Preface
"To be moved, by music, or with, transported ontologically, inhabiting a new-perceived world, resonating a new-composed music, being thereby a new-created new-being, of unsignifiable but saturately selfspecific gender: Was I male, within myself? Was I female, within myself? Was I person? Am I still? Have I been some resonance, some inflection, some reinvented creature alchemized out of the base matters of male and female? (yes, if I remember correctly, . . . )"
- Benjamin Boretz "music/ /consciousness/ /gender" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"
Texts
Streaming
December 19, 2020
Seattle Modern Orchestra - This Is Beethoven Festival (Revolutionary) Julia Tai and Jérémy Jolley, Co-Artistic Directors
Eric Rynes, violin; Jordan Voelker, viola; Rose Bellini, cello; Bonnie Whiting, percussion; Cristina Valdés, piano; Marcin Pączkowski, electronics
Wang Lu - Like Clockwork
parallel play
conspiracy
each period a subject
common and unique
pre-organized
Suzanne Farrin - uscirmi di braccia
bass drum and viola in an outdoor brick space
screen frames and metallic
chairs
battle, Träume
Mauricio Kagel - Ludwig van
bits form
mingled with memory
ala Sinfonia
continuity filched
source as signal
busy box
 |
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/.
December 19, 2020
Pink Void (Crystal Perez)
chill and dark
an aftermath strewn
remains utter stillness
unpeopled
new scene
fade in
frog chirp
running water
thaw
machine
churns and sputters
passes behind security door
ozone hum
cutting torch
what
we rely
on when
we rely
on machines
December 20, 2020
Dangerknife (Nico Sophiea, Brad Rouda)
improvising to (a film)
[a score is a stimulus (BAB)]
[a stimulus can be a score]
a film can be a stimulus || a film can be a score
doing something to
(a stimulus)
relieves the mind
from being
its own stimulus
but in so relieving
also distracting
attention tools
being focused
on the stimulus
other parts of the mind
are left to their own devices
[or]
we have been hijacked
an alien has visited
and we have welcomed it
as a valued guest
[a guest can be a stimulus]
improvising with
a film
we can follow the score
there it is
on the wall
(a projection of it or from it )
the bouncing ball
follow the ball
bouncing
December 22, 2020
gongs are wealthy and generous when coaxed
episodes of sounds
gathering building releasing
each bears warnings calls
of distant beasties
vast inhabited space
location of incidence is far off
unseen
metallic sinews
shock waves reverberate
along molecular paths
pulled into vibrations
that bump the air
Recorded
December 19, 2020
Beato in ver chi puo - George Friedric Handel - Renee Grant-Williams, Dorothy Barnhouse, Alden Gilchrist
The roundness of the piano tone doesn't help what ought to be delicate.
sonority padded
where it oughtn't be
Sonata in B-flat Major, Wq. 65/20 - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach - Miklos Spanyi
on fortepiano
moving through
no more
adjusting position
in a strange chair
propositions are impatient
but stay put
lots of minore
for such a happy key domestic drama
Sonata in A-flat Major, Hob.XVI:46 - Franz Joseph Haydn - Anton Nel
(modern piano)
bright
wit
mischief
2nd movement is lovely
quiet home time
game time
say this
fast
speed run
December 20, 2020
Symphony in D Major, K141a(161/163) "Il sogno di Scipione" - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music, Jaap Schroder, Christopher Hogwood
at the height of fashion
refined
but also independent
complete
nothing to waste
Rondo in C Major, Op. 51#1 - Ludwig van Beethoven - Artur Schnabel
Rondo: the playful form
allows sharp contrasts
and license to ornament
and vary
Sonata in B minor, Op. 40#2 - Muzio Clementi - Howard Shelley
aloneness leaping in melodramatically
hey
I'd watch this movie
more proto-Romantic than classical
2nd wave Sturm und Drang
this being 1802
and Paris being
just down the road a piece
Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 54 "Retour à Paris" - Johann Ladislaus Dussek - Zvi Meneker
see?
I did not plan that ahead
Mozart's operatic sensibility in anything he did:
for the next 30 or 40
years
keyboard works are operatic
in the same sense
that
Mozart
and Haydn for that matter
was
it was in the air
and Wagner picked up on it
a certain amount of
see what a great noise this makes!
