Showing posts with label Cole Bratcher. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cole Bratcher. Show all posts

Saturday, September 2, 2017

Playlist

Preface

"First (1.0) 'a pitch' is stipulated to be 'atomic' - that is, indivisible into components not equivalent to the whole of itself. This designates the 'basic' vocabulary of entities for music, i.e., 'pitches'.

Next (Df. 1.0) two pitches are designated as distinct if there is any third pitch such that one of the two, but not the other, matches it, or if the two do not match each other.

If there is no such third pitch, and the two pitches do match each other, they are equivalent pitches, and are assigned to membership in the same pitch-identity class (1.1 and Df. 1.1; note again that 'pitch identity' is, properly speaking, a relation, not a 'property' - the latter, insofar as it is applicable here, as a notion, is only so in the 'property' of 'being a pitch')."

Benjamin Boretz Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought 1969

Texts

Live

September 1, 2017
Chapel Performance Space
Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Steve Scribner - Untitled Tondish Music

Folk music of a fictional culture, but a real fictional culture, in that there is actual solid fiction (books!) in which that culture arises. Karen and I got to play squiggly percussion in the second one.

Patrick O'Keefe - Sonata for Piano

Like listening to familiar musics through someone else's ears. I hear 30's Stravinsky, some Debussy, some Shostakovich, but not quite the SD&S's with which I am acquainted. Someone else's, and at other slants.

Cole Bratcher - Transit Maps

We visit graphic aspects of San Francisco and Copenhagen. Work in progress on a fascinating project that hits squarely on two of my geek-outs: music and maps. We are all waiting eagerly for Tokyo.

Blake DeGraw - Diler, for strings

Four string players, each playing a single string, attempt to match the pitches of a track heard only by them. See Preface above. Theory hits the pavement. Damn!

Recorded

Charlie Rich
August 26, 2017
Who Will The Next Fool Be - Charlie Rich [from Sun Records The Definitive Hits]

Relies on vocal charisma to hypnotize. Circles around twice, no more, needs nothing so fancy as a bridge. About a girl or about music? Always a tricky question.

City Midnight Junk Strains (for Frank O'Hara) - Alan Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]

Bumps around drunk in an empty room.

I Shall Be Released - Bob Dylan [from Biograph]

Trapped by wordmeaning, more interested in rhythmplay, ripples in a pebble pinged pond.

Miama 2017 - Billy Joel [from The Essential Billy Joel]

Prog Joel. Imagines he has more range of personae than he really does.

Music with Or Without 12 Chairs - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble [May 1981]

The class of clowns.

Breakout - Swing Out Sister [a Rescued Record]

A totally Vegas ambitious arrangement over funky bass and tight brass.

Banned Rehearsal 251 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [March 1991]


tossing noises into a bucket of noises the cats are concerned. Amnehitabel? Concerned. Anarchy: concerned. we must be picking up from something old ugly floral drapes are mentioned 3 bags full

::] city truck outside as I listen beeping clearing sewers? [::

funmaker staccato hits magnetic ghost reel tape

Thought experiment for sound engineers: imagine the worst, the at all costs to be avoided horror of a soundquality, not just unmarketable but quick turn it off before you vomit bad soundquality. Now, imagine the most sophisticated transparent playback apparatus that money can buy reproducing exactly that same worst horror. Is there a difference? Where, exactly, would the difference lie?

improvisational composition designing with readily apparent qualities cumulating funmaker drone reminds of Frippertronics ah that Wurlitzer button that pulls the pitch down almost but not quite a half step

improvisation: the art of redeeming one's, and each other's, sudden decisions. Falling, a la Buzz L, with style

August 27, 2017
Sonic Brilliance 18- John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, John H, Aaron Keyt, Holden K, Kia M [June 1996]

intents made together in a room to hear how it goes. A theory of the man in the oat box. Must be hiding.

