Playlist

Recorded

October 15, 2018
Sonata in C minor - Pietro Locatelli - Philharmonia Virtuosi [from Musical Evenings With The Captain]

ornamentation is a supplemental pointer
as is repetition
and scale degree
function

it points

but what is it that points
and ought we to
blindly
and boldly

follow?

Moving On Without Us - Wes Weddell [from My Northwest Home]

told in stanzas
featuring a monolineal refrain

Rat Hotel - Charming Snakes [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

hot wheels stunt track driver
the familiar push button thrill
the inevitable frustration of which
forces the ear into the tight packed mosh of feedback
for anything to bind it

Songbirds and Stillness - S. Eric Scribner - Ivan Arteaga, Neal Kosály-Meyer [from Stormsound Cycle, May 2011, private recording]

sound floating free of intent, barely anchored to seafloor

kelpish in swaying slumber

gravissimo

October 16 and 18, 2018
Finnegans Wake Part 2, Chapter 1 - James Joyce - Robert Amos [from Waywords and Meansigns]

advertisement
very plain
intro blurb at length

the rhythm of one strand of punnish
the wordless either

did these ways wend
they and the world is made free

plain speaking reading or telling

word by word

to the left leans a guitar whose not recently tuned strings being open and exposed are variously reverberated by the word by word formants and resonunciations of the speaker's head

to make a long story badder
apocryphal of rhyme
ear relevance

tongues' promiscuities

curtains

In Session at the Tintinabulary

October 15, 2018
Figure Study 181015 - Keith Eisenbrey


Neal, being deep in rehearsal for Chapters 4 and 5 of FW, couldn't make it to do the Gradus, so I kept the piano company.

Playlist

Recorded

June 5, 2018
Psalm 23 (meditation, responses) (vocal take) - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [August 1991]

I made this quasi-setting of the 23rd Psalm in 1991 for speaking voice and clavichord, intending the

Eastern Washington

finished product to be some sort of recorded rendition. When Neal read the Psalm for me that August I wasn't entirely certain how the text would fit in with the clavichord commentary. Eventually there were two finished versions, the first accomplished with analog dubbing, and the second, realized some years later, with digital. Listening to my verbal instructions to Neal I find that my concept of how texts ought to be set has not changed much over the decades. I want to hear the sound of the words going by so that they mean what they mean, with minimal dramatic characterization or word-painting, and always being cognizant of the poetic structure.

Coffin and a Six Pack - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

vintage sounds
sample-ready

Thirty-Three Seconds - Storrs Barrett Booch-Williams [from Sonicabal 2001]

apparently a Cage tribute track

Shenandoah - Bruce Springsteen [from The Seeger Sessions]

Baker City, Oregon

Of all the various ilks of americana out there, I think I mistrust the overinflated rural-sentimental the most, as it winds so close to icky ante-bellum nostalgia.

Circle Song - Steve Scribner - Ivan Arteaga, Mike Sentkewitz (?) [from Storm Sound Cycle (live on May 21, 2011)]

against a backdrop
augmenting the distance to the lively made sounds
nocturnal
during
sleep

Good Friend - Ravenna Woods [from Alleyways and Animals]

careful and organized arrangement
buttjoints
greeting card sentiment

June 6, 2018
A Fancie - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr [from My Ladye Nevells Booke]

imitative
proto-fugal
any passing place can generate all things new
routes kept open
civilization seeps outward

Big Butter and Egg Man from the West - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five with May Alix [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

vocals occupy a lesser place within the song structure
it is a song, but the instrumentals are the show, the vocal bits are present only enough to register

Since I Met You Baby - Ivory Joe Hunter [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

another greeting card
an illustrated letter
it is what she wants to hear so it is what you tell her

River Line Blues - Shirley Griffith [from The Art of Field Recording vol. 1]

guitar and voice are one
pitch/meterpoint syncopation // guitarstringtimbre voice word confluence and retrofluence

For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her - Simon & Garfunkel [from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme]

I can't help but think Paul was as frustrated with Pop as with folk rock - but that the full on blues had been foreclosed by Mr. Dylan. He had to futz around for a bit before he really hit his song-writing stride.

Track 2 - Tillicum Junior High School Orchestra [from a private tape of concert given March 3, 1971]

bass booms out into a time warp
affects not just the EQ but also the rhythm sense, as in organ music

June 7, 2018
Terminal Preppie - Dead Kennedys [from Plastic Surgery Disasters]

feeds off some of the same misanthropic sophomoranticisms as Saint Zappa.

