"Aeneas drank in this reminder of his savage
grief. Ablaze with rage,
awful in anger, he cried,
'Should I let you slip away, wearing what
you
tore from one I loved? Pallas sacrifices
you, Pallas punishes
your profane blood' - and,
seething, planted his sword in that hostile
heart.
Turnus' knees buckled with chill. His soul fled
with a groan
of protest to the shades below."
Vergil - "The Aeneid" (translated by Shadi Bartsch)
Texts
Live
October 20, 2022
Tom Swafford and Friends
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Tom Swafford, Vanessa Skantze, Greg Campbell, Jim Knodle, Jesse Canterbury, Eveline Müller
Tom:
dig in it
soar o'er
twirly song
scratch hatch
Tom and Vanessa:
in the dark
make still sound
delicate
balance
movement terrible
to move
face and hands
convulse
invulse
revulse
holy horrible
whirling
omnivulsion
somehow
joy release
Tom, Greg, Jim, Jesse, and Eveline:
lights wander on
around the
neighborhood
mutual incitement
ritual reticence
which lights
where
from nowhere
what happens
a wind is coming
poppy
doing
pip pop
space finds these
in corners of conceptions
room to breathe
ad hoc
underground channels
party in
the back
A most excellent evening of astonishing sound and dance
Recorded
New World Symphony, Largo (excerpt) - Antonín Dvořák [from 100 Greatest Classics]
aspects of the opening
map on to the opening
of
Also Sprach Zarathustra
crescendo to sunburst
this
recording fades out
before the middle section
Skew - Elliott Sharp - The New York Composer's Orchestra [from First Program in Standard Time]
factory floor
machinery working
in good order
if all the
sounds
should happen
to ever
exactly
coincide
the whole contraption
would shatter
now we're in the quieter-sounds lab
developing new ways to fuzz us up
Interlude: Full / What About - Janet Jackson [from The Velvet Rope]
left right play
conversation
from zero-sum sides
Banned Rehearsal 639 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [July 5, 2002]
the trick is this
each composes
(in so-called real time)
their part
so that
it transforms the compositions of the
others
intertransmingling formations
Zarathustra reduced
to
a slow cymbal ssshinggg
tops out at mezzo piano
again with the
ssshinggg thing
anybody can step everybody
into the next room
with them
which
is no motion
and now
for the
next motion
which is no motion
at all
as it turns out
but
with a new drum
and another new drum
in for the
cornet
tambourine should kick some life into this outfit
but we
drift off slowly
to the rattle
of an african rattle
we've
moved on
back soon
||
bakake
a convention within the patterning of letters
to
mark the pronunciation of the syllable
||
at what juncture
did we slip into snoreland
Trying to Reach You - The Hope [from In The Deep]
the melody's rhetoric
echoes
the rhetoric of the stanzas
several lines
of an identical figure
set
several lines
of statements of activity
followed by
a question
on a
new figure
chorus hook announces the stated intent
I Don't Know (Take 1 Raw) - You Mother Should Know [August 20, 2012]
piano and voice
pile on the rhymes
and just-too-long lines
less of a paste-on accent
than in many of these
Flower - ZongYun We - Loadbang [from Quiver]
verbal
but not linguistic
what
of what we say
that
isn't words
and that
other instruments can often imitate
effectively
verbal gestures
figural gestures
simple to grasp
immediately
a feint?
Banned Rehearsal 1053 - Jennifer Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [June 20, 2022]
not just
to allow
ambient sound
to be music
but
to transform it
requires
that our contributions
be
permeable
to like transformation
environmental intimacy
some aspects of an environment's sound
are imprinted upon it
without that agent's listening
to it
air traffic
highway traffic
some aspects
are from within the listening to it
bird song
our efforts
some aspects
are features
that undergird the whole
wind
running water
or rain
we seek the middle ground
some aspects
are architectural
the shape of the ground
and
of the billows of air masses
how these affect
the ambience
more globally
implied times
transform each the others times
into a web of
transformed implications of times
as JS Bach often does
with keys
among contrapuntal voices
Sonata in E minor, Kk. 203 - Domenico Scarlatti - Pieter-Jan Belder
a profusion of articulation points
at further distances than we
contemplated
and of diverse species
a regular economy of
articulation points
Willie the Weeper - Louis Armstrong's Hot Seven [from Hot Fives & Sevens]
introductory measures
to announce the time to dance
check tuning
and tempo
and general agreement
did they record this all on a
single microphone?
wow!