Banned Rehearsal 614 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Isabel K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 2001]


etched with care || a percussion sequence arises
what if we go with it, without regard for redemption?
deep dynamic registers linger languorously

August 29, 2017
Class Notes - Michael Dellaira [from Open Space 21]

Although: barely a minute long
Although: figuration could be any midcentury bebop wannabe piano player in late evening lounge mode
Although: all that and more or less
Rich in: melodic twists of chords
And: Nothing here is quite just one thing

Gradus 187 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

3rd A-nat from the bottom behaving as a point of reference, the high notes, all A-nats, nestled or floating in its active or imagined or remembered partials. Parent floating child; I rattle a rattle! I had forgotten. Are these hiatuses Cage silence or something else? division markers? resets? reminder? absences?

Each A-nat, being itself unhooked from pitch class inclusion renders each of its aspects unhooked to an extent from any sort of class inclusion, i.e. staccato notes don't form a class with other staccato notes, nor quiet ones with quiet ones, nor loud with loud.

2nd rung: it centers a bit higher on a still low mid A-nat.

#2Pretty4Jail - Strange Like Us [from Strange Peeps]

seething writhes around an electrohummy spacefilling wad that squeezes the vocals off to the sides. Immobile, constrained, plea though they plea.

August 30, 2017
Qui Passe for My Ladye Nevell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

Upon these inflections of tetrachordal-metrical correlatives, the ear dances rice on drum.

Die Kunst der Fuge, Contrapunctus XV - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Playful puppy. Weary hound.

How Do You Like It Blues - Art Sims and His Creole Band [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Mid 20s, getting sound into the grooves was work, or the sound makes it seem so, striving to be recorded, to achieve groove.

I'll Be A Friend to Jesus - Wade Mainer [from Goodbye Babylon]

Formulae stubbornly adhered to. The barest of variance tells.

Save It Pretty Mama - Frank Signorelli [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In a similar spirit to Art Sims above, but more chill and relaxed about getting it into groove. And yet, very conscious of that 3' deadline at the end of the record.

Signal - Stan Getz [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Stan Getz

Precisely beveled throughout. Every join tight as tight can make it.

Chorale Variations - Stravinsky - CBC Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Festival Singers, Stravinsky [from The Original Jacket Collection]

The big magic picture book of Chorale Preludes. Each page turn renews.

Little Miss Sad One - The Fleetwoods [from The Very Best of the Fleetwoods - Come Softly To Me]

Weakened by a weak bridge, with a little cliché riff at the end of it (said bridge) as much as to say at last that's over.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

August 28, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 942  - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Saturday, January 10, 2015

Playlist

Live

January 5, 2015
Jimu Makurumbandi
Jimu and Anesu
University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

Our friends from Zimbabwe are off for Norway and gave our church a wonderful little concert as a farewell. They perform intricate arrangements of traditional and quasi-traditional songs accompanied on kora, mbiru, djembe, and shaker. An hour and a half is too little time, but we heard some wonderful sounds from a place where music seems to still be people-sized, easily at home with folks rather than held close by an industry of experts. We will miss them much.

January 9, 2015
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Ivan Arteaga

Ensemble: 3 string basses and 4 saxophones. A solid sound from which globules emerge and swerve, splinter and glint.

Cole Bratcher

Ensemble: voice and piano. A song steeped in the excruciating intimacy of an old family letter.

Fungus on the Trail of Shadows, Longmire, Washington
Neil Welch

Plays solo saxophone. Explores the lyrical possibilities of sounds that hover between timbre and chord.

Matthew James Briggs

Frog sounds imported from a Bali rice field anchored in our space by precisely rung notes on the piano, high and low.

Recorded

January 4, 2015
Symphony in F minor (#1) - Shostakovich - L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Walter Weller

Every statement is coloristically qualified, instrumentally specific.

Sun Treader - Carl Ruggles - Buffalo Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas

All singularities brachiate in grains and veins of quartz. The question attempts to drown itself in its own reiterations.

String Quartet #4 - Zemlinksy - LaSalle Quartet

Fighting an incline of its own devising, every growth a decay.