Readings of a Sonata - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 1986]

Neal and I dink around with another old score of mine, Sonata 1979
We trade-off readings to use up unused tape footage
We accomplish 3 full readings and the first part of a fourth

It's a graphic score so all the notes and rhythms are different, to varying degrees

sounds great, in that cruddy way we had, all the way

8-Ball Deluxe - 7 Year Bitch [from Kill Rock Stars]

Batman rhythm with a slippery bit
quantitive meter in action as rhythm

C'mon Jenny - The Boss Martians [from 13 Evil Tales]

what surf rock sounds like sitting in the rhythm section

Tokyo Fist - Alex Keller [from Sonicabal 2001]

radio signal morsey sound
(love it!)

Banned Rehearsal 702 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [May 2006]

geography of inhabiting

how where and across what extent do the determinable agendi specify their place or their vectors or their circulations

never quite settling for a trio for long

though the constant xylophone (all hail!)

sound assembly takes time (give it)

and so delicate

because it isn't what it is without how it got to be

In Session at the Tintinabulary
June 5, 2018
Banned Rehearsal 960 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

June 11, 2018
Yellowstone 180611 - Keith Eisenbrey

I skipped blogging last Saturday because Karen and I were on the road by mid-that-morning to make a week's long loop among the five northwestern states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, in order of our arrival in each. At the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone, on a windy day (hang on to your britches, dear, it's pretty gusty) I made this recording of our footfalls on one of the older boardwalks.

June 13, 2018
Phillipsburg 180613 - Keith Eisenbrey

10 years ago, during a similar road trip, we passed through the lovely little town of Phillipsburg, in

Montana. The memory stuck in my head all these years as "wouldn't it be nice to spend some time here?" So this time we did. After supper at Silver Mill Restaurant & Saloon (quite nice!) Karen and I opened the balcony windows of our room at The Kaiser House (the Mural Room) to take in the fresh air. I quickly grabbed my recording device to pull in the bird songs and the hominine shouts and the motor roars from the magic hour far from home.

Playlist

Live

September 23, 2017

Sahba Sizdahkhani

Ivan Arteaga
Sahba Sizdahkhani
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Strings and Pulleys - Ivan Arteaga with Allison Burke
parsing the holding into vacant space
touch weight sax fuss distance
scooted
decision tongue and seamless finger flutter

A thoughtful and intriguing tweezing out of aspects of playing saxophone in public, it was already well underway when Allison, incapable it seems of walking without aesthetic deliberation, adjusted the furniture on the stage.

Sahba Sizdahkhani
his amp says Oahu on it slant
with an eighth-note flag on the "a"

how is repetition accomplished, exactly?

Luscious layered builds, on 104-string santour and percussion played in sequence but kept alive with long loops.

Recorded

September 24, 2017
The Battell - William Byrd - Elizabeth Farr

Figures on tapestry
music portrays other music
how lifelike!

Die Kunst Der Fuge, Contrapunctus XVI (Rectus) - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

It ties the ear into knots keeping track of it all, but in such a whistle-y carefree way.

Tommy Dorsey

Big Fat Ma and Skinny Pa - Louis Armstrong's Hot Five [from Hot Fives and Sevens]

And it starts with a whistle. Ultra-musicianship being pushed into lightweight shoes. Something has got to give.

After You've Gone - Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra, Sy Oliver and The Sentimentalists

The arrangement is as hierarchical as movie credits. Leader, Soloists, Rhythm, Choirs.



Oregon Trail - Woody Guthrie [from The Columbia River Collection]

A list of complaints, Whitmanesque, celebratory. How bad they was doin' was why they came.

September Song - Sarah Vaughan [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

She inhabits ever millimeter of those long notes. At the coda phrases are handed down through the ranks, Byrd-ish.

With A Song - Sonny Rollins [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Horn playing, here, is an expression of the shaping of the mouth's cavity, where sound is rounded.

Der Song from Witwe Begbicks Trinksalon - Paul Dessau - uncertain about performers due to poor indexing on the CD

Ein Bierhallsingspielslied.

Sing Ye A Joyful Song - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey [from concert of April 11, 1961]

My mom, as a teen

Rescued from my mom's tape.

Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa (Sad Song)- Otis Redding [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

Fifth item in a row with "Song" in it, not planned. OR carves his vocal into the mix with a deepgrooved chisel. Barely a narration beyond the song structure itself.

Track 1 - Tillicum Jr. High School Band [from concert of March 3, 1971]

Another rescue from one of my mom's tapes. I believe this is a band arrangement of a von Weber concert piece for solo clarinet, played by my brother Paul, who would have been 14.

Cock In My Pocket - The Stooges [from Metallic 'KO]

Aestheticizing sophomoric crudity.

Track 2 - University of Washington Contemporary Group Improv Ensemble [from Neal's Recital Tape, May 22, 1981]

Otherwise known as Undifferentiated Functions. Neal starts center stage, playing the Bickleton Fight Song. I'm in the closet with another piano. When I eventually make my appearance it may have been the first time Karen ever saw me. We were not introduced at that time.

