophone; Peter Tracy, cello; John Teske, double bass

A skein that tightens as it rises.

All The Wrong Notes - Nick Norton
Cristina Valdes, piano

Two-fisted piano writing written, apparently, in order for there to be another piece of two-fisted piano music. Cristina was fabulous as always, but this one failed to convince.

topographies - John Teske
same personnel as in Texture Sketch I

I have been a map nut from a tender age, so this piece plugs into several of my nerd-nodes. In the observation of landforms we can surmise numerous processes and forces and materials at work. Maps are abstracts of the results, representations of several dimensions of data on a surface. Those abstractions are used as a stimulus to other forces, processes and personalities (with all their inscrutable complexities) in order to produce a sound which is itself an abstraction of all the underlying data and which, as it presents itself in time, comes across as nothing so much as landforms made audible.

It was a pleasure to hear these again.

Recorded

April 18, 2015
Symphony #3 op. 27 "Sinfonia Espansiva" - Carl Nielsen - Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Yuri Ahronovitch

This is big drama music that doesn't behave like a stage drama. It is more high steel than Macbeth. Its parts don't fit together with specious inevitability, but are set against each other and folded into each other curatorially. Each episode is enlivened inside itself rather than tensing us into looking where we are going. No matter where one listens in this music it is as though there were a ripple in the glass. Nothing can be heard straight.

Karol Szymanowski

Violin Concerto #1 - Karol Szymanowski - Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Jan Krenz, Shizuka Ishikawa

As though Wagner's forest bird had wandered into the first scene of Pelleas and never recovered.

April 20, 2015
Symphony in B-flat (#2) - Albert Roussel - Orchestre National de France, Charles Dutoit

Begins by repeatedly breaking from darkness into darkness. It eventually bursts into energy, though it never escapes the morass.

Tapiola - Jean Sibelius - Boston Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis

Threadbare, stained, faded. Worn utterly away in many places, in others preserved in sudden flashes from another realm. This fairy tale is less Disney, more Grimm.

Concerto in B-flat (#4) op. 53 - Serge Prokofiev - Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, Antoni Wit, Kun Woo Paik

Punched, squeezed, and shoved into place. Build them, put them on a shelf. There they stay.

April 21, 2014
Symphony #4 -  Dmitri Shostakovich - Moscow Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, Kiril Kondrashin

An immense quantity of individual rooms, voices speaking in layers of imperiled code. Not heartfelt because it can't be. Intricately speaking to its own inability to speak.

William Bergsma

April 22, 2014
Gold and The Señor Commandante Ballet Suite - William Bergsma - Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra, Howard Hanson

One regret I have looking back on my years at the UW was that I never took any classes from William Bergsma. Here it is demonstrated that he composed the Jaws not safe in the water right now theme several decades before it wasn't safe in the water anymore. The wickedly fabulous Eastman-Rochester crew sound great here, engineered so that the dynamic contrasts take your breath away.

Symphony #2 - Roger Sessions - New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos

Muscular, taut, frenetic - all apropos of 1946.

String Quartet #1 - Elliott Carter - Julliard String Quartet

Pushing the extremes of voice/instrument integrity and contrapuntal independence, with a gut punch intensity.

Blueberry Hill - Fats Domino [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock and Soul]

Smooth and solid. Nothing stands out until the last drum bang.

Klavierstuck 10 - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky

A discourse on our sense of quantity. Some aspects are clearly numerable. Others are clearly not.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 19, 2015
Duet 150419 - Keith Eisenbrey

I was on vacation this week so I was very busy. This first duet features my mom's nylon string guitar (Franciscan) and the contents of the big red bag of fun.

April 20, 2015
Gradus 264 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

If the piano keyboard represents a binary numbering system (played = 1, not played = 0), then each combination can be represented by a quantity. We could do math!

April 21, 2015
Duet 150421 - Keith Eisenbrey

This day's duet was with upright grand piano (1908 Kingsbury) in need of tuning, and snare drum (Gretsch).

April 22, 2015
Duet 150422 - Keith Eisenbrey

Viola and pendant pot lids.

