August 2, 2019
Emily Ostrom, voice
Peter Nelson-King, piano and trumpet
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Six Poemes de "Vocabulaire" - Guy Sacre
Ball of Sun - Richard Wernick
Fool - Peter Nelson-King
Consolation - Gerald Levinson
Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale - Aaron J. Kirschner
Songs from the Exotic - Judith Weir
Three Elegiac Pieces, no. 2 - George Rochberg
The Valley Wind - Hale Smith
My teacher opined to me once that, if you have a problem with something, then have it right out in the open. Explain it clearly, for your own benefit. I freely admit that part of my problem in this case is that, from a certain point of view, I grew up in this neighborhood too. So here it goes:
The body of music from which these songs were chosen takes a timid pride in hearkening back to the hold-outs, to the not-willing-nor-able-to-adventure-fully-into-the-modern-world generation of the early part of the 20th Century. And to be fair, it often turned out to be a pretty nasty place.
Its tell is a vain reliance on those familiar, certified hues of wallowy warmth to haul back, intact and unsullied, a simulacrum of comprehensibility, which is attributed wholesale, as though it were a sensibility and not a struggle, to the sepia scented past. But comprehensibility, to be at all, must be constructed from within, each time around. It never existed any other way.
Aside from being an intrepid uncoverer of old books, obscure poetry, and other odd arcana, Peter is a pretty mean pianist, and an interesting and thoughtful young composer. I rather liked his own song, accompanying Emily on trumpet rather than on piano (oh yes, he plays trumpet too) to a poem by Evelyn Scott. It was easily the best of the evening, though to my ear the treatment of the last line was a bit of a kiss-off. I suppose that's partly the poem's fault, but it could be an interesting opportunity to pull something unpresupposed from the bowels of its snark.
Emily has a lovely mezzo voice with a juicy alto range power up. I understand she's leaving Seattle for other regions, but I hope to hear her again one of these days.
Recorded
July 27, 2019
Sonata in D, K. 33 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder
The phrase lengths as counted
and the chunks of density textures
balance on different fulcrums,
the figurational fluidity on yet another.
 |
| my Mom, Betty Eisenbrey b. 1927, and her sister, Dorothy (Dotti) Buetow b. 1929 both coming up on the 20's for the second time. |
sung as an opera chorus, rather than as a pop standard
that is, Gershwin is approached (from this culture) as though he were a high-art thinking composer that used street-hit material, rather than as a street-hit thinking composer with high-art ambition. Historically, of course, he was the latter. But is it even fair to think of him as abiding within that narrative?
Adrenaline - Throbbing Gristle [from Greatest Hits]
flat affect vocal
layered over layered synth vamps
paper thin
adrenaline
Backstreets - Bruce Springsteen [from Live 1975-85]
The piano intro starts right out in armpound full out anthem-chorus mode.
Relaxation is allowed into the verse, retelling its past as a tale of Heroes (as the Beats did as one of Angels).
We certainly do think highly of ourselves don't we. In self defense. Nothing short of glory is acceptable.
Ain't With Being Broke - Geto Boys [from We Can't Be Stopped]
Song from angry starvation of everything we are instructed that we need.
Alleluia - Randall Thompson - Atlanta Symphony and Chorus, Robert Shaw [from Robert Shaw Master of the First Art]
ungrandiosity stands in for tasteful sophistication
choir: bells peal
It is not unattractive, and it's probably lots of fun to sing if you have sopranos who can nail the high end. It's just so non specific.
Highway 61 - Bob Dylan [Key Arena, October 13, 2006]
truck bed bounce blues bumpety bumpety b'bump
rough truck rough road rough speed to make distance
Forest of Thorns - Your Mother Should Know [Live at the Funhouse, July 18, 2011]
Now it is time for the altar call. (Altar Call, that is, as a genre, a genre that is characterized by a near self-parodistic reliance on hypersell of charisma. Of course were the charisma really there it wouldn't need all the bright lights, wouldn't need to hide its lack behind all those wailing strings.) Here though, it is treated as a genre, rather than as an item that might be a sample of that genre in the wild.
En-Lightning - Robber's Roost [from Cuatro]
I think we heard Mark Paschen of Robber's Roost sing this very song for us when we found him sitting on top of a trash can in downtown Ellensburg, busking, after our supper at the late great Valley Cafe: kazoo, dancing dog (Charlotte!) and all. It's still a winner.
July 31, 2019
Sonata in D minor, K. 34 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder
in media seq
i.e. the subject is a melody of sequential progressions
and it jumps right in
Flaming Agnes - Harvey Schmidt - Mary Martin [from I Do! I Do!]
Now's the time for that hat! $85!
Nobody's pipes pipe Broadway like Mary Martin's pipes pipe it.
How Still My Love - Stevie Nicks [from Bella Donna]
still steel
steal still
mood song, but unfinished, stops before it quite becomes much of anything
Retrato de Euchababilla - Keith Eisenbrey - Paul Eisenbrey, clarinet [November 1986]
My 1986 composition ably translated from the oboe into the clarinet by my brother Paul. It was one of the first pieces I wrote without recourse to a keyboard (my more usual practice). It was written in Port Macquarie, New South Wales, Australia, in April of 1986, while drinking Tooheys on the porch of the time-share we (my parents and Paul) had booked. We were there ostensibly to bear witness to Haley's Comet (saw it). Its long long notes and ample spaces concern themselves with distance and the idea of being on a continent a wide ocean away from anyone I knew especially from my then fiancee, Karen, far away in the Pacific Northwest. From the comet's perspective we were standing right next to each other.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
July 29, 2019
Gradus 353 - Neal Kosály-Meyer
Pitch classes are sets of partially matching pitches, not arranged as a chain, but understood as though they were parts of a chain (a partitioning, as Ben's Boretz's Meta-Variations might put it). Partitions of partitions of partially matching pitches.
Postscripts
and naked ran out hair screaming might suck
breasts dry with want o mother husbands give
us the heart give us body and soul speak
no causation
only isomorphism
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