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