Playlist

Recorded

March 24, 2013
Gradus 86 - Neal Meyer - (October 2005)
Two Cuts for Snohomish - Keith Eisenbrey
Fallow Time - Paul Eisenbrey
Snoho Piece 1 - Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Scribner

March 25, 2013
Snoho Piece 2 - Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Scribner

In late 2010 Steve Scribner organized a concert at a little theater in the town of Snohomish. As a part of the project he asked me to prepare two seven-minute pre-recorded sound files. Steve mixed these with two of his own. Two Cuts for Snohomish are my contribution, and Snoho Pieces 1 and 2 are the first two (out of four total) of Steve's mixes. At the concert we improvised while these were played into the space. That was kind of fun, and I'm curious to hear what the result sounds like after not listening to them for a while, but the combinations themselves are really quite nice.

March 26, 2013Suite in D minor - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

Mt. Rainier National Park - August 1976

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

Playlist

Live

March 16, 2013
Quarisima Italiana
Seattle Choral Company, Freddie Coleman, conductor
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle

Stabat Mater Dolorosa - Liber Usualis
Stabat Mater à 8 for two choirs - Palestrina

The mere separation in space between the two choirs is nothing in comparison with the play of depths among the voices.

Stabat Mater à 10 - Scarlatti

An immensity. As though the entire scale of interactions from molecular to cosmic were immanent to mind.

Crucifixus à 16 - Antonia Caldara

Solid. Blinding.

Messa di Requiem - Ildebrando Pizzetti 

Ben Boretz once asked "Can a symphony for big orchestra be from the heart?" The same question could be asked of choral music for cathedral spaces. This piece, without question, is, but that the answer is more often "yes" than it is for orchestra may be linked partly to the social theater involved. A chorus, in general, looks directly at us and sings to us. An orchestra, in general, sits in mixed attitude to us, their sound mediated by the technological marvels which are their instruments. 

Ave Maria (from Four Sacred Pieces) - Verdi

Late, twisted chromatics hearken back to Brahms or Bruckner motets, but also to some of the same sly energy as in Strauss's Metamorphosen.

Recorded

March 17, 2013
Banned Sectional 1 KEE AK - (June 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

One of several sessions over the years centered on my 1981/1982 score Book of Windows. In this case I was reading that portion of the text that was riffing on a line from Stockhausen's Hymnen: "Wir können noch ein Dimension tiefer gehen." with each page getting a new treatment.

Live at Consolidated Works - Intonarumori [from Sonicabal 2001]

Lingua mechanica - Machine lingo.

March 19, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 593 - (December 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

The sound of the late evening wearies.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

March 18, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 833 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

March 21, 2013
Your Mother Should Know
Love Blackmail, Boundary

Playlist

Live

March 9, 2013
La Bohème - Giacomo Puccini
Seattle Opera, McCaw Hall, Seattle

Puccini is hit or miss for me. La Bohème is one of the winners. As in Madama Butterfly, the story is human sized and the characters are as believable as those of late Mozart. But even more, I love the mix and trajectory of the different voices, from comic male quartet to intimate duet to raucus café and back again to the voices of Act 1 transmuted in sorrow. Act 3 (called Act 2 in the Seattle performance) is about as nice a dramatic composition as one could ask for.

Recorded

March 10, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 690 - (October 2005, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

A dog-whistle-high piercing pianissimo-to-mezzo forte feedback whine persists obstinately, flirting with discomfort. A percussion layer continues imperturbably, shifting color matter of factly, but otherwise immovably doing. A third layer interrupts or intercedes with radio scratch or guitar. Oddly it is the intercession that comes across as the context, the eventscape, within which the more continuous beings abide.

Banned Rehearsal 780 - (September 2010, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

Five years later, starting in combo mode of piano, drum, and cornet, I hear much the same character mix as in #690. It even ends with a high long-held harmonica, still and quiet, serendipitously reminiscent of the start of the earlier session just heard.

March 11, 2013
Blood/Candy - The Posies

The entire album could be heard as a set of loving recompositions of Savoy Truffle and Bohemian Rhapsody. The quicksilver arrangements hint at a Tatumesque sense that numerous songs lurk just below the surface and pop in whenever a crack opens up.

