Playlist

Live

November 17, 2012
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Any Ensemble (Greg Campbell, Jacob Zimmerman, John Teske, Natalie Mai Hall, Neil Welch, Paul Kikuchi)

get up

pre-be-bop saxes

jungle high

def slow

scan texture up

down texture back

forth texture in

out at

precisely bare

limb limned

Recorded

November 20, 2012
Birdbrain - Ginsberg - The Gluons

Ginsberg

Casting aspersions widely, hoping something will stick. A list of random social atrocities all attributed to a stand-in bad guy, a them. Not among his strongest work.









Chain 2- Lutoslawski - BBC Symphony Orchestra, Witold Lutoslawski, Anne-Sophie-Mutter 

So what is wrong with putting on a good show? Easy to follow, completely entertaining, brightly colored. Here: no new ground is broken, nothing explored that wasn't known. The given task was fulfilled, music was made, business was duly transacted, we depart unmoved.

Banned Rehearsal 242 - (December 1990, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt)

Smallish sounds closely regarded. Room roar present. Becoming slow and sleepy to the breathing harmony of harmonica breathing sleepy slow. (PP - drumroll!). A study in singularities. Snare buzz roll interrupted by funmaker percussion. Big Crescendo up to A Big Moment: Grand Pause: Loud! Radio sound smeared with slathered sonic paint.

Banned Rehearsal 587 (recording by Pete Comley) - (October 2000, Peter Comley, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Isabel Kosály-Meyer, Neal Meyer)

Slow bell noodles glued with sax. Tub bass in particular.

November 21, 2012
Gradus 84 - Neal Meyer

An airplane dopplers over between events.

BF Vocals and Percussion Chorus - Eisenbrey

The density of the percussion chorus begins to produce a hint of an image of a choral sound, so that the ear is beguiled into thinking there is a touch of the vocal in the mix even when there isn't.

In Session at The Tintinabulary

November 19, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 825 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

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

Recorded

Rachmanoniff

November 11, 2012
Leola - Joplin - William Albright
Prelude in G Major op. 32#5 - Rachmaninoff - Horowitz
Prelude in g-sharp minor op. 32#12 - Rachmaninoff - Horowitz
Stoptime Rag - Joplin - William Albright












Symphony #9 - Mahler - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan - [live at Berlin Festival 1982]

1. In its building up or in its stripping down, as it begins to put itself back together out of collapse, as it turns aside from its final ends, leading always to histrionic shattering failure.
2. A curious clock unfolding into grotesquery remembers a densely febrile desperation.
3. Furious activity, salvation by fugato, attention arrested again and again by what can not be forgotten, but from which it slips away distracted.
4. Fully invested in wish-fulfillment. Would that death be so reassuringly, lavishly personal!

Comrades of the Legion - Sousa - Philip Jones Ensemble, Elgar Howarth
Panathenäenzug - Strauss - Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, Peter Rosel
Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica - Strauss - Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, Peter Rosel

Richard writes his own meta-music.

Ben Tobier

November 12, 2012
Hot and Heavy - Ben Tobier [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Violin Concerto - Berg - Boston Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa, Itzhak Perlman

The voices do not move in sync. They lag, as though dragged around by a magnetic field, or like a swarm of lugubrious bees around their roving queen.

William Walton

November 13, 2012
Symphony #2 - William Walton - BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins

Tenuous, urban, nervous. Uncertain as to how one might go about being lyrical.

November 15, 2012
Ooo Baby Baby - The Miracles [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
I Love Music - The O'Jays [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

An upside down mix: drums up front, everything else homogenized into the midground.

Linda Let Me Be The One - Bruce Springsteen [from Tracks]
Tell It Like It Is - Heart [from Greatest Hits]

I imagine in front of this song a film montage as the idiotagonist sees the error of his ways. Then she goes all Aretha.

Wire - Benjamin, Boretz, Jeff Presslaff, J. K. Randall [from Inter/Play]

First things first: invent a language. Monochord, Crumar, piano.