January 6, 2015
Symphony #1 - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz

Industrious agents, working in a space removed, build motor segments from narrow populations of durations. Relations flash across the surface.

Symphony #5 - Martinu - Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Vaclav Neumann

We creep back into the disconcerting day, into the glory of the new normal. Our hope is examined in the harsh light of war. We make what we can of it.

I discover that the last time I listened to this piece was also on a January 6, back in 2003. In  my journal I find: "Each idea has an ubiquitous shadow."

Sonata #1 - John Verrall - Kimberly Davenport

Up- or other-rooted architecture. Feast macabre. Great effort is made to be what one always was, though nothing is left unwarped. Ravel re-inventing himself from recalcitrant scraps.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

Janaury 4, 2015
Coronet 150104
Coronet 150104 Folded
Coronet 150104 Folded Rubbed - Keith Eisenbrey

I started another cycle of instrumental improvisations and attendant digital manipulation on the bass guitar I have on long-term loan from Steve Kennedy. Folded means I cut the sound file in half and layered the second half over the first. Rubbed means I took the folded file and ran it through a digital effect to see what would come out the other end. I'm still not sure about the results, so I'll just share the folded version.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Playlist

Live

September 5, 2013
Seattle Composers Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Swale - Bickleton, Washington, 1986

Two Pieces for Guitar Orchestra - Mark Wilson

There is an affinity of effect between these intricate multi-stringed chamber compositions and the polyphonic vocal music from the centuries after Machaut, evident both in the play of color among (here) the varied strings and (there) the varied voices, and in the active movement of voices along a horizontal plane in space.

Giver - Peter Freeman

It is wonderful to hear such an ambitious and carefully heard work from such a young composer. It might be a bit too long, or it might simply need some more craftily applied pedal here and there to finesse the colors, but these are quibbles. I look forward to hearing more!

Song - Cole Bratcher

There is mortal danger in the siren's song. It is not just in myth - it also presents a compositional problem: once in it is heroically difficult to transgress. Just ask Tannhauser.

Solo Clarinet - Angelique Poteat

Another solid, challenging piece. Seattle is a veritable hotbed for creative clarinetists, and the Chapel loves that sound. I don't have much to say other than that I was digging it all the way. More!

Introduction to Nature (of) Sound - S. Eric Scribner

Good. Bad. Nature good. Machines bad. Nature sounds good. Machine sounds bad. Recording and playing back nature sounds on machines ? Turning nature sound into machine's sound ? Engaging with nature changes nature - good or bad ? Neither ? or both ? because inescapable ? A music of quietly seething disquiet.

Recorded

September 2, 2013
Bann 2 - Aaron Keyt, August 1985

circling closely in
near choate meta-axis
timing the same stone

Livin - Keith Eisenbrey, August 1985


Fence Post - Bickleton, Washington, 1986
September 3, 2013
Banned Telepath 4 I-5 - Neal Meyer, August 1985

Vibration roar Neal mouths low flange
 
recording on cruddy equipment on quality media the media holds the complex crudeness pristinely
 
the car's inhabitant's voice bumps back and fro in the mix
 
bobbing in vaguely agitated underpier backwater
 
Entering Pierce County Be A Good Citizen
 
City of Tacoma Traffic Information Radio WNAN 648
 
Entering Tacoma

September 4, 2013
Banned Telepath 4 Bickleton - Anna K, August 1985

This may be the first appearance of Karen's drums on a BR tape. Anna, in seclusion, converses with the future.

In Session at the Tintinabulary
September 2, 2013
Banned Rehearsal 843 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Meyer

Probably our last porch session of the summer. Also, our first to be recorded on new equipment - a Zoom R24. Over the years we have recorded on a Sanyo cassette tape (still works), a Sony Professional Walkman (now bricked), a Sony DAT (still works), a Fostex MR8 (still works), and occasionally directly to laptop (still works). Microphones used have been: two Sony dynamic (still work), two Realistik PZM (we may still have one working), occasionally a small Sony stereo condenser (lost one channel), and most recently an Audio Technica stereo condenser.