Playlist

Live

 

January 25, 2014

Rigoletto - Verdi - Seattle Opera

McCaw Hall, Seattle

 

In Wagner the particulars of drama unfold within a globally applied expressive affect. There is not a moment in which the musical material does not reflect and deepen the mythical import of the whole story, beginning middle and end, in all its interleaved and cross-woven layers, as if viewed from a godlike perch on high. From the first note it is clear what it always has been and always will be.

 

In Verdi the affect of the music is entirely inside the singing characters. The music (except for the marvelous brief prelude) only knows what the characters know, only feels what the characters feel. It's taken me more than 30 years, but I think I'm finally beginning to get it.

 

Recorded

 

January 27, 2014

Blood and Fire, Hallelujah - Keith Eisenbrey

 

Recorded live at a concert Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer, and I presented at The Chapel Performance Space in November of 2010. This composition project was a long time in progress and changed a great deal from the original conception to this performance. One aspect of it that I like a great deal is how problematic it still is for me - especially in terms of what exactly it is. It behaves a bit like a concerto for piano and electronic orchestra, except the piano and the canned part don't interact so much as beat each other up. In that sense it becomes a forum in which I work out a personal struggle between sound-board sound and speaker sound, between mechanically amplified personal energy and an electronically amplified sound file. It also comes across, I think, as an allegory of disintegration, war, and grace.

 

Keyboard Sonata in E-flat Major Hob.XVI:38 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

The first movement is the best vaudeville drunk act ever.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Greenwood - Keith Eisenbrey - November 1985

 

Discipline: fill an expanse of time with sound. Use guitar, singing, talking, and chanting.

 

ain't no way to walk in the city

snow on the ground

 

walk down the street

by the river that you meet

 

green fingers on the floor

 

that part of what I still see

when my eyes are closed

 

 

January 28, 2014

Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler - Neal Meyer

 

Also recorded live at the same show mentioned above.

 

Keyboard Sonata in G Major Hob.XVI:39 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

Starts like Polonius giving advice. But what it keeps coming back to are intricate preparations to arrive somewhere, sets of arrows deflected, reflected, and inflected, punctuated by astonishingly rare moments of stasis, moments of actually being somewhere.

 

Banned Telepath 5 Bickleton - Anna K, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - November 1985

 

We start in a house, a radio is playing in a distant room. We take a walk in the snow to an even quieter room where there is a great deal of typing and a space-heater.

 

Figure Study 5 - Keith Eisenbrey - November 2010

 

A solo piano improvisation. While keeping one ear firmly planted at the center, slowly and methodically twisting myself around.

 

January 30, 2014

Fantasia in c minor K.475 - Mozart - Mitsuko Uchida

 

An interesting performance. I remain unconvinced. The forte / piano contrast at the opening is understated, in order (I suppose) to make the slow / fast contrast more effective by making it also about forte and piano. The effect in the end just oversimplifies the dramatic dialogue. The tempo during the slow bits is very slow indeed - hyper-romanticized, as though profundity were being inflicted upon it. Surely there is plenty there already. Pretending it's late Schubert doesn't really help.

 

Recorder Studies - Keith Eisenbrey - December 1985

 

I have always been fascinated by the music made in the midst of working out music. Not improvisation in the performance sense, but rather the sound of the work shop. One evening in early December of 1985 I was writing a recorder quintet and wanted to work out fingerings and tunes and such. I turned on the tape machine and worked at it for an hour and a half. Then I put the two 45' sides on top of each other and pretty much forgot about it until it came up for listening this week. 

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 28, 2014

Fox Spit 140128 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

I improvised for a few minutes on this beautiful guitar that my brother Paul made.

 

Upcoming

 

Herocat

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM 

A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K. Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Playlist

Recorded

 

January 19, 2014

 

Keyboard Sonata in C-sharp minor Hob.XVI:36 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

As though cut into pieces and jumbled back together. Blown away by the tricky metrical scansion in the 3rd movement, we are knocked off our balance and led to the edge, where we remain.