Chaplinesque
(or Chico Marx)
(or Liberace)
December 21, 2020
peaceful evening with a pipe
Symphony in D Major, Op. 107 (Reformation) - Felix Mendelssohn - Wiener Philharmoniker, John Eliot Gardiner
a violent struggle gets in everything
the Romantic Symphony needed to be
about something
have a theme
a subject
music told stories
like operas did
or poems
or
pictures
this Symphony is loads of fun if
as in this performance
the stick
is removed
from where it had been
stuck up
Impromptu in A-flat Major, Op. 29 - Frédéric Chopin - Alfred Cortot [recorded in 1922]
through the modern magic of figuration
melody floats independent of the
accompanying pattern
the ice is slick
take care
December 22, 2020
String Quartet in F Major, Op. 41#2 - Robert Schumann - Quatuor Via Nova
Due to a confluence of indexing errors and mis-readings, I was under the distinct impression, as I listened to it, that this was a String Quartet in F minor. It bent my brain into extraordinary meta-tonal contortions as I persisted, with some success, in imagining that this was actually intended by Herr Schumann to be a minor key quartet. Quite the trip. Irreproducible.
Mephisto Waltz (Dance in the Village Inn) - Franz Liszt - Stephen Hough
music to fill a room with
to be superhuman
to transcend the
possibilities
of mere individuality
December 24, 2020
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act III - 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\
rising
while falling
while falling
while rising
everpresent unobtainable quotidian transcendence
Hans spills his beans
opens the door
Walther lets 'er rip
Hans: not bad for a tenor
more busy work before the big payoff
the main characters check in
the fashion show
fill the stage!
the more forces the
better
This opera lacks a strong female character (as do most of Wagner's operas except the Ring cycle, Tristan, and Parsifal). On top of the misogyny this makes for a whole lot of male-voice sound in a long span. This being a domestic setting, a strong female might have been unbelievable in that era. It took myth to make it acceptable. Sieglinde is the hinge from domestic rape victim to Brünnhilde as full on star of the show.
German he-man culture with supportive comments composed right into the chorus.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
December 20, 2020
Psalm 22:9-10 (2020 version) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey
In 2019, during an Advent service at our church, Karen performed a setting of these two Psalm verses that I had composed in the Summer of 2000. I was accompanying, but at a certain point it occurred to me that the reason one particular bit was difficult to pull off - the very bit I was even then preparing to play mere moments hence - was due to the clear fact that I had composed it poorly, settling for good enough when I should have worked it out properly. Further, I began to furiously make internal compositional decisions on how to improve that moment and the rest of the piece. Needless to say my feeble brain can't compose one thing and play another at the same time. Karen persisted like the trouper she is, singing on until I regained my bearings and rejoined.
When I got home I made some notes, and over the course of several weeks realized that the only way to correct that spot was to start from scratch and re-compose the whole thing. Those pages sat on my piano's music rack until this Summer when I finally had some time to work it out and complete it. For about a month I have been learning to play and sing it myself. The range is pretty high for me in spots, and the chromatic leaps are a challenge, but I get the idea of it across. Next task is to teach Karen to sing it. It fits her range much better than it does my untutored-except-by-what-I-have-picked-up-over-the-years-from-choral-conductors voice.
December 24, 2020
24 Preludes (Preludes 21 through 24) - Lockrem Johnson - Keith Eisenbrey
I had hoped to put together a recital sometime this coming year to complete my survey of the Prelude cycles of Lockrem Johnson, Greg Short, and Ken Benshoof, but the Covid lockdown didn't just mess with my timing, it has also made me reconsider the idea of my playing composed music in public. I reserve the right to change my mind, but at the moment I'm just not sure I need that kind of self-inflicted stress in my life. For now I think I would rather just work on getting good recordings. I have such recordings in the can, and am slowly piecing them together in sequence, for the recital I had planned for this last Autumn, of recent music by Aaron Keyt paired with the 12th and 13th segments of my Études d'exécution imminent project. This is the start of such work for Preludes in Seattle Part 6. Lockrem's pieces are not as technically difficult as Greg Short's or Ken Benshoof's are, but they make up for it in exposure.
Postscripts
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