Playlist

Live

September 22, 2017

Fantastical Sounds: Music from Tond
Steve Scribner, author, composer
Tond Band: Phillip Arnautoff (sampled), Molly Bauckham Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Carol Levin, Linda Rio, Steve Scribner, and Waterbound (Mimi and Steve Akerman).
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Fyorian:
Prologue (Folk Dance)
Reading from Book One
Excerpt from the Song of Origins
Kitál (dulcimer) improvisation
Táluwaa (Dance-based classical piece)

Karjannic:
Reading from Book Two
Srakah (classical piece)
Reading from Book Three
Tsajkoo Chaebrwakak (Epic Poem with Music)

Sherványa:
Reading from Book Three
The Sherványa Nocturnal Music

As I understand it, this project arose 40 plus years ago as an invented language, followed by (order matters not) an invented culture, an invented continent (Tond), several other invented languages with invented cultures to match, a tale (in three volumes), and, these being humans, musics, and Steve being Steve, a concert of such.

The musics are constructed, it would seem, from a grab-bag of musicological attributes of the sort one might expect musics to possess, culled from here and there: a bit of Japan, a bit of India, a bit of Steve Reich, etc. - Steve (Scribner) being a consummate taxonomist of musics I can't begin to even hint at the range of bits one might find if one took the time to dig.

To me, the idea of inventing a language seems perverse, and that of composing music from general attributes inward equally if not more so, and I find myself, considering what Steve is proposing to do, wondering how it could possibly work, how it could avoid simply being, well, lame. However, it always does work, and it always astounds me just how blisteringly well it does.

We performed with almost no rehearsal, just a quickened run-through that ended moments before the doors opened. The scores are part instruction, part graphic notation, part (minimal) standard notation, and part quasi-musicological stage setting - incomplete: one is never quite certain that a train wreck isn't inevitable. Essentially it boils down to "Here is what I imagine happening. Make it so." As performers we are not so much given agency as we are forced to grasp it for dear life. It just can't work, and yet it does. Every time. It's kind of exciting.

Looked at another way, he is simply inventing possibilities and collecting collaborators. Does it matter whether that is composition or not? Given the enrapturing results, I guess not.

Whatever's next, I'm probably up for it.

Recorded

September 17, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 616 - Isaac E, John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [September 2001]



inchworm turn by inchworm turn
drum led
the action is in the side-confabulations
patchy and disjointed

September 21, 2017
High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Recorded live in June of 2006 at University Temple United Methodist Church, it projects the varieties of acoustically charged stance within reverb resonance that originally caught my ear and generated the piece in the first place || that caught my ear while reading through Benjamin Boretz's O, listening to that final (0,1) simultaneity ssshhhimmer || that final (0,1) arrived at via cycle of diminishing intervals climbing into the keytops || starting there and flipping the cycle but continuing the climb, hanging higher into the keytops || from each ssshhhimmer higher gazing back downward  briefly into the brachiate undergirdings [spoiler: undergirdings made of those notes below, which contain within them the individuals of the high dyadic simultaneity as acoustic partials]: an ad-hoc etude.

Shaprece

Love Emergency - Shaprece [from Scatterbrain]

The heady imperative of young lust.









Banned Rehearsal 905 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer


Melody is a structure built in memory, harmony is a structure built from analysis. Music in the wild proliferates dimensions, acting not in but upon our experience of time.

A poly-sentient rattle we pick up now and again and again to shake.
A radio orchestra :: twiddlydials of musical intentions
Shortwave consciousness
Musical thinking as it happens

(as it happens)

Piano plays at either end
Poetry plain as rocks

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 18, 2017

Gradus 321 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Sounding like a chord
is a choice not often made
a prolongation of arpeggiated arpeggiation
a line protracted into the abyss

Playlist

Live

March 2, 2017

James Falzone & Bonnie Whiting

Utterances - music based on text, spoken word, and translation
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Bonnie Whiting: percussion
James Falzone: clarinet, piano, shruti box, bells
with special guests:
Beth Fleenor: bass clarinet
Ivan Arteaga: alto saxophone and clarinet
Neil Welch: tenor and soprano saxophone
Steve Treseler: tenor saxophone and clarinet
Eric Vanderbilt-Mathews: alto saxophone and clarinet

