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