April 23, 2015
Duet 150423 - Keith Eisenbrey

Acoustic guitar with pickup (Mitchell) through a Sunn amp, paired with a locally made wood-body drum (Sawatch).

Études d'exécution imminent - Keith Eisenbrey

This was my last composition before I went on a self-imposed sabbatical last Spring. I am fascinated with music that lives at the edge of its own beingness - pieces that are only just barely pieces, or perhaps aren't quite. I've been working them up for presentation next August, and took the opportunity afforded by my vacation to record them.

April 24, 2015
Duet 150424 - Keith Eisenbrey

Solid body electric guitar (Peavey) on long-term loan from my brother Paul, and bodhrán. I learned (while making sure I spelled that correctly) that the little wooden beater is called a 'tipper'. I turned the amp up pretty loud.

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.

Playlist

Live

January 5, 2015

Jimu Makurumbandi

Jimu and Anesu
University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

Our friends from Zimbabwe are off for Norway and gave our church a wonderful little concert as a farewell. They perform intricate arrangements of traditional and quasi-traditional songs accompanied on kora, mbiru, djembe, and shaker. An hour and a half is too little time, but we heard some wonderful sounds from a place where music seems to still be people-sized, easily at home with folks rather than held close by an industry of experts. We will miss them much.

January 9, 2015
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Ivan Arteaga

Ensemble: 3 string basses and 4 saxophones. A solid sound from which globules emerge and swerve, splinter and glint.

Cole Bratcher

Ensemble: voice and piano. A song steeped in the excruciating intimacy of an old family letter.

Fungus on the Trail of Shadows, Longmire, Washington

Neil Welch

Plays solo saxophone. Explores the lyrical possibilities of sounds that hover between timbre and chord.

Matthew James Briggs

Frog sounds imported from a Bali rice field anchored in our space by precisely rung notes on the piano, high and low.

Recorded

January 4, 2015
Symphony in F minor (#1) - Shostakovich - L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Walter Weller

Every statement is coloristically qualified, instrumentally specific.

Sun Treader - Carl Ruggles - Buffalo Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas

All singularities brachiate in grains and veins of quartz. The question attempts to drown itself in its own reiterations.

String Quartet #4 - Zemlinksy - LaSalle Quartet

Fighting an incline of its own devising, every growth a decay.

January 6, 2015
Symphony #1 - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz

Industrious agents, working in a space removed, build motor segments from narrow populations of durations. Relations flash across the surface.

Symphony #5 - Martinu - Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Vaclav Neumann

We creep back into the disconcerting day, into the glory of the new normal. Our hope is examined in the harsh light of war. We make what we can of it.

I discover that the last time I listened to this piece was also on a January 6, back in 2003. In  my journal I find: "Each idea has an ubiquitous shadow."

Sonata #1 - John Verrall - Kimberly Davenport

Up- or other-rooted architecture. Feast macabre. Great effort is made to be what one always was, though nothing is left unwarped. Ravel re-inventing himself from recalcitrant scraps.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

Janaury 4, 2015
Coronet 150104
Coronet 150104 Folded
Coronet 150104 Folded Rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

I started another cycle of instrumental improvisations and attendant digital manipulation on the bass guitar I have on long-term loan from Steve Kennedy. Folded means I cut the sound file in half and layered the second half over the first. Rubbed means I took the folded file and ran it through a digital effect to see what would come out the other end. I'm still not sure about the results, so I'll just share the folded version.

Playlist

Live

November 1, 2014
Don Giovanni - Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

Listen again to the opening chords, how the bass emerges, swallowing. The entire argument of the opera played out in a few seconds.

Carbon Glacier, Mt. Rainier National Park - 1976

November 7, 2014
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jacob Zimmerman - selections from a larger set of duets

Jacob was joined by Christian Pincock and Jeff Draper (is that right?) in three duets involving combinations of tenor sax, trombone, and a tray full of electronics featuring a hot pink telephone handset. Each duet proceeded as a series of discrete event-moments of carefully varied length, each event-moment a lively duality within itself - like a first-species counterpoint of timbre-complexes.