Pink Cadillac - Bruce Springsteen

A riff on original sin, and how the lengths of lines falling into line roll around to find the rhythm of the hook.

September 26, 2017
Banned Rehearsal 253 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt [April 1991]


Our first born, a few week old, makes his taped debut. A distant radio signal finds itself somewhere in the wiring. Frogs and dogs. We pick up an activity and carry it with us to unknown parts, the thread of thought. Wastelands? Burned bare. Dischord wouldn't fit, much like life.

September 28, 2017
Sonic Brilliance 19 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Holden K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, Kia M [July 1996]

Jumps into the thick of it. You're supposed to be a dragon. Lizard of Oz. Sounds flow right in, undirected. Why do we have all these buttons? A crowded aviary compressed into the space of sound smaller than the studio. Ringing and rattling.

Assembly Rechoired 46 - John E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey [September 2001]

Trumpet, piano, percussion. Buzzy.

Come Out And Play - Dead Vampires [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Close packed mass physicality. The subject matter is the mosh pit.

Banned Rehearsal 786 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [February 2011]

Shaker crickets
bell traffic
mist snake glides
occupy kalimba
finding the lower limit of audibility
ritual of not disorder not entropy
the chosen moment unyieldingly placid

Along The Path (Dreams of Emptiness) - Denise Glover [from Pathways]

Tuning in time and timing in pitch
The vocal entrance kills
Every time

In Session at the Tintinabulary

September 25, 2017

Banned Rehearsal 943 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Playlist

Live

March 2, 2017

James Falzone & Bonnie Whiting

Utterances - music based on text, spoken word, and translation
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Bonnie Whiting: percussion
James Falzone: clarinet, piano, shruti box, bells
with special guests:
Beth Fleenor: bass clarinet
Ivan Arteaga: alto saxophone and clarinet
Neil Welch: tenor and soprano saxophone
Steve Treseler: tenor saxophone and clarinet
Eric Vanderbilt-Mathews: alto saxophone and clarinet

Prelude - Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone, 2017
Amazonia Dreaming - Annea Lockwood, 1987
Sighs Too Deep For Words - James Falzone, 2017
Exercise No. 4 for Hands Right, Left and Deserted Mouth - Susan Parenti, 1984
The Room Is - James Falzone, 2013
Perishable Structures That Would Be Social Events, IV. Varése - Bonnie Whiting, 2017
White (part 1) - James Falzone, 2013
Your Thoughts While Listening - Richard Logan-Greene, 2015
White (part 2) - James Falzone, 2013
Toucher - Vinko Globokar, 2013
Grace and Chance (at the same time) - James Falzone, 2015
Postlude - Bonnie Whiting and James Falzone, 2017

The event as a whole wholly subsumed its constituent parts. Not that each part was not utterly distinct in its own integral event-ness, but that each part gave itself up wholly, in all of each of its integral event-nesses, to the passage of the event as a whole. That is, each event's moments were lifted into a status within the whole event that outshone their narrower moment-hoods. This doesn't just happen. Serious lifting was involved.

One hell of a band too.

March 3, 2017
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Sheila Bristow :: two songs: Strong Wisdom and Leap Into Love, for mezzo-soprano, piano, and cello. Melissa Plagemann sang, Sheila played piano, and Meg Brennand was her usual magnificence on the cello. Sheila has been working on this set for some time now and we have heard earlier versions of at least one of them at other Salons. I admire her straight-ahead, get out of the way of the text, illustrate clearly without over dramatizing things approach to song writing. Although her style is nothing like my own, the attitude is like, and refreshing. The entire cycle will be presented at the Chapel on April 8.

Steve Eric Scribner :: Tree and Stone (Artificial Version), for paper tree parts and chair stones (performed by the audience); and The Sherványa Nocturnal Music, for piano, harp, and other plucked instruments (peformed by Steve, piano; a harp player whose name I was too dead tired to remember to write down; and Karen and me on miniature kora (bug-guitar) and three-string ukulele). I was involved - in the sense that I plucked a few notes quietly through most of it - so my only comment is that I think I had the best seat in the house. The paper sound from the audience was luscious.

ComManD :: Thaumaturgy, for percussion, saxophone, dance, and electronics. Being, as I say, pretty much dead tired from a wicked week at work, I didn't manage to catch all the names, but Ivan Arteaga operated, to some extent, as spokesperson. They are working on some fancy computer-enabled ideas of collaboration, interaction, and mutual sound manipulation. The image that struck me strongest was the dancer, tricked out with accelerometers at wrist and ankle, somehow being both marionette and string-puller at once. Weirdly fascinating.

Blake DeGraw :: Electronic Quartet for Humans, for four saxophones. I recognized Jeremy Shaskus, but the other two names escaped my enfeebled note-taking. Adam and Justin was all I got. Bursts of sound from four sides projecting an image of a surrounding space. Bursts of no sound from all sides projecting an image of a withheld space.

