Playlist

Live

May 16, 2013
Any Ensemble
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
John Teske, Paul Kikuchi, Alex Guy, Kate Olson, Jessie Polin, Natalie Mai Hall

On stage, front, as a prelude, a vertically maximized microphone stand bearing two globuloid microphones in vertically opposed attitude, twisted from each other. A recording device lounges on the lone chair. The performers dis-assemble off-stage, three on the left and four on the right, along the windows. On the left from the back: cello, oboe, double-bass. On the right from the front: bass clarinet, drums, violin, bassoon.

PK: Given the distance between them, to join is a choice not a given. Joining is often chosen. JT: Circling so that motionless twists back into. PK: Melodic in a lyric space, without the usual rhetorics of dramatic or conversational continuities. JT: Slow, then quivery. AG: Nervous underpinnings. KO: Chorale with drummy bit.

Recorded

May 14, 2013
Banned Couple 13 - Banned Rehearsal

Rattle of a can packed tight and dried.

May 15, 2013
Banned Couple 14 - Banned Rehearsal

A large room fit into a small room.

In Session at The Tintinabulary
May 13, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 836 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Playlist

Live

May 4, 2013
Music for Piano by John Cage and Keith Eisenbrey
Neal Meyer, piano; Keith Eisenbrey, piano
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Solo for Piano - John Cage - Neal Meyer

Neal took John at his word that as much or as little as is desired of the score can be used in any given performance. Neal used just one piece of material, item AJ from pages 26 and 27. Eleven minutes of spare sound framed by 10 minutes of silence at one end and 9 minutes of silence at the other. The evening was extraordinarily beautiful with sounds of children playing wafting in.

Barrytown, New York, ca 1983

Welcome to my planet. I come in peace. - Keith Eisenbrey

My notes:

a duration of 5 followed by a duration of 7

the duration of 5 is always a set of durations 1 1 3

the duration of 7 alternates sets of durations of 4 3 and of 3 4 within the reiterations of each ordered pitch-class pair

the durations of 5 are trios of monads

the durations of 7 are duos of dyads

the trios of monads in durations of 5 occur in pairs

the first of each pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulls 2 pitch-classes from an ordered series of same into a higher register and 1 pitch-class from the inversely ordered series of same into a lower register

the second of each pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulls 1 pitch-class from that ordered series of same from which the first pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulled 2 pitch-classes and 2 pitch-classes from that ordered series of same from which the first pair of trios of monads in durations of 5 pulled 1 pitch-class

the pulling pattern switches for the next pair of trios of monads in durations of 5

the duos of dyads in durations of 7 occur in cycles of 4

the first dyad of the duos of dyads in durations of 7 pulls its first pitch-class from an ordered series of same and its second pitch-class is derived from an ordered cycle of intervals in a fixed arbitrary pattern above or below the first pitch-class and the second dyad of the duos of dyads in durations of 7 pulls its first pitch-class from an inversely ordered series of same and the second pitch-class is derived from an ordered cycle of intervals in a fixed arbitrary pattern above or below the first pitch-class

and so it goes a cycle of 4 duos of dyads of durations of 7

the durations of 7 presume upon the durations of 5 incrementally until the durations of 7 occur over the top of the durations of 5 then continue incrementally until the durations of 7 of duos of dyads precede the durations of 5 of trios of monads and then further incrementally until the durations of 7 presume upon the preceding durations of 5 so that the durations of 7 of duos of dyads pulling pitch-classes from inversely ordered series of same occur over the top of the previously preceding durations of 5 of trios of monads pulling pitch-classes from inversely ordered series of same

the ordered series of pitch-classes from which the pitch-class pulling pattern pull are all-interval tetrachords derived from ordered pairs of pitch-classes within the first of the all-interval tetrachords from which pitch-classes are pulled

and so it goes spirally

welcome to my planet

i come in peace

May 5, 2013


Freddie and the Screamers May 5, 2013

Jim Page, Freddie and the Screamers
Restaurante Michoacan, Seattle


We arrived just as Jim was finishing up his first set, but we got to hear him again later. It is always a pleasure to hear such fine guitar playing.

In a Crown Hill parking lot fronting on 15th Avenue Northwest Freddie and the Screamers played two sets full of classic rock and roll for a distinctly classic-aged crowd. Over the course of the evening a few people would get up to dance. At about quarter to 8 the police pulled up as there had been a noise complaint from several blocks away. Personally I thought they just managed to balance the traffic noise of 15th. They sang one quiet number and then lit gleefully into The Sonics' Cinderalla. At that even I had to dance, and that shut the show down mid song. Can't have a bunch of gray-hairs dancing in a parking lot, you never know what might happen next.

