Preface
"Composers are thinkers. Composing is thinking. The experience, the very being of music is inextricably interdependent with the entire range of a person's mental interior; the critical individuality of each person requires that each person pursue and evolve and articulate their own personal thinking in and about music, to have it adequately as composers, performer, listener. Music has evolved overt complexities and musical culture has developed acute anxieties which force engaged people to consciously reflect and articulate and work out their issues in extramusical languages. Deconstructing conventions to uncover their cognitive opacities, and the musical consequences of their applications, has become a creative - a moral imperative as well as a path to an artistic breakthrough; hearing old music as new, imagining a new music arising 'from the shell of the old', making 'music which invents the world from scratch', by some cognitive-imaginative path determined by one's own philosophy of personhood, composerhood, history...composers, musicians, are driven to reflection and utterance by these musical urgencies and aesthetic visions, and by their habitation in an intellectual and artistic world much wider than that of music alone."
- Benjamin Boretz "The Zeitgeist of Perspectives, ab origine" from "inside in . . . / . . . outside out" Open Space Publications, 2020
Texts
Streaming
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/.
Jackie An
In Encouragement of Impermanence
explaining for ourselves
open mouth
calculator not required
answers provided
flavors presented as found
a swarm intrudes
accepted
graduals
troubling terrain for dealing with
June 20, 2021
Jesse Canterbury
From Home:
1. How Do We Spell Shadow?
2. Interlude
3. Encounter
i. Bons mots
ii. Turgid Fustian
iii. Admirable Bolete
iv. Forest Paterfamilias
4. Shimmer
5. Fog
6. Still
7. Fight and Flight
brief spacious passages that might continue through each other
(clarinets and vocal sounds)
(a confrontation)
(fungus finding spirit sport)
and do
past the wild man
patient dissonance
these sounds
lap at no other shore
flow through no other cavern
arise in no other grotto
and always have
getting back requires some bushwhacking
sharp thorns too
Recorded
June 19, 2021
Scherzo Fantastique - Igor Stravinsky - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz
fairy dust
took what he needed from Rimsky-Korsakov
and composed with it instead
Khamma - Claude Debussy - Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest, James Conlon
exotic
lives in misty murk
if it tells a story we don't know
how might we approach it
Livery Stable Blues - Original Dixieland Jazz Band [from Allen Lowe's Really the Blues]
amuse the masters
in a dance rhythm framework
with animal imitations
Pictures at an Exhibition - Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel - Philadelphia Orchestra, Riccardo Muti
wants to be for antique instruments
the figuration does that
is orchestration
is interpretation
performance
this is Ravel
performing Mussorgsky
as a composer performs:
composing sells it
tells the whole story
start to finish
top to bottom
there's Boris again
remember how you loved him
a procession from the past
in glorious
wide screen
70 mm
o heaven
Lonesome Road Blues - Da Costa Woltz's Southern Broadcasters [from Allen Lowe's Turn Me Loose White Man]
a caricature
an act
an attitude
arnery pilgrim huckster music
among other things the Duke did
he invented a stylish society
as a musical fiction
ya shoulda been there
by then
radio
and magnetic tape
were things
When a Woman Loves a Man - Art Tatum [from Classic Early Solos]
it is increasingly difficult for me
as I listen to this
to comprehend
that this is a recording
an actual person made
out of their own head space
and not some impossible feat of magic
Las Agachades - Aaron Copland - New England Conservatory Chorus, Aaron Copland
an American Kodály
yikes there's Boris again
what's he doing stateside?