Recorded

February 28, 2017

Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus VI - J. S. Bach - Zoltan Kocsis

This stands in front of you several times over all at once. Resistance is not futile, it is presumed, vanquished. Nothing like music as usual.

Symphony 95 - Haydn - Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Adam Fischer

First the overture. A domestic crisis with fatherly advice. Fatherly advice activated, public acclamation follows. Wrap it up.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 27, 2017
Assembly Rechoired 56 170227 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey
There was rain. There was snow. There was thundersnow. And then came the overturned propane tanker on I-5. Traffic was beyond a mess. In honor of our compatriots trapped in traffic Karen and I carried on with noise. Since before our marriage (the first two were in June of 1986) we have called any improvisation session with just the two of us and no other Banned Rehearsal regular an "Assembly Rechoired". This is #56. Karen played the Excelsior and I bumped around several noisy items, at the end pouring all the ping pong balls out of the bucket into the chimney. And back.

Playlist

Preface

"Meaning and sound, as Nancy describes them, both share the same 'form, structure or movement': they are comprised of a series of infinite referrals, a sending-away which returns, only to be sent away again, ever anew. The return penetrates the sending, 'all simultaneously,' producing a dispersal of bounds and rebounds without end. This applies, for Nancy, equally to the actual physics of sonorous reverberation as well as to the infinite circulation of meaning and reference. Meaning and sound share the 'form, structure, or movement' of resonance." Brian Kane "On Reading Listening" - Open Space Magazine Issue 12/13 fall 2010/winter 2011

Texts

Live

Mud On My Bra!

February 24, 2017

Café Racer, Seattle

Mud On My Bra!

Merchant Mariner

The Snubs

What a great evening all around.

MOMB!'s jawdropping togetherness was a masterclass in perfect ensemble. It's more than technique, it requires a personal sympathy that can't be bought. I was seated around a corner from the stage so I couldn't see the whole band, but had a wonderful view of the drummer's expressively intelligent face, totally in it. MM spilled off the stage (seven people in a space that three makes tight). We were surprised and delighted to recognize an old friend from another part of our life playing violin. Hey there small world! TS wore masks like bandits and ripped out Black Flag-like song bursts. Good feeling all night. Thank you!

Recorded

February 19, 2017

Way Down Old Plank Road - Uncle Dave Macon [from Anthology of American Folk Music]

Attempting to answer the age old question: how many times can whoop-diddle-iddle-iddle-oo-bedop-day come up on a 3 minute banjo scrub?

Merchant Mariner - the electric ukelele player

I'll Be Satisfied - Bryant's Jubilee Quartet [from Goodbye Babylon]

An easily gracious a cappella phraseology, breath-based. The singers don't blend so much as give up just enough of themselves to allow the others space to do likewise.

Satisfied - J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers
[from Goodbye Babylon]

Same song slightly different feel. This one adds banjo and fiddle to provide a table for the singing to stand, and a commentary like wine to pace it.

The Star Spangled Banner - arranged by Stravinsky - London Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas

MTT takes a broader tempo than Stravinsky's recording does, and eschews the chorus. Revealing of some truly sweet voice leading.

A Hundred Years From Today - Sarah Vaughan, Georgie Auld and His Orchestra [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

Suave take on a Shakespearean ploy (why wait? no one will care what you did). You can hear the expression of her eyes in the tang of her voice.

My Heart Belongs To Daddy - Charlie Parker [from Cole Porter Songbook]

And here you can hear the words CP is singing with his axe. He plays like a singer. Must have been listening to Sarah.

Lonely Avenue - Ray Charles [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Arranged wth a capital A. RC sings like an instrument, articulating time spans with pitch-words.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (Wimoweh) - The Tokens [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock &

The Snubs in masked action

Soul]

So close to yodeling you can smell the cowpoke camp smoke.

(I Know) I'm Losing You - The Temptations [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Putting it all together, strands wound strong as rope.

Baba O'Riley - the Who [from Who's Next]

New toys! Not just the synths but also the whole stadium filling hugeness of it. And yet the final instrumental could be a hoedown from anytime.

Frankie and Johnnie, Twenty Froggies Go To School - Margaret Kummett [from Art Rosenbaum's The Art of Field Recording Volume 1]

Which is the more accurate memory device? Recordings or brains? When an elder pulls out songs sung in childhood the memory has been ripened, fermented, purified.

I Fall Down - U2 [from October]

A confessional. There is a hint of Ray Charles (see above) in the way he fits words to a note-y tune, almost like a mallet instrument here and there.

Note to reader: Cue up all of the above on whatever song performing software you have. You won't be sorry.