Getting Some Fun Out of Life - Billie Holiday [from Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia]
rhyme play lightens the pretense
but also opens up pattern possibilities
that can be composed with
outside of lexical comprehension
My Old Flame - Charlie Parker [from The Complete Savoy and Dial Master Takes]
the intro is a separate music here
as well
though
a bit more
extensive
then sax solo
then trumpet solo
toward the end of
which
the sax joins quietly
from underneath
and it ends
because things do
Goodnight My Someone - Meredith Wilson [from The Music Man: Original Cast Recording]
a chaste waltz
the dance of romance
Falling In love Again - The Beatles [from First Live Recordings, Volume 2]
and here we are with another chaste waltz were it not for the guitar flat-footing a ponderous and prickly swing
Love O' Love - Nina Simone [from Silk & Soul]
this intro
on piano
has episodes
and the voice joins
seamlessly
coming back to it
on piano
clearly
not just
an introduction
but a world of potentialities
barely harnessed
by the imperative
to sing the song
Hollywood-derived "primitive music"
underlying a political speech parody
at least
on one level
within a Tommy-esque
quasi dramatization
Sirius (continued) - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Karlheinz Stockhausen, Markus Stockhausen, Annette Merriweather,Suzanne Stephens, Boris Carmeli
all of these sounds
have collected
at the bottom of the beaker
they all talk over each other
fingers in ears
they all stop
and a wind blows
but they don't stay quiet for long
it is
not true
that this is the same throughout
it does have events
but
there are long stretches
of what seem to be a
perfunctory filling in
of given time spans
what it is
counts
less
than the time it takes
and the inventory of sounds
that
are stagnant within it
enduring the reading of an occult treatise
impervious to inquiry
becomes the inverse
of the sum of its
parts
O Superman - Laurie Anderson [from Big Science]
I guess it's theme night
I'm trying to understand
what it is about
this
I find so distasteful
certainly
its
coolersmarterironicer-than-thou insufferabless
is a big part of it
I'm up to the minute
and you never will be
the patina of
profundity
on a flat surface
overlying nothing at all
Kosály-Meyer 5 - Anna K, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 15, 1987]
one morning in San Diego
we hear birds in the distance
some
traffic
and other occasional sounds
such as
folks shifting
in their chairs
some small matters
but mostly birds
peaceful
domestic
then the phone rings
good morning nobody
On A Slow Boat to China - Morgana King [from This Is Always]
out on the briny
with a moon bright and shiny
(Frank
Loesser)
the lyrics can't draw attention
to anything like profundity
likewise
with the music
nothing can distract
from the
need for them
to fit together
in a seamless synthesis
or to
blow up such a synthesis
as a song might be
eschewing cleverness
in favor of
color-block clarity
in
patterns
of phrase endings
Tibetan Swing - Bright Sheng - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Scwharz
study in Stravinskyan (Rite of Spring) rhythms
blocks of repeating
in calculated lengths
cinematic local color
more adventurous
musically
than any Hollywood composer could afford to be
but
in essence
quite familial to that perspective
I think the
word swing
in this context
is ill-advised
misleading
Sputnik Love 04 Mixdown 01 Pine Forest - Keith Eisenbrey [February 20, 2007]
Pine Forest
refers to an acoustic mirror
in the audio software I
underuse
but enjoy playing around in
essentially
it filters
the signal
through a reverberation profile
derived from a sample
made in a particular location
(here: a pine forest)
I am the
beetles
munching away unseen
External Rhyme - Triptet [from Figure in the Carpet]
laser drilling in
down the past streets' layers
metamorphed folds
pressure hardened
best wear eye protection
get lost in there
lose your lase
and you're toast
Banned Rehearsal 934 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 8, 2017]
a certain amount of applied pressure
is applied
certain enough
to keep it awake
is a euphemism
for
the sequential mis-understanding
of one's predecessors
then