Yesterdays - Lenny Tristano [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
creates its own cigarette smoke and noirish cinematography
a tone poem sings without words
I am duly impressed
Ring Around the Moon - Harry Partch - Gate 5 Ensemble
Beatnik poetry at its most potently sincere
nothing fancy goin' on here no sirree
they ain't
a performance artist extraordinaire
he counts x y z
microtonalists are a community
one to be respected
talk theater
I'm Lookin' for Someone to Love - Buddy Holly [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
strutting plea
I'm lookin' for someone to love
(me)
Music for Four Pianos, Part II - John Cage - Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Lise Mann, Neal Kosály-Meyer [Meany Studio Theater April 17, 1985]
these
for pianos
occupy a space
there is considerable distance
between them
audible
as actual space
in an actual room
even
as scrunched
onto cassette tape
these microphones
were played by the head of Stuart Dempster
no less
whose character is this sound
his sound?
part mine?
the score is the stimulus
not the hype around its meaning
as popularly received
I write in my journal
I am a journalist
what you see is what you get
including the thumping dancers
in the attic
we did sure make it pretty
imagine a performance of Gradus
but with every combination of
4 (pianos) x 4 (pianists) x 88 keys
selfhood is a mathematical artifact
even more
if x 4 lights too
see the System
arpeggiation maximized
hey kids let's play math games in tonal space
as interpreted by physical space
it's fun
you'll like it
one must allow easing out of this
before we formally greet each other in applause
June 20, 2021
Choir Festival May 7, 1967 - Choirs of Bellevue First United Methodist Church, Betty Eisenbrey, director [from a private tape]
enter in round forthright syllabic plodding
now some Mendelssohn
it was old music then
and persisted as part of our repertoire
right up to the shutdown
then the Matthean beatitudes
now some Brahms
how lovely
now some kids
Cherubs in white robes
with red bows
pitch matching for 5 year olds
I might be one of those voices
in one of those choirs
being 8 at the time
perhaps the boy choir
I was a soprano at the time
but I got over it
the big combined number to finish it up
triumphal kindly Christ for suburban comfort
Layla - Derek and the Dominoes [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
inflating the personal out to stadium size
an activity ridiculous on its face
requires a suspension of social proportion
long instrumental
time enough for a costume change and a drink or two
June 21, 2021
"...such words as it were vain to close..." - J. K. Randall - Neal Kosály-Meyer [at Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington, April 9, 1986]
a poem of immediate moving
as I recall
Neal postulated
that the heart of the piece
was in its cumulating overtones
I postulate
that he was incorrect
but that his performance
is remarkable nevertheless
this may be from the show that Greg Short walked out on
patience tried too far
Neal's slow thoughtful tempo
allows his solution room to breathe
all manners of modes
of one
being like another
shifting the focus of form
from direct repetition
to measured partial repetitions
brings us back inside
the space
going as it goes
Blow Gabriel - Nathan Palmer [from The Art of Field Recording, Volume 1]
from some other roots
deeper
Banned Rehearsal 112 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [January 10, 1987]
we might have agreed to pluck and strum
kalimba dulcimer violin
so some scraping too
Karen tells the cats a story about Neal & Anna's stuff
and the doing things to their car
it's a moral imperative
back to instrumental scribbling in progress
throw sounds onto a tape and see what happens
developing a music and a sense of ourselves from the ground up
funmaker is a thinking space
echo of a sudden song
[from my journal entry of May 20, 1988: plucks and strums as though in the morning on a front stoop whittling like you was doodling but not just that making something something for which there is a use Karen tells a tale among the morning whittling sounds after which tale it's much later in the day middle of afternoon then soon it quiets off into evening and bells and mbiru and trains and a fishwhistle evensong what all the whittling was for earlier on a celebration cow home march cowherdsong now the bucolic funmaker comes on country church organ congregational the sermons or prayers on bugledrone surrounded and punctuated whilst bell "can't Play the Trumpet" postlude Keyt benedictus exeunt we all go home grumbling Ladies and Gentlemen Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band]