S. Eric Scribner - selections from a larger set of compositions involving field recordings and found
objects.

I was involved as a performer for Steve's pieces so I don't have a good read on how these came across. Only one of the three selections (the middle one) had a written score, essentially just outlining the density of things to do. The two others consisted of the instructions "kind of noisy" (the first one) and "sustained sounds" (the third one).

Nat Evans - a study using field recordings from The Tortoise

Layers of desert wind, horse-bells and cow-bells (Mahler's last sounds?), deep gongs. Images of movement within stillness and stillness within movement, all of it palpably ancient.

Keith Eisenbrey - J - a solo piano piece written in remembrance of the late J. K. Randall.

I wrote this piece in the Chapel Performance Space last September, while listening to Neil Welch remember the victims of the Cafe Racer shooting. The recording is available on my soundcloud site.

Recorded

November 1, 2014
Two Episodes from Faust - Liszt - Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest, James Conlon

This is the stage scenery in which one imagines operatic action taking place. Particular drama needs to be supplied by the audience's sensibility. There is nothing given but an ambiguous trajectory.

November 3, 2014
Schicksalslied - Brahms - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, Ambrosian Chorus, John McCarthy

What has been prepared slips to the side. What persists is interrupted, deflected. What we build, dauntless, evaporates.

Variations on a Rococo Theme op. 37 - Tchaikovsky - Northern Sinfonia Orchestra, Yan-Pascal Tortelier, Paul Tortelier
Sonata-Fantasie in G-sharp minor - Scriabin - Michael Ponti

If this were a film the camera would always be in motion, circular, dancing around its subject.

Symphony in C-minor (#1) - Bruckner - Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, Gunter Wand

Like Berlioz, Bruckner has a characteristic flavor of non sequitur. Where Berlioz will drop in just exactly the wrong affect (and then demonstrate that it was exactly correct) Bruckner goes for registration or scale, lurching us forward in time or plummeting us from tiny to vast, or vaporizing the solid rock we were clinging to, leaving us utterly without being.

November 4, 2014
Love Songs After Foster - The Gregg Smith Singers, The New York Vocal Arts Ensemble

Comfort music then: cleaned up for parlor use, non-threatening - possibly even worse now: the nonironic ironic nonironic.

Concerto in C minor (#2) - Rachmaninoff - Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Rachmaninoff

Imperialism's fatal nostalgia for its own sweet fictions.

The Ragtime Dance - Scott Joplin - William Albright
Finale aus der III Sinfonie - Louis Vierne - Stanislav Surin

Sound fills space from all sides, dissociating what we are hearing from any possibility that a single person could be responsible for it all.

Renard - Stravinsky - Columbia Chamber Ensemble, Igor Stravinsky

The first, and perhaps only, punk rock opera. Brutally perfect.

6 Songs op. 14 - Webern - Heather Harper
Concerto #1 - Bartok - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, Maurizio Pollini
String Quartet - Ruth Crawford Seeger - Pellegrini Quartet

a thorny hedge

a hashing out in court of law

a discussion in the back rows

in the trees just past firelight undulating

November 5, 2014
Psalm - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

A neo-classical mind struggles with the facts of violence.

Melancholy Baby/Rhythm Riff/Nice Work If You Can Get It - Thelonius Monk [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Naked City - Raymond Scott [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The sound is a stunner: a nearly shrill violin, a baritone sax up from miles deep.

Women In My Life  - John Lee Hooker

The guitar sound pulled fat and the stomp stomp stomp stomped with some crazy palmwine mojo, this is in no meter known to any but JLH.

Klavierstück XI - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky
One Little Star - The Fleetwoods

Self-absorbed, cushioned, protected, oblivious.

Quartet in F minor (#11) - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam String Quartet

As though from in hiding. Music for narrow dark passages.

The Lovers - Samuel Barber - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Schenck, Dale Duesing

The odd politics of inflating personal intimacy into the realm of corporate expression. Or perhaps merely the high-falutin' counterpart of The Fleetwoods' eternal adolescence.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 2, 2014
Samick - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvising on a miniature electric guitar.

