March 6, 2015
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Jeremiah Lawson
Jeremiah presented two sets, in C Major and C minor, of his 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo classical guitar, finding a personal place among several venerable instrumental traditions at once. In response to a question he stated that working the counterpoint out on paper as though it were for voices and then transcribing it for guitar worked well because the restrictions of vocal writing were more strict than for guitar. Fancy that!
Ann Cummings
In Three of a Kind for string bass, piano, and banjo, Ann and her collaborators Jesse Stout and Ethan Subotta aspire to reinvent gamelanic polyrhythms from the ground up. The spectacular result here sounded like a giant autoharp. What fun!
Clement Reid
Each of us has their particular life within the music we know, our peculiar histories within the music that fascinates us. A large part of the value, for me, of the Salon is its function as a sharing of those histories and those lives. For me as a habitual composer of solo piano music, Clement's music underscores just how varied those histories can be. Dreams and Improvisations are composed of six (if I heard correctly) pieces fully of splashy inside-the-piano sounds and un-fussy tunes. I've said this before, but his approach reminds me of Greg Short in its easy acceptance of all manner of crazy within a familiar setting. Its strength is not in its newness, but in its imaginative amiability.Nadya Kandrevis and Jeremy Shaskus
Part One - Creation for cello, piano, and soprano saxophone. What is clear is that something of vital importance is being worked out. The arena in which the work occurs is as personal and private as it gets, that is to say, it is of the greatest possible vastness. Some comments were made about the relative temporal segregation of the instruments. To my ear (as it was to others I think) this feature was its power. If I have a comment I would suggest drilling this segregation even further, down into the individual parts. The less like regular music this was the more I was digging it.
Recorded
February 28, 2015
Concerto in C (#3) - Prokofiev - Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrei Chistyakov, Evgenyi Kissin
A music of two lives or spiritual locations - one workaday, busy, vigorous: a public face; the other dreamy, sentimental, languid: a private face.
Concerto #1 - Bartok - London Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis, Stephen Bishop
Tight canons to startle and scare. The patterns increment stepwise to plateaus. In terms of treating many of the instruments as percussion it follows the example of Stravinsky, but in a more linear concert piece trajectory - the new ensconced in the comfortably established. It gets pretty interesting when it reduces itself to little more than a field of colored impulses.
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| Arthur Grumiaux |
A still picture, framed, An evoked place rather than a story to tell. Energized stasis by means of constant misdirection.
March 3, 2015
Quartet #4 - Schoenberg - LaSalle Quartet
From under a crab's carapace a tiny window looks out upon a dingy yard. What is possible is only so for a moment, at each moment it is more of a struggle.
A Pixie From Dixie - Fletcher Henderson
Sounds are arranged in pairs (brass / reeds :: piano/guitar / string bass) with a Haydnesque sophistication. We can dance because our place here is clear, socially unambiguous. Subversive role reversals occur within careful bounds.
Quartet #3 - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam Quartet
a comic song (don't look
behind you)
chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk
see
I'm being good
looked didn't you
lament is perilous
(if it can be imputed to the soul it can be pathologized)
back to comic song
good boy
unwilling to ever
ever ever
leave
In Session at the Tintinabulary
March 1, 2015
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| like the one on the left - but I think I paid more for it |
Silvertone 150301 folded
Silvertone 150301 folded rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey
Improvising on my first electric guitar, a hollow body with three pickups. Pretty sweet.
March 2, 2015
Banned Rehearsal 880 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer
No accompaniment from the snowy east this time.
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