this may not operate this way
but as I understand what Earl Brown does
is he provides a set of scores
of spans shorter than the whole
and a methodology of varying flexibility
for moving among or through them
so that relations might be discovered
time span polyamory
given the count of such spans
and the rules of the game
the total of all possibilities
could be determined
but in what order to listen to them all
or perhaps
simply
no piece is knowable fully
but this one is more like
how one might become acquainted with someone
how one knows another
incompletely
Banned Rehearsal 446 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 22, 1997]
gentle clarinet
too big electric guitar
some plucks
toy piano and wood sounds
we are all up close to the speakers
doing our pitchwork
as we have thrown sounds onto tape
the pressure has increased
the cumulant sense of what we are
and what we do
stressed
with saxophone and electric guitar and clarinet
decade of chaos at its height
listen at your own risk
it wasn't pretty
[from my journal entry of November 16, 2004: quietly opening off in corners looking for a music small woodland critter music a certain amount of uninspired noodling or tapping 10 minutes or so in probably less things finally become a kind of music just before or as the squeeze box comes into play as we build finally to some energy took a while to find honk of sax up the middle BR's take on heartfelt lyricism slow and with feeling this music doesn't move much directed individually toward distinct centers a bereft music dispiritedly alienated why I wonder do we sound so bummed I wonder is part of it just the struggle physically to produce sound on sax and clarinet and that without a more professional breath-control it all sounds like air being let out of a balloon forever deflating together with the fairly colorless guitar this session again and again just doesn't go is it the instruments stupid?]
Adrift in New York - Christopher DeLaurenti
voices and motors
sales tales
and questions
life after
Consider the Birds Mix 7 - Keith Eisenbrey [February 3, 2007]
vis a vis Earl Brown above
another way of blasting pieceness apart
shred something into its fibers
twist the fibers into strands
braid the strands into rope
each fiber and strand remains intact as an object
as part of the whole
of what it might be considered to be
this is a strand of fibers
of the original shredded file
historical note
the time it took to make the whole set of them
not counting the off clock wetware processes of how to do it
was exponentially less time than it takes to listen to the whole set of them end to end
in the old days
rendering time was exponentially greater than performance time
or
what are the constituent sounds of this
let's puree
centrifuge
and study them on slides
to find out
Spider Over the Bed - Lovesick Empire [from Four Songs]
fuzzed out impatience
effective use of sound size
amp hum proud
Gradus 306 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 6, 2017]
so many notes
another Earl Brown type concept
within any rung the order is wide open
draws the face of a moment's thoughts
[from my journal entry of February 6, 2017: stars blink on as though night appeared as dawn some constellations are habitations distant ones or near the flooding waves ripple closer dikes and levees permeate the ripples reflexive co-infusion]
 |
| Gradus 306 |
June 23, 2021
4 Praeludiums, Fvb 22-25 - Traditional, William Byrd - Claudio Columbo [from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book]
lines can share ideas
like as how rumors are spread
or like balloons
much as they are now
Preludes then
were short pieces
to establish a particular flavor of a tonal feel
Symphoniae sacrae II "Frohlocket mit Händen und Jauchzet dem Herren", Op. 10 #9 - Heinrich Schütz - Capella Augustana
text repeated upon jaunty descending line
carefully modified
each iteration
a slower recitativo lesson
just the jaunty instruments
another slower lesson
but ornate
a new jaunty
vocal line wiggles about
a new slower
that's it
Conzona in C Major, BuxWV 166 - Dieterich Buxtehude - Simone Stella
keeps starting back up
after wandering into the workings
Fughetta super Lob sei dem allmächtigen Gott, BWV 704 - Johann Sebastian Bach - Michael Chapuis
a fugue being a looser structure than a canon
it has broader possibilities
not pursued here
Dix-Huiteme Ordre (fa) - François Couperin - Michael Gilbert
goes straight
turns corner
finds the start of the going straight