March 12, 2013
Suite in B flat Major - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof
Canon on "To Alexis" - Schumann - Peter Frankl
Tango - Stravinsky - Columbia Jazz Band, Igor Stravinsky

On the surface this performance comes across flat-footed and inelegant. But the square approach to rhythm throws the intricate particularities of the orchestration design into high relief.

March 14, 2013
Ebony Concerto - Stravinsky - Columbia Jazz Band, Igor Stravinsky, Benny Goodman

The science of chord voicing, both vertical and horizontal, aided and abetted by the in-your-face presence engineered into the recording. The grain of the HiFi sound approaches the surreal quality of the too-deep-too-bright focus of Bambi. I am torn between not wanting to hear page turns that perfectly imaged, and digging it.

First Part at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels - Allen Ginsberg

A short poem that lives for its final lines. "And 4 police cars parked outside the painted / gate, red lights revolving in the leaves."

Jig Medley - John W. Summers [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

In Session At The Tintinabulary

March 11, 2013
Gradus 222 - 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

Playlist

Live

March 5, 2013

Canals of Venice, Red Ribbon, Dead Bars, Your Mother Should Know
Comet Tavern, Seattle

Emma Danner of Red Ribbon

It is lovely to find so much that is unexpected within the realm of an established social music. Who would have thought that the first sounds out of chamber folk band Canals of Venice would suddenly bring the shade of Machaut into the room? Who would think that the tiny Emma Danner of Red Ribbon could sink such a righteous weight down through the stage? Dead Bars, in midair pogobounce pivotted punk around to its roots. Time-travelers-from-the-past Your Mother Should Know had their strongest outing yet, tightening up the arrangements of their standards, and mixing up the set with wildly varied song-settings that touched notes of Cole Porter and Duke Ellington as well as the venerable Boss. They finished with a fine rendition of Louie Louie in honor of the Sonics.

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.
Meyer: Cage - Solo for Piano

Playlist

Live

February 24, 2013
The Music of Emily Doolittle
Poncho Theater, Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle

Sorex - Cristina Valdés and Oksana Ezhokina, piano
Music for Magpies - Paul Taub, flute
falling still - Brent Hages, Oboe; Mikhail Shmidt, Violin; Mara Gearman, Viola; David Sabee, Cello
Social sounds from whales at night - Catherine Lee, Oboe d'amore
Why the parrot repeats human words - Maria Mannisto, Narrator; Laura DeLuca, Clarinet; Mara Gearman, Viola; Matthew Kocmieroski, Percussion
Four Pieces About Water - Paul Taub, Flute; Laura DeLuca, Clarinet; Seth Krimsky, Bassoon; Mark Robbins, Horn; Sara Mayo, Trombone; Oksana Ezhokina, Piano; Mikhail Shmidt, Violin; Rajan Krishnaswami, Cello; Joe Kaufman, Bass; Julia Tai, Conductor
All Spring - Maria Mannisto, Soprano; Paul Taub, Flute; Laura DeLuca, Clarinet; Matthew Kocmieroski, Percussion; Mikhail Shmidt, Violin; Joe Kaufman, Bass; Julia Tai, Conductor
A Short, Slow Life - Maria Mannisto, Soprano; Paul Taub, Flute; Winnie Lai, Oboe; Laura DeLuca, Clarinet; Seth Krimsky, Bassoon; Mark Robbins, Horn; Matthew Kocmieroski, Percussion; Mikhail Shmidt, Violin; Natasha Bazhanov, Violin; Rachel Swerdlow, Viola; David Sabee, Cello; Julia Tai, Conductor

This concert was a joy from beginning to end, with far too many wonders to mention. But somewhere between the timbral circles Paul Taub was drawing within single repeated pitches in Music for Magpies, and the play among the contours of the tunes Catherine Lee was spinning against the spacial vectors of electronic sound in Social sounds from whales at night, brought to mind the giddy mass flocking of birds and fish as they wheel in near unanimity, an image that worked quite well as a key to negotiating the delicate, carefully calibrated rhetorical flow of these musics.