 

Banned Rehearsal 56 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Karen Meyer, Neal Meyer - November 1985

In my Greenwood cottage, 1985

 

On occasion one of our less formally improvised sessions manages to succeed in some pretty amazing ways. The instant example is occupied mostly with a slide show and its attendant conversation. At that level it manages to be among our least smart-ass talky-tapes, and as a consequence is quite a fine snapshot of who we were and what we were like back in the day. On a family-business note this is particularly fun because it was made just a month or so before Karen and I made clear to each other our mutual smittenhood, and you can certainly sense more than a little flirtation in the air. But as Neal begins to layer in several other sessions, including the internally infamous Banned Rehearsal 12 and the less infamous Banned Rehearsal 44, with its own slide show and commentary, it becomes a wonderful study in the dynamics of recorded presence. In the end the dinosaurs swallow us all.

 

January 20, 2014

Foliage (live recording of playback) - Aaron Keyt

 

This electronic work opened our concert at the Chapel in November of 2010. The sound of it, as recorded in the space, is a pointedly immediate image of the tiny, the delicate, the close-focused, measured in millimeters from our ear. A tam-tam-y interlude at a great distance, across a chasm, marks out an extraordinarily specific stance of relative points in space. It is as though, with ear alone, we directly perceive the vector between them: concrete, immutable, impossibly precise.

 

Keyboard Sonata in D Major Hob.XVI:37 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

Eethoven - Tom Jajdu, Andrew Milburn, J. K. Randall - (from InterPlay)

 

big circles

muttered musical analysis clipped space radio chatter

freefloating atmosphog

back earthly metamorphosed

discourse :: continuity

moving alongness

stuckness

sight-seeing examples pasted SPLAT!

 

"you can't put those next to a fughetta with an H in it!" (JKR)

 

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

January 19, 2014

Banned Rehearsal 851 - Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

 

Upcoming

 

March 7, 2014 - 8 PM

Seattle Composers Salon

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

I will be performing Aaron Keyt's Sonata (2012) for solo piano.

 

April 12, 2014 - 8 PM

Herocat



A Cat's Life Returns Again - a recital by Keith Eisenbrey, piano, with special guest Olivia Sterne, narrator

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Attitude - Doug Palmer

Greek Nickel 2 - J. K Randall

Sonata (2012) - Aaron Keyt

A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (1990) - Keith Eisenbrey

 

 

 

 

 

June 27, 2014 - 8 PM

Banned Rehearsal Celebrates 30 Years of Noise

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

 

 

Playlist

Live

December 14, 2013
Gradus: for Fux, Tesla and Milo the Wrestler
Neal Kosaly-Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Imagine your quest is to learn our solar system and everything in it one particle at a time. The number of particles, or in this case of combinations of the 88 keys of the piano, is the quantity expressed in base 2 by a sequence of 88 ones. A very large quantity indeed. It is so large, in fact, that this piece, this quest, in its entirety, can't be heard. It is, as an entirety, or even as a significant enough portion to grasp as a portion, completely and essentially inaudible - as absolute a silence as can be imagined.

 

Recorded

 

December 17, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 53 - Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Neal Meyer - October 1985

 

We start with some rhythm modules that ease into sudden songs: Under the Stars, and Can't Play th'Trumpet. But by the end, between Neal's blown-out speaker (dubbed 'the speaker of the house') and craziness with the microphones, the session sounds like the machinery of civilization recording itself being chewed to pieces by a planet sized troll.

 

Banned Rehearsal 781 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer - October 2010

 

25 years later, subtle shifts of flora map a forest floor.

 

December 19, 2013

Keyboard Sonata (Divertimento) in D Hob.XVI:4 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

 

I was put in mind of J.K. Randall's bias against "Perfunctory Propulsion". These phrases don't interleave in graceful subversion of meter (like Bach), or balance in delightful conversation (like Mozart). They whip like pennants in a stiff breeze. Until suddenly they don't and they are fountains frozen solid. Until suddenly they are filigree or crickets or calculus.

 

Children's Choir Christmas Pageant - Bellevue First United Methodist Church 1965

 

I was six, so I must have been in one of these choirs.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary November 25, 2013

Banned Rehearsal 849 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer



Playlist

Recorded

December 3, 2013
Banned Sectional 14 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, October 1985

The sectionals, especially those that Neal and I did during this period, were not so much sessions of free-improvisation as they were freely-improvised workings out of ideas of things to do with which to fill up sides of tape. On the plate for this was a continuation of the sudden song project. Texts used include a Heine poem and coin-toss-chosen phonemes from John Rahn's Lines Of And About Music. In the middle Neal launches into a spirited acoustic rendition of Wild Thing, which gesture in subsequent sessions became a reflex go-to subject changer. In this case I can't say that the subject changed from was all that spectacular - we were once again driving lameness firmly into the dirt - but it was never about being spectacular, and working steadfastly at sticking points often leads to amazing places otherwise unreachable. Changing the subject comes across as a defense mechanism for avoiding discomfort, and veering into a groove, specifically, approaches social manipulation. You can join the fun or you can be a grump. But if neither fun nor grump is where you're at you're stuck. There is no room to maneuver into elsewhere. You just have to wait it out.