return to ancient wisdom
is a fool's errand
as
success would only mean
the arrival
at another's misunderstandings
it may be nearly asleep now
so lighten up its journey
so as
not to abrade
over the rough stretch
Anchorage enters
as a sudden dream breeze
down in the undergrowth
and at
creekbed
in the slime
we have wandered
into the space of
rooms
and distant rooms
do not resist ones own transformation
within the greater music box
we keep the lesser
as a mascot
Hölluþula - Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, Halla Lovísa Loftsdóttir [from Strengur]
shivering concentration
enclosed in cold
a surface that extends
downward
inside
Miserera a4, Fvb 177 - William Byrd - Claudio Columbo [from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book]
first phrase
a multidimensional lattice
that starts in its middle
having no other surface
besides its cadence
which
only
anchors it
in place
within any
continuation
Riverboat Shuffle - Hoagy Carmichael, Bix Beiderbecke, Bill Rank, Don Murray, Frankie Trumbauer, Ernest 'Red' Ingle, Itzy Riskin, Eddie Lang, Chaunsey Morehouse [from Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz]
solos pop out of Laugh-in windows
directed by the high-hat laugh
punctuator
Wild and Reckless Hobo - Bill Baker and Bob Miller's Hinky Dinkers [from Evans 78s]
song
as popular journalism
voices of American types
lightly
drawn
caricatures
lots of old freight train whistle in this one
I Thought About You - Nellie Lutcher [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
on a train
in a lane
when I pulled down the shade
looked out
the crack
down the track
sharp accents on piano
comfort
class style
minus a smile
a series of clever rhymes
within a
conceit
matches the homogeneous flow
of chords in their
changes
quodlibet duet
demonstrates
that the chorus and verse
are
the same size
with different tones
matching
line for line
and rhyme for rhyme
China Gates - Sun Ra [from The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra]
we were obsessed with China
still are
then
it was the exotic
past of it
and the opium dens
of pre-revolution
a place of
mystery
and sensualism
all is to be exploited
as blatantly
as caricature will allow
Chain of Fools - Aretha Franklin [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]
complaint blues
with chorus
structured like a sermon
pitched
to a crowd
You've Got A Friend - Michael Jackson [from Got To Be There]
yet another redo
of Hey Jude
and
Bridge Over Troubled Water
the string part
sounds like it
was written by a keyboard player
doesn't rely on anything native to
violins
beyond the timbre
all the imperfections of individuality
buffed out
This Town - The Rumour [from Max]
what a band sounds like
if
all intensities
are turned down to
three
Cryin' But My Tears Are Far Away - The Knitters [from Poor Little Critter On The Road]
another trope
I look happy
but I'm blue
outing one's own
ironic stance
toward one's self
as seen
Piano Concerto #1, First Movement, Excerpt - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [from 100 Greatest Classics]
tune bird is born
how glorious
although I must admit
I heard
a wicked performance of one of these
ages ago
with SSO
and
Cherkassky
playing like a thug
Saint Behind The Glass - Los Lobos [from Kiko]
a lullaby to oneself
Lamb of God - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [recorded live at University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle, November 6, 2004]
an early
mod 17
17-tone
piece
no fancy row form play
just treating the row as a melody
to explore the lopsided pitch
space
that mod-17 creates
thinly recorded
but Karen sang it well
porch sitting tempo
tale of a gone wrong soul
a grating dissonance
lovingly emphasized
I Don't Know (Take 2 Raw) - Your Mother Should Know [August 2, 2012]
with a start-over and another
I think this was recorded on the
Chickering
rather than on the Kingsbury
Song 2 - Sarah Pasillas [recorded live at The Victory Lounge, Seattle, April 27, 2017]
a she-minstrel in the wild
protected from the dangerous grounds
by
a guitar
and a voice
and open vulnerability
Postscripts
Skaldmud's Doodle Gallery
some listening journal doodles from 1990
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