November 3, 2014
Gradus 255 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Live

 

August 16, 2014

Noisegasm, Coreena, Ron Rice, Seattle Noise Collective, Distorrent

Coreena

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

It is commonly perceived that the rather static theater of performers standing behind tables twiddling knobs is a problem for the audience.There's a bunch of noise coming at us, but those responsible don't appear to be doing anything, or at least they don't seem to be doing anything commensurate with the sound. There is a disconnection between the visual and audible. When a pianist is performing, for instance, there is a clear correlation between keys we can see being pressed and the tunes we hear, and to a certain extent, between the range of motion of the pianist's arms and wrists, and volume of sound. A certain amount of this is necessary just to play correctly, but if truth be told, much of the flamboyance seen on the regular concert stage is unnecessary and frankly kind of icky.

 

So what's to be done if you're a knob twiddler? One option would be to do nothing at all. Another would be to dress in costume and/or incorporate a dance routine like a big name pop act (please don't). Or, as done on this night, one could provide a video back drop, a new-fangled light show like a 70's prog rock outfit. The problem then is that we read it as a film, and we want it to be at least as interesting as the sound we're hearing, or perhaps to offer a salient comment upon it, give us some reason to be seeing what we're seeing other than to distract us from the people on the stage. I really tried through a good part of the show to find such a reason for the video to be, but in the end it just looked like a souped-up spin cycle and I would not have missed it.

 

Complaining is now done. Each of the groups or acts or collectives or whatever they call themselves was a different take on playing with synthesizers, and enjoying the hell out of filling the space with high definition bigness. A real ear scour. Next time I'll just keep my eyes closed.

 

August 22, 2014

(The) Nature (of) Sound - S. Eric Scribner

Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle

 

I played a small part in this production. If you listen closely you may occasionally hear the sound of a toy steel drum. That's me.

 

None of this should work at all. A quiet sound track of birds and such with an oh-so-careful overdub of instruments all spaced out wide. And on the screen what is really just a pretty slide show with an achingly slow fade. But the effect is complete magic, as though one were plunging vertically through the experience of dawn in an alien geometry. Up, down, left, right, fore, back, all gone or rather never been. This is not a new planet, it is in (if there is anything like 'in' here) some radical cosmic otherwhere (if there is anything like a 'where' here).

 

The installation will be up through October 24. I have linked to the gallery above for details.

 

Recorded

 

August 19, 2014

Symphony in C "Leningrad" - Shostakovich - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Berglund

 

The concern here is the mediation of the personal with the public. The cumulatorific set-piece in the first movement notwithstanding, the most typical gesture is a retreat into isolation. Very slowly it is acknowledged that we are, after all, in a public space together. And so, each of us takes what we are given, transforms it a bit, and passes the baton to the next of us. The musical material itself, for all its coloristic shenanigans, is as abstractly functional as could be. This little theme takes us up a Major 2nd. This one shifts the focus from the 3rd of a harmony to the 5th. They are bricks.

 

August 20, 2014

Concerto for Oboe - Strauss - Staatskappele Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, Manfred Clement

 

A bit more complaining: this recording is engineered so that the solo oboe has the sheer volume to be in front of anything and everything. This seems to my ears to be a gross exaggeration of what I hope was intended to be a more subtle play of balance between the forces.

 

Fantasy Variations on a Theme of Youth - Howard Hanson - New World Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Carol Rosenberger

 

The material is packed tight, trunked for decades. The creases have become permanent.

 

August 21, 2014

Maybellene - Elvis Presley [from The First Live Recordings]

Lover's Island - The Blue Jays [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

 

The line between doo-wop and barbershop is nowhere thinner than here.

 

The Owl and the Pussycat - Stravinsky - Adrienne Albert, Robert Craft

 

As perfect an art-song as there could be. It is utterly endearing but eschews sentiment or word-painting, focusing the sing-song rhythm of the text, illuminating coolly, just enough. All that and a contrupantal accompaniment as runsible as could be.