Banned Sectional 20 KEE NWM - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer, January 1986

Using cheap consumer stereo gear to turn half the little house in Greenwood into a mailbox. Neal, still relatively new to Finnegans Wake, reads from it lickety split, on psalm tones. (Joyce: comic vocabulist, propounds an Eruditerad.) I am playing the mailbox room, at the end making a train with windups and feedback whistle. One of my finer moments if I do say so myself.

February 20, 2017

Fired Up - Moe Tucker, Lou Reed, Daniel Hutchens, Sonny Vincent, Brian Ritchie [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

What's left of the bare outline of song structure is pounded into submission, a massy pulp.

Banned Rehearsal 419 (Speakeasy Set #) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, March 1996

A roar gathers slowly in the high places. Bit of a blast fest at the sound-work shop. Hammering a plate of noise into shape (see MT, above). Big fat blobular trio of sax cornet electric guitar naked obesity || shh it's almost sleeping || Armor On! Now hold still! War Drums. Overpower the recording equipment (not a bad plan of attack). The pluckystrings help clean up what's left of the oily mess. Alarms sound, they're marching back to ecstatic dance village. It goes on too long several times over, each time worth the effort of going on too long again.

Jeremiah 17:5-8 (050517A) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey

Recorded by Doug Haire at Jack Straw as part of the 2005 sessions in which we recorded all of my then existing Gathered Songs. This one seems stronger to me every time I hear it. A set of double variations, or perhaps of angled adumbrations on a lyrical habitat.

February 21, 2017

Roll Call - Aaron Keyt

Lift the rocks, show all that lurks there. Kick-ass untamable acidspitting malevolent staring glimeyes and unearthly Tierschrei. A curated bestiary. What DIY can lead to, given an actual aural sensibility. This is about as fabulously raw an hour of sound as I can remember.

Too Slow - Newton Armstrong - Mark Knoop [from Milton Babbitt, a Composers' Memorial]

A solid body called into presence by the gentlest of indications. here. here. and here.

Ivan Arteaga & Keith Eisenbrey 160202 A - Ivan Arteaga, Keith Eisenbrey, February 2016

We tell tales at each other.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 20, 2017

Gradus 307 170220 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

What if there were a way, equally methodical, of working through all the rhythmic/metric/dynamic/agogic combinations as well?

February 23, 2017

Your Mother Should Know Acoustic Demos - Karen Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Although they haven't been out and about for a while they have been working on songs old and new. Time to set up some microphones and record an acoustic demo of a bunch of songs. For the big boxed set.

Playlist

Live

January 28, 2017

Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle

La Traviata - Verdi - Stefano Ranzani, conductor

My puzzlement at Verdi, and indeed at Italian opera in general, is of long-standing. Looking back at my attitude now that I am finally finding something interesting going on, I think I was simply misapprehending, or possibly not apprehending at all, the particular point of view of the musical material, as an aspect of the drama, that is in play. Here there is neither Wagner's Romantic embedding of the drama within a symphonic structure, nor Mozart's Enlightenment era arch-ironical puppet master as a musical narrator. Instead the orchestra serves as a kind of scaffolding to support a close first-person that exists almost entirely within the sung melody. Nothing exists for the music except the expression of the line as it unfolds.

There was some discussion bandied about concerning the stripped down production. Apparently the orchestra was reduced from Verdi's scoring, and perhaps there were some cuts made. Any of these can be easily remedied (for my own purposes) by simply finding a reasonable recording for later study. For my part I have no musical complaints at all about what I heard that night. The set consisted of lighting and several layers of curtains. There might have been a chair or two, but I may be confusing that with the chairs and tables at Seattle Shakespeare Company's two-evening, production of the Henry VI plays (with an all female cast), Bring Down the House, which we saw on the Thursday before and the Thursday after. I thought the curtains were attractive, thoughtfully used, and ambiguous enough to evoke all sorts of pertinent things. Mostly they didn't get in the way of or distract from the music, for which I am personally grateful.

Recorded

January 31, 2017

beneath the ground - Infamous Menagerie

industrial lasers cutting

blocks of mineral

as light

on film

Banned Rehearsal 418 (Speakeasy Set 1) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Anna K, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer, March 1996

morning after the May 2001 fire

Just shy of 12 years into our shared history we played two sets at the Speakeasy Café in Belltown. This is the first of them. It has never been about playing well, but that if we were invested enough in our listening, then making any sound would speak true.