Prelude - Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone, 2017
Amazonia Dreaming - Annea Lockwood, 1987
Sighs Too Deep For Words - James Falzone, 2017
Exercise No. 4 for Hands Right, Left and Deserted Mouth - Susan Parenti, 1984
The Room Is - James Falzone, 2013
Perishable Structures That Would Be Social Events, IV. Varése - Bonnie Whiting, 2017
White (part 1) - James Falzone, 2013
Your Thoughts While Listening - Richard Logan-Greene, 2015
White (part 2) - James Falzone, 2013
Toucher - Vinko Globokar, 2013
Grace and Chance (at the same time) - James Falzone, 2015
Postlude - Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone, 2017

The event as a whole wholly subsumed its constituent parts. Not that each part was not utterly distinct in its own integral event-ness, but that each part gave itself up wholly, in all of each of its integral event-nesses, to the passage of the event as a whole. That is, each event's moments were lifted into a status within the whole event that outshone their narrower moment-hoods. This doesn't just happen. Serious lifting was involved.

One hell of a band too.

March 3, 2017
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Sheila Bristow :: two songs: Strong Wisdom and Leap Into Love, for mezzo-soprano, piano, and cello. Melissa Plagemann sang, Sheila played piano, and Meg Brennand was her usual magnificence on the cello. Sheila has been working on this set for some time now and we have heard earlier versions of at least one of them at other Salons. I admire her straight-ahead, get out of the way of the text, illustrate clearly without over dramatizing things approach to song writing. Although her style is nothing like my own, the attitude is like, and refreshing. The entire cycle will be presented at the Chapel on April 8.

Steve Eric Scribner :: Tree and Stone (Artificial Version), for paper tree parts and chair stones (performed by the audience); and The Sherványa Nocturnal Music, for piano, harp, and other plucked instruments (peformed by Steve, piano; a harp player whose name I was too dead tired to remember to write down; and Karen and me on miniature kora (bug-guitar) and three-string ukulele). I was involved - in the sense that I plucked a few notes quietly through most of it - so my only comment is that I think I had the best seat in the house. The paper sound from the audience was luscious.

ComManD :: Thaumaturgy, for percussion, saxophone, dance, and electronics. Being, as I say, pretty much dead tired from a wicked week at work, I didn't manage to catch all the names, but Ivan Arteaga operated, to some extent, as spokesperson. They are working on some fancy computer-enabled ideas of collaboration, interaction, and mutual sound manipulation. The image that struck me strongest was the dancer, tricked out with accelerometers at wrist and ankle, somehow being both marionette and string-puller at once. Weirdly fascinating.

Blake DeGraw :: Electronic Quartet for Humans, for four saxophones. I recognized Jeremy Shaskus, but the other two names escaped my enfeebled note-taking. Adam and Justin was all I got. Bursts of sound from four sides projecting an image of a surrounding space. Bursts of no sound from all sides projecting an image of a withheld space.

Recorded

February 28, 2017

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus VI - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

This stands in front of you several times over all at once. Resistance is not futile, it is presumed, vanquished. Nothing like music as usual.

Symphony 95 - Haydn - Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer

First the overture. A domestic crisis with fatherly advice. Fatherly advice activated, public acclamation follows. Wrap it up.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 27, 2017
Assembly Rechoired 56 170227 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey
There was rain. There was snow. There was thundersnow. And then came the overturned propane tanker on I-5. Traffic was beyond a mess. In honor of our compatriots trapped in traffic Karen and I carried on with noise. Since before our marriage (the first two were in June of 1986) we have called any improvisation session with just the two of us and no other Banned Rehearsal regular an "Assembly Rechoired". This is #56. Karen played the Excelsior and I bumped around several noisy items, at the end pouring all the ping pong balls out of the bucket into the chimney. And back.