May 7, 2013
A Festival of Ives
Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington, Seattle
Cristina Valdés, piano; Donna Shin, flute; Melia Watras, viola; William Sharp, readings

Piano Sonata No. 2 ("Concord, Mass., 1840-1860") - Charles Ives

The Concord Sonata has become something of a rite of passage for American pianists staking a claim in the modern repertoire, and it is certainly impressive to hear it so valiantly and brilliantly performed. But Ives' harmonic language is distinctly viscous, and is helped neither by the enervating deadness of Brechemin's acoustics nor by his more-is-better writing for piano. The thinner and more transparent it gets the more I like it. The last few pages are magical. One wonders what this would have been like had he had a pianistic imagination on a par with Scriabin or Sorabji.

But it aspires to be more than just another big concert piece. William Sharp's dramatic readings from and concerning the sonata's attendant essays highlighted the work's extra-musical intellectual underpinnings. At this remove of time I could almost accept these as an artifact of a distant past, a nostalgia trip to a more innocent America, were it not for the fact that peeking out from behind Emerson's transcendentalisms I can't help but see not just self-centered New Age-y claptrap, but also the distant sound of goose-steps and the stink of gas.

Recorded

May 9, 2013
Banned Couple 11 - Banned Rehearsal
Banned Couple 12 - Banned Rehearsal

Direct contact with the microphone transforms into an image of a direct tapping on the speaker, as though the tapping had reached through time and space to touch the back of the speaker's scrim, or as though the speaker in the corner now is the flip side of the microphone then and the now and the then are joined. Generalized, the sound produced by the speaker is not only the trace of the sound that reached the microphone, but also the trace of the entire artifactual mechanism of microphone, tape, wires, electronics and time through which it passed.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

May 6, 2013
Gradus 225 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

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

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

Live

May 3, 2013

Seattle Composers Salon Chapel

Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

3 Pieces for Piano - Brad Anderson - Jason Kuo (spelling?)

 

An energy once begun does not stop. Big disambiguous movements. Clarity of figuration. Music's bare bones.

 

Phillip Arnautoff

2 Variations from 16 Variations - Phillip Arnautoff

Truly the most beautiful string quartet ever performed on a half size cello. The composer engages in hard-core old-school microtonal thinking, which is certainly a thing to know going in or you'll find yourself struggling to regain your bearings. But the most remarkable thing about Phillip is how absolutely he inhabits his own music, to the point where, as big as his personality is, he isn't entirely present until he plays. Stunning.

Luke 6:20-26 - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey & Glynn Olive, sopranos, Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Thank you Glynn and Karen for the wonderful performance. I look forward to doing this again soon. When I got home I was thinking about the questions that were asked and realized that I had neatly avoided one with a technical response. Why was it such a particular challenge to set this text? Quite simply, I find it hugely intimidating to set the words of Jesus. It is imperative to get out of the way of the text. Getting it wrong is not an option.

Crystal Trees  - David M. Shere

A pretty little piece compiled in C-Sound, full of old-fashioned blip-bloop electro-sounds that made me smile. It ended with a  ravishing quiver of evanescent resonance hanging precisely 17 feet above the stage. I made a comment in the Q&A about a concern I had with the wide stereo separation. After thinking about it over night I offer this clarification: The aesthetic image of right and left would continue to be there even if the speakers were closer together. The farther apart they are the more the fact of right and left overshadows that aesthetic image. Image always trumps fact, so to strengthen fact at the expense of image is to weaken, or at least partially obstruct, the experience. I've been called on this myself in respect of extreme dynamics.

Recorded

April 28, 2013
Doomsome Otherings (midi orchestra) - Keith Eisenbrey

The title is a riff on 'Canonic Variations'. It started as a piece for viola and piano. I orchestrated it for a reading session with the Seattle Creative Orchestra some years ago and this was the midi version that came out of that. The original idea came from a possible mis-hearing of a theme and variations movement in one of Prokofiev's piano concertos. What I thought I heard was the music of an earlier variation returning in the middle of a later variation. So I made five variations of 50 measures each. In measures 31-40 of each variation the figuration of the next subsequent variation was used. In other words, variation 3 figuration is inserted into variation 1, variation 4 figuration into variation 2, etc., and around the horn, so to speak, so that 1 shows up in 4 and 2 in 5.