February 2, 2017

Aku (aged tape) - Keith Eisenbrey

Oh the memories! In 1980/81 at the University of Washington I was studying with John Rahn, who, at that time, had just produced a piece on the Department of Experimental Musicology's new Synclavier. I'm not sure how it was all worked out, but somehow I managed to get quite a bit of time on it during Winter Quarter. I devised an elaborate chart, based on a series of eight digits, and wound up with a 30 minute, 8 part monstrosity of an electronic piece. I remember that it was while I was transferring the charts to notation, pages strewn all over the room, that my brother came upstairs to tell me that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

In order to realize it exactly I had calculated the timing of each "take" so that it could be recorded separately, at a slow tempo, and could be played easily without error. My friend Christopher Mehrens, whom I had met in middle school at various city-wide piano competitions, helped with this process. I don't remember how many hours it took, but I do remember we often had to wait 20 minutes or more for the first note to be played. I also remember going to a computer store, which was quite the novelty back then, in order to purchase a "floppy disk", my very first. At the end of the process I ended up with a reel-to-reel tape which was my clean master.

Pete Comley instructing a camel

I made a cassette copy right away, and then kept the master tape. As the years went by, and digital recording at home began to exist, I became acquainted with Pete Comley, who had both a working reel-to-reel tape deck and a DAT. In May of 2001, with high hopes of once again having a pristine image of the sound, we pushed play and record and waited for vintage synclavier sound to emerge. It is difficult for me to describe the combination of delight and dismay when I heard what time's deterioration had worked on that tape. Apparently tape stock from that era was notoriously unstable. It was partly stuck to itself, causing the 30 minute piece to stretch out to almost 40. The wobble is woozily wonderful. Most of one track didn't make it over the record head, and my intricately designed digital patches were converted to awesome shrieks. Later I overdubbed a version of my text-sound composition Confessions of a Polyphonist, and called the result Ms. Found in a Bottle, after Poe, of course.

Even later I transcribed the whole thing in midi. Not synclavier to be sure, but looking back on it, my particular patches were no great shakes to begin with, at least not compared to what time and neglect could accomplish with a physical medium. Analog takes revenge, and how sweet it is.

Banned Rehearsal 694 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer, January 2006

Early on we invented a word for sessions like this: 'sedatory'. Snorish, trajectorizing away from energy increase. Gentle, domestic - crib play. Time-biding. It takes a long time settling, and settling is all it does. Could be a long preamble to set up the wicked xylophone entrance about 20 minutes in. This requires patience.

in memoriam M. B. - Andrew Mead - Maria Sampen, violin [from Milton Babbitt, a composers' memorial]

Golly. This is truly, truly lovely.

Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 B - Ivan Arteaga, Keith Eisenbrey

Playfully poking, right up to the end, where some quiet place, gracefully turned, is revealed.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 30, 2017

Gradus 305 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Rich Trove struggling to cross Vast Emptiness. Pushing, spreading, expanding, more inexorably than the possibility of measuring. // Delving, pushing down against buoyancy.

Unfortunately the recording device ran out of memory 28 minutes into this 40 minute session. Bother!

Playlist

Live

November 19, 2016
Finnegans Wake Project
Gallery 1412, Seattle

Chapters 1 and 2 - James Joyce - Neal Kosály-Meyer

In case we had forgotten, Neal brings us up to date on the story so far. The body laid to rest and the crime rumored about. Chapter 3 will be performed at the Chapel on December 17, 2016.

Recorded

November 20,2016

I did not pay the price on the label

The Best Of Times - Styx [a Rescued Record]

A full Las Vegas style production. Strangely timely.

Guess I'm Falling In Love - Jad Fair, Moe Tucker, Kate Messe, Barry Stock [from I Feel So Far Away - Moe Tucker Anthology 1974 - 1998]

Focus guaranteed. That firehose is, in fact, directed at your face.

Self Portrait in 69 Shades of Grey - Michael Leese - Burning Dog Music Ensemble

Nothing whatsoever to do with the recent infamous book and movie: this predates all that by nearly 25 years. This begins in late 20th century chamber music territory, flute, harp, some brass. An electric bass enters and some cages are rattled and it wanders into jazz band land. ML was a composer I became acquainted with back on CompuServe, when that was a thing. This was one of several tracks on a cassette - transportable medium of choice at the time. We lost track of each other at some point. I was sorry to discover that he had passed away several years ago at the age of 49.

Little Mouth - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Lust and Disgust shout each other blue in the face.

Doomsome Otherings (reading session unedited) - Keith Eisenbrey - Seattle Creative Orchestra, Roger Nelson

Freefloating passages in a partly clogged rehearsal bay. The music's parts, set adrift, have jostled loose. What comes through, even early on, is the orchestral palette, and a sense of how the colors shift.

Get Daddy A Chicken Sandwich - The Trashies [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

A screenplay written as a prank or novelty song. Self-parody in the mold of Black Flag or The Dictators, perhaps even leaning toward the full-on satire of Full Toilet.

Xtet: Last Dance for Milton - Elaine Barkin [from Open Space volume 29]

The space between the notes is full of mischief or tenderness. A music of teasing affection.

November 25, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C


A conversation in pantomime, aiming at what just eludes text.

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

A typical sequence might be expected to climb up or down a ladder. These spin on tilted axes. Organ sounds tend to take up residence within architectural space, in a way that nothing else does that I can think of. Among other things this separates the voices of the fugue along different lines than implied by the score.

Alla Polacca in D Wq. 116/6 - C. P. E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Ostensibly in 3, but I was hearing the meter as a sequence of 4-beat measures overlapping like fish-scales so that beat four and beat one occupy the same temporal location.

Sonata in E Major (#31) - Haydn - Anton Nel

Once again, the sonata that my friend and collaborator Aaron Keyt reworked into a thorny and thoroughly modern semi-pastiche, and once again it wasn't until the opening of the middle movement that I recognized it.

Concerto in A K. 622 - Mozart - Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Neville Mariner, Jack Brymer

A Mozartean imitation is never direct, he delights in subtle differentiation - a narrower ambitus here, a modal shift there, ornaments full of attitude sprinkled liberally. He fully inhabits the means of his own expression, much as Ken Griffey Jr. fully inhabited his home run swing. This more than anything was probably the achievement that left the Romantics gasping for breath.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 21, 2016
Gradus 303 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Among the poking around are frequent bouts of pretty sweet timbral composition.

November 25, 2016
Ravenna Park 161125 A - Keith Eisenbrey

The sun was out yesterday morning so Karen and I took a walk down to Ravenna Park. I recorded two stretches. This first started at the top of the ravine, at 20th Avenue Northeast, and proceeded east along the North Trail as far as the ball field (where there was a game of Kick Ball in progress, what fun!) We heard and saw several winter wrens, and crows, gurgling brooks, and a conversation among our footfalls. I still need to find a good way to silence the microphone handle I'm using, but the extra noise isn't too distracting.

Ravenna Park 161125 B - Keith Eisenbrey


Once we got above the ball field, heading back along the South Trail, we heard a squeaky swing in the playground. I turned the recording back on and we marched up the damp concrete steps (a really nice sound!) and recorded a little bit of the swing in its weary complaint.

Playlist

Live

January 30, 2016
The Marriage of Figaro - Mozart
Seattle Opera - McCaw Hall

The stage set was cleverly designed, visually attractive, but not so fussy as to be distracting. The most interesting decision was to place Barbarina's cavatina about the pin at the edge of the stage, in front of the tall woodish panel wall that served as a curtain. Like setting Christ on a mountaintop, it forces attention: this is what it is all about - a lost trifle. Ironic, poignant, barbed. Something like the effect of the Holy Fool's plaint anchoring Boris Godunov.

Recorded

January 31, 2016
Merce grido piangendo - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

Utterance is never simple, always at least a skein. The co-sounding harmonies are a metaphor of inflection, of placement of voice within the mouth. That particular upward chromatic shift is an eyebrow raised, a dubious query.

Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir BWV 228 - J.S. Bach - Concentus Musicus Wien, Bachchor Stockholm, Nikolaus Harnoncourt

The actual earth has dropped down half a frame and we hear the angelic chorale floating above. Meanwhile we mortals go chugging about our business.

Keyboard sonata in F Wq. 54 #1 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Single notes poke in here and there, laugh-in style. Toward the end of the 1st movement the harmony slows to an almost Beethovenian stillness.

Quartet in E op. 17 #1 Hob. III:25 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

A thought experiment: extract just the resolutions of each cadence and play only those, in sequence, in time. Then ask what the shape of each preceding and succeeding phrase does to change the sense of how that cadence sounds.

February 3, 2016
String Quartet in D K. 499 - Mozart - Juilliard String Quartet

It is lucid even when it gets gnarly.

February 4, 2016
String Quartet in F op. 59 #1 (#7) - Beethoven - Budapest Quartet

Entering the dark, overwhelming.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 1, 2016
Gradus 283 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

February 2, 2016
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 A
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 B
Ivan Arteaga and Keith Eisenbrey 160202 C

Ivan brought his alto sax and clarinet over to meet my piano. I for my part had a blast.

Playlist

Live

January 8, 2016
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Ivan Arteaga

Ivan Arteaga

Reed voice human voice inside each outside each voice being outside through each voice being inside enclosure through each voice being outside voice's disclosure - holding outside, birthing inside.

Patrick O'Keefe - Three Bagatelles

The first one was done before I got a bead on it, but the second was really pretty. I liked the way the harmonies of the third jostled each other, shoulder contra shoulder, not unfriendly.

Amy Denio

Best title of the night, possibly of the year: Recipe for Disaster. I am still and always in awe at how effortlessly Amy seems to generate good feelings in everything she does. How can one not smile? She has an easy comfort with what I can only call "song-ness", music consists of a bed of rhythm and a play of tune. The joy is in the details.

Keith Eisenbrey (with Banned Rehearsal)  - Tambourine Quintet (or Banned Rehearsal 901 160108) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

I was quite gratified both by how easily my colleagues got into it, and by the response. This (and the whole evening) is an example why I love the Seattle music scene.