February 26, 2013
The 21st-Century Piano with Cristina Valdés, piano
Meany Theater, University of Washington, Seattle

Transfigured Etudes - Huck Hodge
La Mandragore - Tristan Murail
Tombeau de Messiaen for piano and CD - Jonathan Harvey
The Mechanics of Escapement for toy piano and clock chimes - Nathan Davis
A Little Music for two pianos - Richard Karpen - Richard Karpen, piano

As a note for my benefit, and not as a complaint: a case could be made that each of these pieces, even the toy piano piece, concerns itself less with the piano as such than with varieties of latter-day Lisztian virtuoso pianism, and with what can be extracted from that prodigious energy. It is interesting that more than a century after the passing of the Abbé, it seems to be difficult to approach the keyboard without a nod in his direction. Cristina, of course, just eats this stuff up. My local music bias was pleased that the concert began and ended with the music by local luminaries, and that they held their own quite easily. I was also pleased that within three days time I heard Cristina begin a concert playing piano 4-hands, and end another with a piano duo. Who arranged that?

A huge hand to both Emily and Cristina for the immense amount of work it took to so ably produce these spectacular and thought provoking events.

March 1, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer - Keith Eisenbrey
Escape Sequence - Matthew Briggs
1 and 3 from Possible Aphorisms - Tom Baker
music from the film 'Love In The Year 2000' - Marcus Oldham

Four takes on the idea of accompaniment, taken in reverse: music and film as mutual accompaniments to each other; likewise with music and dance; percussion providing a wire-frame for a piano trio; and the incorporation of two parts into one.

Recorded

February 24, 2013
Summertime - Billy Stewart [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
Banned Sectional 6 KEENWM - (May 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer)

The aural record of my reverie on Sibelius #1, Kajanus, hi-fi, compact disks (new at the time), and phonographs, the greater part of which ended up published in News of Music. What I don't remember is whether I was writing this text as I was speaking it, or more likely was simply reading it.

February 25, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 34 - (May 1985, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Not surprising that someone cued up Sibelius #1, but I was intent upon airing deeper anxieties as an experiment in text-generation (accompanied by detractors and an enabler). One of many tapes in which things were tried but in which results were thin.

February 28, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 592 - (December 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

The tamtam roil arises from the impression that whichever way the pitch committee is headed the populace is going the opposite, which sense lingers even past where the tamtam has ceased to sound, and even past where uppitchness and downpitchness have wandered into other qualia sets.

Flyer by Darick Chamberlin

Upcoming

Tuesday March 5, 2013 8pm
Your Mother Should Know, Red Ribbon, Dead Bars, Canals of Venice
Comet Tavern, Seattle - $6 cover

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

Playlist

Live

Poised

February 22, 2013
Banned Rehearsal - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Banned Rehearsals 831 and 832

We have played in public, doing more or less what we do, six times now. The first three shows came early and in quick succession: January 18, 1985, (Banned Rehearsal 23 The Fishcritic); July 13, 1985, (Banned Rehearsal 43 A Short and Simple Concert); and January 9, 1986, (Banned Rehearsal 63 Three Compositions No Breaks, with Sudden Songs); all at Brechemin Auditorium in the UW School of Music. Another 10 years passed before the next two performances: March 27, 1996 (Banned Rehearsals 418 and 419 at Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown, Seattle); and January 11, 1997 (Banned Rehearsal 440, back at Brechemin).

Last evening's performance in the Chapel, a wonderful space with a fabulous wooden floor, felt really good. We enjoyed bringing some of our noisemakers to a new acoustic, and we look forward to playing out again soon.

Recorded

February 16, 2013
That Was The Year That Was - Tom Lehrer

"We'll try to stay serene and calm / When Alabama gets the bomb!"

February 17, 2013
Banned Sectional 1 AKNWM - (May 1985, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer)

Two pianos recorded on a boombox in a practice room at the UW. Every time a loud sound is produced the compressor in the box pulls the input levels way down. Every time there is a lull the compressor allows the input, with its ominous 60-cycle hum, to fill the vacancy. It turns the resulting tape into a theater of desperation: sound must be made or this space will be fill with choking hum.

PCKEE 001111 (my recording) - Pete Comley, Keith Eisenbrey

Last week I listened to Pete's recording - this is my recording of the first 20 minutes of the same session. Comes across as though it were a room.

Banned Rehearsal 590 - (November 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

This tape takes its time finding a focus. After about 10 or 15 minutes it is solid.

February 18, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 591 - (December 2000, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

Delicate and transparent from the start, emphasizing metallics: bells, wires, cans, lids, and tam tam. It remains small thin and slow in ferocious consistency. Built nearly entirely of singularities and fixations, scratching only the surface of the quiet.