December 5, 2013
Snohomish Piece 1 Remix - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer, S. Eric Scribner
Sonata (Partita) in B-flat Hob.XVI:2 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim, clavichord

Haydn is so gracious with the what of where he is, and with the spaces between. He does not move along to satisfy moving, but to provide a vantage of a new what, at a precise remove.

Grande Piece Symphonique - Franck - David Di Fiore

our humble abode

 

A sprawling mansion

too big to inhabit

our host uncanny

shows us around

each time

sunken more

Chorale from Seven Last Words - Dubois - Bellevue First United Methodist Church, Betty Eisenbrey, cond. - April 1965
Go Girl Crazy - The Dictators

They'd fit in quite well here in Seattle. Surf-rock self-parody. You'd almost think Kurt Bloch was involved. I have to say their cover of I Got You Babe made my jaw drop.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 2, 2013
Gradus 238 - Neal Meyer

In anticipation of the impending 2-hour public performance of Gradus on December 14th, (Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle, 8pm) Gavin Borchert came over to hear a 1:3 scale model preview. Of the three rungs to be performed, the first two differ sharply in the quantity of pitches present. I was struck, hearing them in such close proximity, by how perversely bereft the more pitch loaded rung was in timbral richness, as though the sharp point of palpable sound was obscured by a haystack of figuration, however attenuated that figuration might be. It made me wonder to what extent we compose in order to hide the actual in favor of the conceptual.

Playlist

Live

November 27, 2013
Dead Bars

Swearin'

Waxahatchee
Chop-Suey, Seattle

If each band's set were successive acts of a chamber opera the evening's dramatic arc would be distinctly Schumannesque, Florestan to Eusebius, centering focus to a single point, to a single low thwung on guitar, to a single attitude of neck, to a single sung note carrying all.

Or, as root context trajectory: From (Dead Bars) street music doo wop girl group deep ground punk, similar ur-milieu to the Ramones, but from longer back now and un-admixed with keep-your-distance up-yours attitude, all joy and hopping, the sheer noise a naked mask to bare confession behind; through (Swearin') a mid-ground to brake the tempo down, twisting chromatic bass lines (you know, for us music nerds), filling the dragon with fire of ride and crash, as though Velvet Underground were jamming with Red Ribbon; to (Waxahatchee) where it all boils in the end, blues at its most minimal, somewhere far out near Star Anna's constellation, in the nebulae of Whitney Ballen and Jonathan Richman, at the edge of, as we leap.

Recorded

November 24, 2013
Sonata (Partita) in C, Hob. XVI:1 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

The spirit of the age is scholarly and impatient of the performance practices of our Romantic forbears. For better or worse, it is no longer the time to blithely play old music on modern instruments in the assumption that, the new instruments being improvements upon the old, all the music played upon them is improved thereby. I'm not a baby-and-bathwater idealist in this regard - I will cling to Milstein playing the Sonatas & Partitas and Richter's WTC and much beside - but there is plenty to be said for the clarifying decrustification possible on replica instruments, and for the imaginative delights unleashed by impromptu embellishment. Ms. Schornsheim plays this early Sonata on a harpsichord, taking every repeat as an opportunity for gloriously transformational ornament.

Me, ca. 1965

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor - Bellevue First United Methodist Church Chancel Choir, Betty Eisenbrey, conducting - ca. 1965

November 26, 2013
Rapper's Delight: The Best of the Sugarhill Gang

Old tracks: power retrieval by nostalgia engine

Affirmative self-promotion: Not I hope you love me or even You will love me if you buy me, but You do love me and you are beautiful therefore and you are here therefore and you exist therefore

 

The only possibility is this party

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 25, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 848 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Neal Meyer

November 30, 2013
Interview 131130 BGE CRE KEE KEE - Betty Eisenbrey, Dick Eisenbrey, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey