Playlist

Recorded

January 14, 2017
I Fought The Law - Bobby Fuller Four [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Nice triplets in there. I love the dipthong on "law", curling back on itself as though hitting resistance. Almost appropriate: Karen and I recently watched "I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", which has some truly amazing sound events in it, as well as a fascinating view of the connection between the penal system and slavery.

Samuel Barber

Prayers of Kierkegaard - Samuel Barber - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Schenck

The solid tonal sensibility loses grip in places, it works to break free, struggling slowly, manages to unsettle the more settled.

John, I'm Only Dancing - David Bowie [from Changes One]

Technically perfect song-writing. The voice pushes at the instrumentals, as though it were trapped in their cage.

You Better You Bet - The Who [from Face Dances]

Postural pullback, only to return to full frontal, hiding the low point of tenderness from prying eyes. Or letting it hang.

Violin Concerto - Henri Lazarof - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, Yukiko Kamei

Icy spreads its arms and twists 

acrobatique 

aerialesque 

orchestral circus stage 

big top fire breathing peril 

here come the clowns sardonic 

self regarding self 

chatty nervous

Janaury 16, 2017
Adagio (3rd Movement from 11th Symphony) - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

Triumphal weariness, as settling to the ocean floor's deepest trench, through its subtle gradations of dark.

Good Things - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Held close, stiffly still, simmering under pressure.

Work Architecture Unity And The ("17 Crags" 010511) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Second go at it. A sense of enforced singularity of event, severing any particular participant's interest or curiosity. Salutary to the extent we find a way to do what we always do but spread over thinner space. Or: an exercise in leaving space so that we can't always fall into the always-going-on-ness, leaving space for sharper corners?

Judith Shatin

Homemade Music - Judith Shatin [from Open Space 21]

Intervals Between Events: A Study.
Intersections of sets of distances between events as motivic cells. Clearly, so as to index the sets.

The Dancer - Patrick Marland [from Hendrix Uncovered]

Easily lovely. the bass is subtly amped, close the fingerboard.

January 17, 2017
Finnegans Wake Chapter 1.3 - Steve Gregoropoulos [from Waywords and Meansigns]

Spoken with attitude. 'scuse, with AttiTude. The music allowed to attempt to overpower, the vocal imitating the lingo of partisan journalism. Drunken sbrawling squalities. Text just one ring of a circus co-occupied by dueling Captain Beefheart Impersonators, infiltrated by multiple iterations of the Chaotic Noise Marching Corps. Babble of neverending political speech. Each music change: to enter a new room.

January 19, 2017
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus V - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

How they do crowd upon each other! At the end (and this is frequent in these fugues) there is the sense of "OK, now we're ready to really dive in, now that the preliminaries are over."

Alla Polacca in C Major Wq. 116/4 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

The purpose of ornamentation is to skew counting, to turn tables on the concept of number. These little pieces are about meter in a way that little else is again until Chopin's Mazurkas.

Symphony in E-flat Major (#76) - Haydn - Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

It is not simply that he moves in the unexpected way (surprise!) but that he gauges each unexpectedness so carefully, veering just so far along the circle of fifths, just so much further at the structural hingepoints: Where we have gotten to determines the depth and yaw of the veer. The slow movement has a focus that allows a huge dynamic range (a model for Schubert's late sonatas?) Then an extra fancy last movement.

Ave Verum Corpus - Mozart - University Temple Chancel Choir, Keith Eisenbrey, director, Howard Wolvington, organ

Last Fall our choir director, Chris Vincent, was in Italy and kindly allowed me to take the choir for a few weeks. He even let me conduct this justly famed anthem from late in Mozart's short life, for which I remain ever so thankful. What a pleasure! Listening one becomes so rapt that it is not until it winds down into the cadential trill that one realizes what a ride one has been on. A bit like life that way.

Sonata in A-flat Major Op. 110 - Beethoven - Rudolf Serkin

An earnest attempt to clearly play what is clearly there. He makes some interesting connections among the tempi in the fugal bits.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 16, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 927 170116 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Aaron is back from the far north for a few weeks. Hurrah!

Playlist

Recorded

December 8, 2015

Marion Harris with Banjo Uke

Paradise Blues - Marion Harris [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Give me some of that [fill in the blank] music: a trope of reflexive self-advertising by which popular music never ceases to tell us how much we should love it, from Alexander's Ragtime Band to Roll Over Beethoven. Apparently we are all and have always been just completely OK with commercials for a product embedded in the product.

Men - Carl Ruggles - Buffalo Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas

Solid, tense, immovable. Not turned to stone, but jammed tight in the pile-up of its own mirrorings. Brief as Webern but battled, recklessly muscular.

I Want My Life To Testify - Hendersonville Double Quartet [from Alan Lowe's Really the Blues]

The microphone placement leads to an odd balance, with the baritone part way up front and everything else variously behind. One imagines a live performance would sound completely different, but here it becomes a very strange piece of music indeed. The piano, when it breaks in, does so in a completely different tempo than the singers.

December 10, 2015
Hungarian Sketches - Béla Bartók - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner

Bartók's piano style is overtly orchestral, and so one could regard these literal orchestrations as lessons in how to play the piano pieces: play this tune as though it were an oboe, play the accompaniment like soft strings - keep the voices clear!

David Diamond

First Orchestral Suite from the Ballet TOM - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

At the end of the first long phrase a chime rings out alone in glorious chimey dissonance, uncompromised, physical, present. From that point on the music prolongs the sensibility of that dissonance, carefully weaving its chromatic counterpoint. This focus drops in a few places for some 'happy southerner' hokum, which I suppose might be read in a similar way to some of Shostakovitch's contemporaneous satirical romps. I'm not sure I buy that here, but am willing to pass over it anyway for the long moments of really stunning stuff.



In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 6, 2015

Trio 151206A
Trio 151206B
Trio 151206C
Trio 151206D
Trio 151206E
Trio 151206F
Sextet 151206 - Keith Eisenbrey
At first I thought I might just make two trios, but I decided I could fold all six instruments on top of each other successively, then combine the whole thing into a Sextet. The instrumental tracks are: viola (A, E, F), selection from the big red bag of fun (A, B, F), toy steel drum (A, B, C), amplified acoustic steel string guitar (B, C, D), frame drum (C, D, E), and alto horn (D, E, F). The selection from the big red bag of fun was a plastic mayonnaise jar, a tin can into which the jar just fit, and a wine cork. The alto horn came to us, as most instruments do, circuitously, purchased at a thrift store by my late Uncle Jim Meyer and given to us (he had one already). On the case is stamped "U.G.S.D." - for Union Gap School District.

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.

Playlist

Live

November 1, 2014
Don Giovanni - Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

Listen again to the opening chords, how the bass emerges, swallowing. The entire argument of the opera played out in a few seconds.

Carbon Glacier, Mt. Rainier National Park - 1976

November 7, 2014
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Jacob Zimmerman - selections from a larger set of duets

Jacob was joined by Christian Pincock and Jeff Draper (is that right?) in three duets involving combinations of tenor sax, trombone, and a tray full of electronics featuring a hot pink telephone handset. Each duet proceeded as a series of discrete event-moments of carefully varied length, each event-moment a lively duality within itself - like a first-species counterpoint of timbre-complexes.

S. Eric Scribner - selections from a larger set of compositions involving field recordings and found
objects.

I was involved as a performer for Steve's pieces so I don't have a good read on how these came across. Only one of the three selections (the middle one) had a written score, essentially just outlining the density of things to do. The two others consisted of the instructions "kind of noisy" (the first one) and "sustained sounds" (the third one).

Nat Evans - a study using field recordings from The Tortoise

Layers of desert wind, horse-bells and cow-bells (Mahler's last sounds?), deep gongs. Images of movement within stillness and stillness within movement, all of it palpably ancient.

Keith Eisenbrey - J - a solo piano piece written in remembrance of the late J. K. Randall.

I wrote this piece in the Chapel Performance Space last September, while listening to Neil Welch remember the victims of the Cafe Racer shooting. The recording is available on my soundcloud site.

Recorded

November 1, 2014
Two Episodes from Faust - Liszt - Rotterdams Philharmonisch Orkest, James Conlon

This is the stage scenery in which one imagines operatic action taking place. Particular drama needs to be supplied by the audience's sensibility. There is nothing given but an ambiguous trajectory.

November 3, 2014
Schicksalslied - Brahms - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, Ambrosian Chorus, John McCarthy

What has been prepared slips to the side. What persists is interrupted, deflected. What we build, dauntless, evaporates.

Variations on a Rococo Theme op. 37 - Tchaikovsky - Northern Sinfonia Orchestra, Yan-Pascal Tortelier, Paul Tortelier
Sonata-Fantasie in G-sharp minor - Scriabin - Michael Ponti

If this were a film the camera would always be in motion, circular, dancing around its subject.

Symphony in C-minor (#1) - Bruckner - Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester, Gunter Wand

Like Berlioz, Bruckner has a characteristic flavor of non sequitur. Where Berlioz will drop in just exactly the wrong affect (and then demonstrate that it was exactly correct) Bruckner goes for registration or scale, lurching us forward in time or plummeting us from tiny to vast, or vaporizing the solid rock we were clinging to, leaving us utterly without being.

November 4, 2014
Love Songs After Foster - The Gregg Smith Singers, The New York Vocal Arts Ensemble

Comfort music then: cleaned up for parlor use, non-threatening - possibly even worse now: the nonironic ironic nonironic.

Concerto in C minor (#2) - Rachmaninoff - Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Rachmaninoff

Imperialism's fatal nostalgia for its own sweet fictions.

The Ragtime Dance - Scott Joplin - William Albright
Finale aus der III Sinfonie - Louis Vierne - Stanislav Surin

Sound fills space from all sides, dissociating what we are hearing from any possibility that a single person could be responsible for it all.

Renard - Stravinsky - Columbia Chamber Ensemble, Igor Stravinsky

The first, and perhaps only, punk rock opera. Brutally perfect.

6 Songs op. 14 - Webern - Heather Harper
Concerto #1 - Bartok - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado, Maurizio Pollini
String Quartet - Ruth Crawford Seeger - Pellegrini Quartet

a thorny hedge

a hashing out in court of law

a discussion in the back rows

in the trees just past firelight undulating

November 5, 2014
Psalm - David Diamond - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

A neo-classical mind struggles with the facts of violence.

Melancholy Baby/Rhythm Riff/Nice Work If You Can Get It - Thelonius Monk [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]
Naked City - Raymond Scott [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The sound is a stunner: a nearly shrill violin, a baritone sax up from miles deep.

Women In My Life  - John Lee Hooker

The guitar sound pulled fat and the stomp stomp stomp stomped with some crazy palmwine mojo, this is in no meter known to any but JLH.

Klavierstück XI - Stockhausen - Aloys Kontarsky
One Little Star - The Fleetwoods

Self-absorbed, cushioned, protected, oblivious.

Quartet in F minor (#11) - Shostakovich - Fitzwilliam String Quartet

As though from in hiding. Music for narrow dark passages.

The Lovers - Samuel Barber - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Schenck, Dale Duesing

The odd politics of inflating personal intimacy into the realm of corporate expression. Or perhaps merely the high-falutin' counterpart of The Fleetwoods' eternal adolescence.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 2, 2014
Samick - Keith Eisenbrey

Improvising on a miniature electric guitar.

November 3, 2014
Gradus 255 - Neal Kosály-Meyer