Preface
"And, indeed, music is going to overpower you only in that you inwardly desire to be overpowered. You lust to go into bondage under the virtuoso's lash. You slaver to be terminally disabled by sensory-neural overkill. The future-shock machine is going to terrorize or outrage or do whatever to you with your active strenuous collusion. In fact, these manifestly nasty operations count for a considerable percentage of what we - all of us - go for in going for music and other expressive-language productions as consumers. Doing it those ways as a producer mostly evolves out of the experience of being an avid consumer - the M and the S are familiarly the complementary nodes of a single psychic tendency."
- Benjamin Boretz "Some things I've been noticing, some things I've been doing, some things I'm going to need to think some more about (Interface, Part VII)" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"
Texts
Wayward in Limbo
"With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series now moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is curating and commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of exclusive material. Many of these will be essentially 'live' performances recorded at home for this occasion. Others may create a mix of pre-recorded material that has not been previously released elsewhere."
- from the Wayward Music Series website at https://www.waywardmusic.org/.
August 15, 2020
Ahmad Yousefbeigi
drum with hand
sing with voice
this drum sounds like a large frame drum
shallow to distinguish the hands drumming on it
song sings
high in his skull
really lovely articulate drumming, delicately pitched
short songs
sings (I presume) in Kurdish
words "set to" music:
framework to amplify, to display, to comment,
"set to" tune:
lined up with pitch sequence syllable by syllable,
"set to" music (accompaniment in the broad sense)
(to mediate the realms)
what might it all mean?
music minus tune
or just tune extended into a multiplicity
to fight for song: the full meaning of saying.
Our consciousness of our consciousness is a consciousness of which we are often conscious but what consciousness is it that is conscious of the consciousness of our consciousness?
or are we?
or is it?
I am really digging these drums he has! what a delight!
with which consciousness do we introspect our listening while we are listening?
do we have a consciousness of our retrospective consciousness?
how far back or up does it go?
where within that do we find our consciousness of others?
[is there a consciousness-structure node within which inter-subjectivity arises?
innately?
born in?
a consciousness gene? an inter-subjectivity gene?]
August 16, 2020
Housekeys (Tiffany Costello)
Jellyfish
we understand a thing that makes a sound
we understand how we make the sounds we make
we just do it
we understand how other creatures make sounds
we do that too so we know how
no explanation is required
but sound produced by electronic signal processing and loudspeaker driving is not so gut level intuitive as to what makes the sound. (a magnet is shaking a diaphragm)
(whistles and flutes are similarly mysterious until one does it once for oneself)
with the tide
August 18, 2020
Mother Tongue (Angelina Baldoz, Katherine Cohen)
moves at a pace only partly measured by the pulse
song type stretches occlude
occupy time within the pace it moves
great care is taken to hold that slant of weary cosmic disdain
bits and pieces on a long wire.
August 15, 2020
Symphony in F Major, K42a(76) - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music, Jaap Schröder, Christopher Hogwood
repetition as principal tool
and how we slip off from it
and come back to it.
just stay in the same room.
find some game to play.
cadences doubled, curtailed, and tripped over, disappointed, deceived.
Young Mozart wishes to arbite your good taste.
dialogue practice
His repetitions are never token repetitions
they are this particular thing again
Symphony in E minor. Hob.I:44 "Trauersinfonie" - Franz Joseph Haydn- Adrian Shepherd, Cantilena
He had to be careful, people who knew their shit were listening to this.
Don't slack off.
binary form repeats: they hold the music inside.
long form repetitions relies for its effect on a quiet attentive audience
(excuse me, this is a private room)
preparations: so many things to do before we can have a fireworks show.
will there be? we don't know.
August 16, 2020
Sonata in E-flat Major, op. 7#1 - Muzio Clementi - Howard Shelley
the material as first presented: polite but curls around itself.
loud comments are made
nose right up to the key sense - to how that key sense was constructed - variations and comments focus back on the how of their key sense making.