these straight lines have curves in 'em
counterpoint and imaginatively intricate voice leading
soften tonality into modellable clay
Couperin is a celebrator of possibilities
Sonata in D Major, Kk. 122 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder
figural variety differentiates harmonic states and shifts
Sonata in D minor, Wq. 69 - Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach - Miklos Spanyi
parts of figures pop up all over
the moment to moment balances are jarring
he constructs a theme or phrase with the same structural thinking that his dad used in constructing fugue subjects
a bunch of variations ends it
(Beethoven was going back to old ideas in his late quartets and sonatas)
this harpsichord has a bunch of colorful stops
Symphony in A Major "Feuersymphonie" (#59) - Franz Joseph Haydn - Austro-Hungarian Orchestra, Ádám Fischer
dynamic orchestration
full of sudden jabs
odd ending to 1
just drifts off
the dynamic becomes another aspect of figuration
and of articulation
the whole arsenal of tonal differentiation
Concerto in E-flat Major, K. 271 (#9) - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - English Baroque Soloists, John Elliot Gardiner, Malcolm Bilson
enter on a trill
adjunct to something going on
within the ongoing orchestral business
Mozart's dramatic imagination
showing itself
remarkable orchestra-piano sound in 2
personification of piano soloist as opera character
singing an aria
perhaps not original with Mozart
but he nails it
Sonata in E-flat Major, Op. 31 #3 - Ludwig van Beethoven - Wilhelm Kempff
playful
outdoors
free and breezy
so much fun
I worked on this with Neal O'Doan back at the UW
and as chance would have it
am reading through it again
as part of my morning practice
this morning it was this little Scherzo
so friendly
Sonatina in F Major, Op. 88 #4 - Friedrich Kuhlau - Loredano Brigandi
figuration is ordinary
left hand accompanies
right hand sings
most of the time
the texture is exposed
the melodies are gracious
polite
Sonata in G Major (#7) - Johann Nepomuk Hummel - Constance Keene
he must have practiced his scales to be showing them off so much
nothing here to alarm folks
family fun
Scherzo in B-flat minor, Op. 31 - Frédéric Chopin - Cecile Licad
incremented the distances tonally
among figures certain
and figures questioning
and figures venturing
and figures elsewhere
not family fun time any more
Track 4, Selections from The Nutcracker - Piotr Ilyich Tchakovsky - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy
here more like Hummel than like Chopin
these tunes don't question themselves
they're too busy putting on a show
3 Sarabandes - Erik Satie - Frank Glazer
block chords at home
have their ways
deep ways
but humane and kind
[from journal entry of February 8, 2004: among other things: Homophonyfarbenmelodie allows even the barest hint of figuration to have structural power and when he lets go in 3 and cascades in chaste rivulets whew!]
Pelleas et Melisande Act II - Claude Debussy - Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Ernest Ansermet, Camille Maurane, Chorus of the Grand Théâtre, Geneva, Erna Spoorenberg, George London, Hoekman, Veasey, Brady, Shirley-Quirk
draws us close inside the relational surface of the characters
Sonata in F-sharp, Op. 53 (#5) - Alexander Scriabin - Ruth Laredo
passion within a spiderweb of ice crystal twitches
vibrate to the ends of strands
galaxies distant
In Session at the Tintinabulary
June 21, 2021
Gradus 367 - Neal Kosály-Meyer
volume amplitude size duration impact
nonlinear
pitch higher than or lower than
isn't a symmetrical relation
but pitch class is
?
same up or down
aboveness doesn't matter
because acoustics have nothing to do with pitch class
by definition
acoustically
a higher pitch is primarily embedded within the harmonic spectrum of the lower pitch
the part of a pitch that might be lower
those rumored and occasional undertones
is acoustically negligible
takes significant shenanigans to make it audible
clever manipulation of pitch class relations
and timbre
and amplitude
can fool the ear
or enlighten it
the kid across the street is quacking I think
higher than is different in kind than lower than
to proceed higher is to find one within
to proceed lower is to embed the past within
acoustically
actually
as I understand it
Postscripts
::Consult the Oracle
his opponent's spine hard to say uncle
wasn't cowboy's maker back on the up you
sonofabitch he said crack it was both
Reality Check::
it was a mailbox
a rather black clothed
marionette being shaken
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