 

The Line Between Love and Hate - The Persuaders [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

August 16, 2014

Like a Bird on the Deep - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

The Packard

 

Karen and I recorded a version of my hymn tune composed to a text by Fanny Crosby. We did this partly as part of a project to record all my hymns and partly as a 90th birthday audio-card for our Aunt Mary Ellen Juhola, who so graciously passed her beautiful old pump organ to us recently. There is a bit of wheezing and creaking but Karen and the harmonium both sound pretty good.

 

August 18, 2014

Gradus 249 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

 

In time past great effort was placed on transcending the bar-line. These days we are struggling with the metaphor of the singular note, with the irreducible token of information. Dissection is a common strategy, or we might collide them like protons.

 

The second half of the session was a cat's cradle.

Playlist

Recorded

2/26/2011
The Unashamed Accompanist - Gerald Moore

I don't want to make too much of this recorded lecture by the eminent accompanist, the main point of which is that accompanists have a difficult but rewarding job and that 19th Century art songs are duets in which both pianist and singer have important roles. Hardly earth-shaking propositions. But a common attitude about words and music hangs unexamined throughout: that the point of the music is to reflect the meaning of the words, to act as an illustration for the poem. The problem is that we are postulating that the composer intended to construct a music that disappears into a visual or poetic image, that he intended to write a music that we listen to without hearing. We are asked to play so as to deflect attention from possible musical experiences in favor of something else. Should this really be our default attitude?

Fool, Fool, Fool - Elvis Presley
String Quartet in f-sharp minor, op. 108 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam SQ

Skeletal, ghastly, and icily pure, this is the thinking person's Shostakovich - frantic structuralism barely clinging to the pretense of continuity.

2/27/2011
Mikrophonie I - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky, Johannes Fritsch, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Fred Alings, Harald Boje, Jaap Spek, Hugh Davies

Episodes without trajectory, the structurally sensual now.

Pole - Stockhausen - Harald Boje, Peter Eotvos

Popular, in that the greater culture leaks in, is roughed up, is consumed.

Tierkreis - Stockhausen - Markus Stockhausen

Little studies in continuity, lyricism, and contrast. Personal and lovely.

3/1/2011
Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey

My live performance of June 6, 2009. The various species of pauses and interruptions are more clearly distinguished here than in my other performances, and I managed to refrain from rushing as much as I usually do. The Chapel piano sounds good.

Pastorale 85 01 13B - Keith Eisenbrey - Fehrwood Ensemble

For this run-through I had the players cut each note short - not quite staccato, but using only enough duration to voice the pitch. As I recall, I later did some cheap overdubbing of this cut (using two cassette decks, to one of which a switch was added to toggle the erase head).

Banned Rehearsal 210 - Banned Rehearsal
Rough throughout, but exquisite right at the end.

3/3/2011
Mad Science ca. 2000 - John Eisenbrey

This little two minute tape showed up in a box recently. My son John had made it at an after school class when he was 9 or 10 or so. Among the over-amply-reverberated fart noises the big surprise was a spontaneous and enthusiastic performance of a little song we invented to amuse the kids in the car: "Do the Weedy Weedy at the Bop".

Two by Four - Tom Baker - Jesse Canterbury, William O. Smith

Allowing time for complex steady states to unfold, to define themselves, to allow thinking in their terms.

Strange Flower (album) - The Tipton Saxophone Quartet

Something about the flattened melodicism of the vocal lines in the last cut reminded me suddenly of Brian Eno. The mind does odd things now and then.


Live

2/28/2011
Gradus 188 - Neal Meyer

3/4/2011

Seattle Composer's Salon at the Chapel Performance Space, Seattle

Wayne Horvitz

Wayne provided a brief overview of his life in composition, with samples - a window into the inherent chaos of a creative mind. I was left with the image of a vital exploratory imagination rooted in a deeply personal demotic sensibility. I would also like to hear that piece for rainstick and paper bag he mentioned, whether Schoenberg comes back from the dead to write it, or whether Wayne writes it himself.