Sonata in F Major, op.10#2 - Ludwig van Beethoven - Artur Schnabel
first repeat:
to remind us of the size of space that was opened in our passage through
now we'll do it backwards
blindfolded
after spinning around
are we there yet (uncertain)
2nd movement is about its repeats types, exact and varied.
and the restlessness with which they veer.
Overture in C Major "Italian" - Franz Schubert - San Francisco Symphony, Herbert Blomstedt
seems a little tipsy
whistley morning
hello moo cow
Polonaise in G-sharp minor, op. posth. - Frédéric Chopin - Peter Katin
flourish to usher in the singer : guitarish accompaniment,
The folkish boom chick is used quite sparingly, as a marker between more flamboyant vocalizations.
String Quartet in A minor, op. 13 - Felix Mendelssohn - Quatuor Ysaÿe
strange how the historical narrative of the history of music (composers never cross stylistic divides) doesn't apprehend that it is a web of contemporaries all the way back. so story book!
Mendelssohn wanted to be Haydn
((let's inside)) how dramatic!
Atonality was born from the womb of counterpoint (the elder Goddess)
the book now sleeps upon my shelf
August 17, 2020
clearly made of parts, each audible - no hurry.
as though hearing them for the first time, in tune, in balance.
independence to the point where it is difficult to posit the architecture that holds them all together.
Stunning job distant cousin Robert Shaw!
August 18, 2020
Klaviertrio in F Major, op.80#2 - Robert Schumann - Quatuor Via Nova, Jean Hubeau
each instrument has multiple personalities tag teaming in the same direction
we carry each other
each duets with each
pleasant evenings making music with friends
a game we play with notes.
Pensees des morts - Franz Liszt - Alfred Brendel
death, oh how profound
how soulwracking
how terrible
how lovely
how disjointed and unstable
how personal and disabling
August 19, 2020
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg Act I - Richard Wagner - Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin, Eugen Jochum, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Lagger, Peter Maus, Roberto Banuelas, Roland Hermann, Gerd Feldhoff, Loren Driscoll, Karl-Ernst Mercker, Martin Vantin, Klaus Lang, Ivan Sardi, Miomir Nikolic, Placido Domingo, Horst R. Laubenthal, Catarina Ligendza, Christa Ludwig, Victor von Halem
square in part flowing in others
softhearted bricklayers
there're the wee tykes
how picturesque
How many processions can be fit into one clown car?
Does
Walther serve as
Wagner's stand-in?
Why
Would anyone think that?
What's interesting is that this had nothing to do with Royalty. It is a different notion of Nation.
He even brings Luther's choralic ghost in to bless the proceedings. Bach-analle.
[miles past Tannhäuser in the sophistication with which the dialog is embedded within the fabric of the music]
Nationalism and the Big Tune.
[myth and history collide: the Nürnberg song trial of nationalism at its birth and the Nürnberg crimes against humanity trials at its ripeness]
the sounds of the score being tallied (runs, hits, errors) are unscored sounds.
August 20, 2020
Symphony in C minor, op. 17 (#2) - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky -U.S.S.R. Symphony Orchestra, Yevgeny Svetlanov
peopled scenes
that first movement person is a hothouse Romantic Hero
second a harumphy old gentleman being plied by young folk
a life of fast adventure
tugowar
Symphony in D Major, op. 73 (#2) - Johannes Brahms - Otto Klemperer
The problem with not taking the first movement repeat is that the corner that is turned as the music goes into the so-called development section is just another corner, not an entry into a brand new world. The repeat taken provides an essential threshold. Without it the return to the tonic feels empty, unearned, we can still see back to where we were. We haven't left the room.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
August 16, 2020
Clavichord Project - Keith Eisenbrey
another special project - details in a few weeks I hope!
August 18, 2020
Music for Wallace Book 2 takes - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey
August 19, 2020
Music for Wallace Book 2 (to be edited later) - Aaron Keyt - Keith Eisenbrey
August 20, 2020
Chorale 2 takes - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey
August 21, 2020
Chorale 2 (to be edited later) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey
I was having trouble getting clean takes of these, hence two session on each. I think I finally got there.
August 22, 2020
Clavichord Project - Keith Eisenbrey
Postscripts
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