Februay 19, 2013
14 Songs - Kent Jeppeson
Blood and Fire, Hallelujah! canned bit - Keith Eisenbrey

February 20, 2013
Blood and Fire, Hallelujah! (100914) - Keith Eisenbrey

This was my home test of improvising along with the canned bit. Looking back on the whole project I think that the stuff coming out of the speakers is the strongest and most fully realized part of the piece. The piano improvisation, though it was in the conception from the very start, ends up sounding like an unnecessary add-on. That may be less of a problem in a live performance, where the presence of an actual person on the stage carries its own theatrical weight. As a recorded item though it falls flat.

February 21, 2013
Sonata in F - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhoff
Portals - Carl Ruggles - Buffalo Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas

Mineral homogeneity. Brittle. Cold. Ancient.

Angels (version for trumpets & trombones) - Carl Ruggles - Studio Brass Ensemble

Not monumental - mythic, but not that exactly either. More like the bedrock out of which the myth emerged.

Evocations - Carl Ruggles - John Kirkpatrick

Any pianistic figuration fancier than necessity is brutally eschewed. Its sensuality is pointedly ignored. It is the image of a mechanism evoking music-meaning data, the image of a thing to be analytically considered.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 18, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 830 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

This in from Steve: "One member of my little plethora of 'beat slicing' programs made 893 samples out of session 830 in a vain attempt to find a pattern. Ha!"

Later: "heretofore unknown software features department: when our 893 samples were imported into another program a 'groove' created by the beat slicing program generated 192 'patterns' of various subsets of the 893 samples at '70 bpm' which can then be arranged on a timeline."

Cool!

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

Playlist

Coming Up This Week

Banned Rehearsal Reduced to Essence

Friday February 22, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Banned Rehearsal at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

"Let's try a session playing instruments we don't know how to play." This simple suggestion in June of 1984 among three newly re-united musicians wrought an improvisational project of uncommon longevity and abundance. Nearly 29 years along, and with 829 recorded and numbered sessions behind us, we are still not entirely sure what we are doing. Charter members Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, and Neal Meyer will be joined by long-time collaborator Karen Eisenbrey, and by our recent adoptee Steve Kennedy in an evening of noise and exploration. Having persisted these several decades happily in private workshop mode, the February 22 event will be the group's first public performance since 1997.

Recorded

February 10, 2013
PC KEE 001111 "Bells for Lost City" - Pete Comley, Keith Eisenbrey - (November 2000)

The Kingsbury in its natural environment

Pete wanted to use some of the sounds available at the Tintinabulary in a composition project, so he came over and recorded while we half improvised half demonstrated various items. Pete divvied up his recording into 7 tracks, each featuring certain groups of sounds. The first couple of tracks were mostly bells, gongs, and tam tams. After that there were some rattles and janglies, a flute with clang and taptik, a drum, and a penny whistle with a host of toys. A challenge for me in this project, and one which I overcame only fitfully, is my disinclination to leave sounds be. My background in improvisation is to regard the process as another mode of composition and so if I play a sound I am immediately thinking how to skew and transform it. But here, to a certain extent, the idea was to record a sample track that would be malleable to composition at a later time rather than to create a unique and solid timespan.

But for the last track Pete let me loose on the piano, and the result is quite nice. There are a couple of audio issues resulting from Pete's risky improvised microphone placement running afoul of a sudden dynamic accent, but other than that he made the old Kingsbury sound pretty amazing. I am about as pleased with my compositional/improvisational thought as I have ever been.

February 11, 2013
Gradus 85 - Neal Meyer - (September 2005)

Silence generously applied confounds ratio and number.

February 12, 2013
Gradus 181 - Neal Meyer - (August 2010)

A huge dynamic range, the correspondence among which are not just those of impact to impact, but also envelope to impact and envelope to envelope.

Prelude in E-flat Major - Sylvius Leopold Weiss - Lutz Kirchhof

A sudden staccato passage, crazy chromatics, dissonances voiced inimitably. The more I hear of Weiss the more ecstatic I am to have found him.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

February 11, 2013
Gradus 221 - Neal Meyer

The substance into which these pebbles are dropped and poked and fired can be pulled into various tautnesses by the dampers: now a liquid, now a gel, now a sheet of iron. The hissy halo of sound co-opted the whorling roar of a jet - distance and trajectory united in a luscious noise.

Upcoming

Friday February 22, 2013 at 8:00 PM
Banned Rehearsal at The Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
See top of post.

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