Recorded

Alfred Cortot

January 3, 2016
Ballade in A-flat Major, op. 47 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot

The first eight bars comprise four gestures, each in a distinct register. It also divides neatly in two, each half a question and answer, the latter like an echo of the first. Then four bars, two big, two little. Echo's echo. Got that straight? Good thing, because the ground begins to shift something ferocious.

Symphony in D minor, op. 120 (#4) - Schumann - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

Schwarz hears this differently than I do, his reading is leisurely, dreamy, and a bit heavy, with a tendency to broaden and luxuriate in a warm glow, rather than to quicken, ignite. This works pretty well for the opening, circling in the dark to an inner light, but never really gets its get-up-and-go up and gone.

Sonata in F Major op. 99 - Brahms - Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein

I love those low cello double stops toward the end of the first movement, an anchor in the bottom of the sea pulled by an unseen ship high above.

January 5, 2016
My Little Zulu Babe - Williams and Walker [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Fascinating, but uncomfortable to listen to in almost every way imaginable.

The Invisible City of Kitezh (Suite) - Rimsky-Korsakov - Philharmonia Hungarica, Richard Kapp

A sound track drifting free of its film.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 4, 2016
Gradus 281 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Three simultaneities open, equivocally similar, identically uncertain. Coherence is a process of connecting presence to memory. When we hit bottom the summit re-emerges.

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

September 12, 2014

Neil Welch, with John Teske and Ivan Arteaga

Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

 

One of the cognitive snags for which we might blame written-down music is the stubborn idea that notes are atomic and irreducible. Tunes, figures, chords, and prolongations are all built from individual notes - as Fux intended. Midi, for all its twisted usefulness, wallows in this error. For at least the last 150 years musicians have made various attempts to challenge, or at least critique, this (see my notes on Liszt that follow), and Neil's compositional and performance stance is firmly in that tradition. His strategy is to discover or allow or tease notes or figures, or hybrid scraps or specters of what might have once been notes or figures, out of dynamic resonance systems broadcast through a tenor sax into the audiosphere by confluences of breath, mouth-shape, embouchure, tonguing, and finger-key wiggles. In short, the erstwhile atoms emerge as sparks from a flaming body, epiphenomena to the main show.

 

The evening was dominated by Neil's devastating performance of his recent A Response to the Wednesday Morning Shooting at Café Racer. Heart-felt does not even begin to describe. Also on the program, John Teske and Ivan Arteaga, on upright bass and alto sax respectively, explored the apparently vast and teeming territory just prior to pianissimo.

Recorded

September 7, 2014

Sonata in G op. 78 - Schubert - Vladimir Ashkenazy

 

VA makes a great case for a first movement tempo so slow it barely moves and for taking the repeat. The sheer expanse lifts us out of flesh.  The moments of wrath require adequate space for their resonance to breathe in or they would be petty, hurried, merely hemi-demi-semi-divine.

 

Waltz in A minor Op. 34 #2 - Chopin - Peter Katin

 

the memory of a hope of a dance

 

Symphony in B-flat "Spring" - Schumann - Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, John Elliot Gardiner

 

Between the opening fanfare call of horns and trumpets on forte D-naturals, unrevealed as yet as the key's median - though hinted in measure 2's B-flat, C, D! - and the response in full triadic orchestral glory, spanning 4 octaves plus, there is no apparent harmonic movement. But a terrible and intoxicating energy is unleashed that drives unrestrained to the end. Has there been an orchestral work this exhilarating since?

Liszt

September 9, 2014

Études d'exécution transcendante - Liszt - Claudio Arrau

 

The self wrestles with the atom, each singular audible blasted and split. Atlas bursting his globe.

September 10, 2014

Die Walküre Act 1 - Wagner - Orchestra and Chorus of La Scala, Furtwangler

 

I was following along with the score this time, attending the rate at which the printed key-signatures change. The first two scenes hang out stolidly near D minor and C minor respectively, and not surprisingly there is,  toward the end, a rapid acceleration as the tonality wobbles and spins before it finally collides into G Major.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

September 7, 2014

Coronet 140907 - Keith Eisenbrey

 

The current version of my improvisation project is to record a session on some instrument or other every week and then fold it, which is to say I layer the second half over the first half. This week's session was on an electric bass of unknown make. A recent repair replaced the face-plate with part of an old vinyl record. Coronet is the label.

 

September 8, 2014

Gradus 251 - Neal Meyer

 

September 13, 2014

J - Keith Eisenbrey

 

Although I'm on a sabbatical from composition, I had an idea yesterday that needed working out. While listening last night to Neil Welch's performance in response the Café Racer shootings I started thinking about the late J. K. Randall and writing this piece.