Where The Soul Of Man Never Dies - Smokey Joe Miller, Norman Young [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording volume 1]

In Session at The Tintinabulary

November 12, 2012
Gradus 217 - 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

Recorded

November 4, 2012
3 Liebesträume - Liszt - Michael Rudy

Exuberant metrical flexibility

careful registral husbandry

Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli - Liszt - Stephen Hough
Lieder und Gesänge op. 32 - Brahms - Thomas Quasthoff, Justus Zeyen
Liturgy - Pavel Tchesnokov - [from Rassegna Internazionale di Capelle Musicali Loreto 15-19 Aprile 1998]
Piano Concerto #4 in C minor - Saint-Saëns - Philharmonia Orchestra, Charles Dutoit, Pascal Roge

As though it never starts, just picks up in the middle. There is something almost Brucknerian in the dynamic between the square phrasing and the never knowing where a thing will get to.

Burleske - Strauss - Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, Malcolm Frager

The parts slide off from each other as though lubricated, and tipped.

November 6, 2012
The Corcorans Cadet March - Sousa - Philip Jones Ensemble, Elgar Howarth
El Capitan - Sousa - Philip Jones Ensemble, Elgar Howarth

Several decades ago I came up with a system of choosing what to listen to out of my collection. Without going into great detail, and certainly without revisiting the Object PAL code that does the choosing, selections are made in chronological order of composition or production, in 5 year increments, i.e. something from 1800, then from 1805, then 1810, etc. Recently my uncle Jim Meyer gave me a bunch of his CDs, which is why this blog is suddenly awash in older music again.

All this to assert that it was entirely by happy chance that Sousa marches came up on election night.

November 8, 2012
King Cotton - Sousa - Philip Jones Ensemble, Elgar Howarth
Etincelles op. 36#6 - Moritz Moszkowski - Vladimir Horowitz
Hail to the Spirit of Liberty - Sousa - Philip Jones Ensemble, Elgar Howarth
Eugenia - Joplin - William Albright

J.S.

S.J.

Another happy chance placed Sousa and Joplin side by side. Each is a cartoon, a well-drawn caricature, one of self-satisfied triumphalism, the other of aspiration to sophistication. Between them is an American friction, poles of a national identity. Structurally, a typical Sousa march and a typical Joplin Rag could be peas in a pod, throwing their disparate personalities into greater relief.

La Mer - Debussy - BRT Philharmonic Orchestra, Brussels, Alexander Rahbari

In Session at The Tintinabulary

November 5, 2012
Banned Rehearsal 824 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

Playlist

Live

October 27, 2012
Fidelio - Beethoven
Seattle Opera - McCaw Hall, Seattle

In his greatest operas Mozart crafted the acts into effortless and graceful key sequences. Beethoven worked hard at it and wants you to know in your bowels that he did. Graceful they are not, but they stick.

November 2, 2012
John Olson and David Abel
Open Books, Seattle

First, an apology to Seattle Composers Salon for my absence, but I was just down the street at Open Books to hear my Portland friend David Abel read.

Seattle-based writer John Olson is new to me. Poems of plangent lists veering wildly. Hold tight to the headrhymes, pa'dner, or you'll be cogbrain splatter. One poem was about beans, or it was by the ending.

David and I met 30 years ago in the Barrytown area of New York state. His recent work explores possibilities of textual collage and systematic progression in ways that are alarmingly similar to how I find myself thinking about pattern confluence in my own composition. Was it something in the water? I look forward to the possibility of a collaboration soon.

David Abel - a few years ago

Recorded

October 28, 2012
12 Poems, op. 35 - Schumann - Ian Partridge, Jennifer Partridge

The first songs are square, almost ordinary. But the progression sinks more quickly and more deeply even than Die Winterreise, and into a far more personally anguished place.

O Lieb, so lang du lieben kannst - Liszt - Thomas Quasthoff, Justus Zeyen

In Session at The Tintinabulary

October 29, 2012
Gradus 216 - Neal Meyer

Tone blossoms: the gradual focusing of a pitch event into its resonant location, operating as a virtual crescendo.