Hockets: A Recital - (2005, Keith Eisenbrey, piano):

2 Interruptions - Keith Eisenbrey
Partita - Benjamin Boretz
Intermezzo 2 - Keith Eisenbrey
Brandeis - Elaine Barkin
4 Pieces for Piano - John Verrall
Hockets - Keith Eisenbrey

Yikes! That was an ambitious program. What was I thinking? The Boretz, Barkin, and Verrall are all fiendishly difficult, and Hockets, though not technically challenging for the most part, requires strenuous concentration to stay on task. Oof!

April 30, 2013
Cicada - pH

1. Continuous throbbing pulsing thrum. 2. Picking up back again in mid stream becoming a working out of doors with alien overlords full of non sequitous entrances. 3. On a malfunctioning radio at a distance of distance picking up malfunctioning signals in a rhythm like typing. 4. Through hard crystal edges electric arcs zapping obsidian 5. The toxic pool is in the basement but it is aware, and falls off quantumly. 6. Choral, tropical, wet. 7. Mica slivers signal. 8. Resynthesizing the sound of speech synthesis.

Great album!

May 2, 2013
Banned Couple 10 - Banned Rehearsal

What is up front obscures what is down back but what is down back establishes a ground from which we perceive the up front as obscuring the down back without which the up front would not obscure and would merely be. Deal.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

April 29, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 835 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Playlist

Coming Up This Week

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

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

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

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

Live

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

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

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

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

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

Recorded

April 21, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

Bickleton, Washington - 1986

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

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

In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 22, 2013
Gradus 224 - Neal Meyer

Playlist

Live

April 13, 2013
John Cage: 90 Stories / Empty Words Part III
Roger Nelson, Neal Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

The man on the left told stories or didn't.
The man on the right spoke or didn't.
They each did the same.
They didn't, or they did.

In one of the stories Cage discusses a problem that arose in performances of an orchestral work. Some of players responded to his score unprofessionally. He expresses a desire to discover a way of allowing or guiding the performers to respond to liberation nobly, rather than foolishly. I hope he realized that this would require a deeper fix than any compositional process, however ideologically pure of ego, is capable of delivering.

April 19, 2013
Roots of Fire
featuring Morten Lauridsen's Madrigali Six Fire Songs and the 16th Century Madrigals that inspired them
Canzonetta, Roger Nelson conducting
Prospect Congregational Church, Seattle

Ov'é lass, il bel viso? - Henricus Schaffen
Ov'é lass, il bel viso? - Morten Lauridsen
Quando so più lontano - Morten Lauridsen
Quando so più lontano - Yvo Barry
Amore, io sento l'alma - Jhan Gero
Amore, io sento l'alma - Morten Lauridsen
Io piango - Morten Lauridsen
Io piango - Vincenzo Ruffo
Luci serene e chiare - Claudio Monteverdi
Luci serene e chiare - Morten Lauridsen
Luci serene e chiare - Carlo Gesualdo
Se per havervi, oimé - Claudio Monteverdi
Se per havervi, oimé - Morten Lauridsen

Any overbearing musicological or educational intent that might be impugned to this concert was vastly overpowered by the strength of the music.


April 17, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 594 - (December 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

A muttering neighborhood of sounds.

April 18, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 691 - (October 2005, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

Kora provides a constant, as the weather might: an index, a ground, a basis. Cornet comments and guitar eloborates. We move into a more percussive territory of xylophone and toy piano. We grub in the dirt.

Floating Point - Gray Scale
1. Xaphoon - Jungle, Down below something molten is oozing.
2. Pastoral Detoon - Liquid.
3. (Re)Bound - Static, as in not said to the boss.
4. Elephantine - Moving fast in tight lanes.
5. Bowed Clarinet - Dis-earthed. Un-embodied. Distantly ex-orbital.
6. Dronehead - Hardcore robotics ascending into abstraction.
7. Purvis Bearing - Back in the wilds, back in orbit, getting a grasp of what this is where I am at. Cave close.
8. Topsy's Hawser - Processes of manufacture invaded by cheery goblinesques.


In Session at the Tintinabulary

April 15, 2013
Assembly Rechoired 55
Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

April 16, 2013
A Cat's Life
Keith Eisenbrey

It took 90 minutes but I think I got a fairly clear read on the whole thing. I should be able to edit it down into a usable recording. That is, if I didn't lose the whole thing when my main computer failed.


Upcoming

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

Toward the contemplation of a pitch stereoscope: two frameworks, joined at the source, phased (in specious increments), mutually warped, rounding space.

Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano

Playlist

Live

April 6, 2013
The Holy
Red Ribbon
Acapulco Lips
No Rey
The Josephine, Seattle

The recorded literature that is rock & roll now stretches back many decades, and encompasses a huge variety of styles and attitudes. There are, consequently, myriad paths by which current celebrants can trace their self-inventions, and many stylistic locales in which to set up shop. It's great to go to a show like this and hear four very different thoughts about what a worthy endeavor might be.  

The Holy is a stripped down trio of drums, bass, and guitar/vocal driving down the center of hard and fast. It's all about gut-punch and tight corners. Between them, as a collective, they convene a remarkable drummer.

Red Ribbon steadfastly declines to round-off their songs. When it is over it is over and it stops without a fuss. If the paint drips, so it does. This isn't the artful fragmentation of a Schumann song-cycle - it doesn't spin your head into the next song so much as it allows the interior of the song into conversation with the house.

Acapulco Lips, aside from having a great name, is a lively power-pop group that sounded to me like what a sock-hop would be like if we had those now.  Loads of fun.


No Rey is a polished ensemble with a set of intricately arranged, perfectly balanced songs. As befits their apparent maturity (they were the only band of whom I could be reasonably confident that the sum of any two of their ages would be greater than mine) they are finding their way into a larger world, reaching back a little further into their roots.

April 12, 2013
Save as . . . new electronic music by Tom Baker
Poncho Theater, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

Tom Baker: theremin, fretless guitar, live-electronics
Corrie Befort: dancer and filmmaker
Julio Lopez: violin
William Smith: cello
Natalie Lerch: soprano
Gretchen Conrad: soprano
Michael Monhart: saxophone, electronics
Greg Campbell: percussion, french horn, electronics

Prelude Music
Imaginary Aphorisms
Traces: Nellie
Holos
Sagamihara
Triptet

Years ago Sarah Johnson wrote in News of Music, concerning Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."), "not inside a bordered thing and not itself with borders, but the universe without suggestion of an outside". And it is exactly the senses in which there is an outside, an other, and where that outside, that other, is, that makes these musics so fascinating. It is tapped into, as one might find a realm of radio signals. It is extracted with painstaking care, as one might search for a particle in a bubble chamber. It is created from within itself, as though the inside's idea of the outside bore fruit. This music makes spaces. They invade, open up, slide in, descend upon, leak through, permeate.

This concert was too full of riches to call out each here, but special mention must be made of the costume Corrie wore in the second of the Imaginary Aphorisms. It was hilarious, obscene, terrifying, completely alien and absolutely human all at once - morbid self-consciousness embodied. Completely brilliant.

Recorded
April 9, 2013
Banned Couple 9 - Banned Rehearsal

In Session At The Tintinabulary

April 8, 2013
Gradus 223 - Neal Meyer

April 11, 2013
Boundary
Your Mother Should Know

Upcoming

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

Toward the contemplation of a pitch stereoscope: two frameworks, joined at the source, phased (in specious increments), mutually warped, rounding space.

Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano

Playlist

Live

April 4, 2013
The Water Line is Rising
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Greg Campbell, Stuart Dempster, Lori Goldston, Kevin Patton, Dana Reason

Three long movements played with nuanced near-pauses between. Romantic in a Barzun sense: literary but not literal, evocative but not pictorial, lyrical but not sentimental.

In Movement One it is night and we witness a quiet tide cycle in an image of real time. In Movement Two we are under the ripples and witness the same quiet cycle from within the water's acoustic. In Movement Three the waters that rise are other waters. We are under underness, beneath our selves, beneath the face of the void.

Intimately attended - they gave out beautiful hand-printed posters.

Recorded

April 2, 2013
Ebony Concerto - Stravinsky - Woody Herman & His Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, Woody Herman

As in Mozart, the movement from one thing to another is made in a sense of delight, but not as of a movement from balance to balance, or of conversational repartee, but of a reconfigured repeating, repeating reconfigurations within refigured frames repeated from skewed angles.

Banned Sectional 2 AKNWM -  (June 1985, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

The same session recorded on two machines, and then remixed out of phase by a few seconds (to start with - the equipment all runs at different speeds, so there is a pleasant fluidity to the phase relationship). But the sense of an echo doesn't last long. Soon the sound separates itself into regions of registral textures. The sessions of this period are often concerned with questions of multiplicity - of sources, agendas, personalities, what have you - and cramming those back together to make a concord that does not flow necessarily from a hearing of anything, or from an intention of anything. In this case the session was pried apart from within itself, along a non-obvious seam, and then remelded. The scar should show, but the process illuminates other and more strongly evocative jointings.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

April 1, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 834 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer


Upcoming

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

Olympic National Park 1973