March 8, 2019
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| Maple Leaf Reservoir Park - March 2019 |
Chapel Peformance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Emily Acri, violin; Chris Young, cello; Steven Damouni, piano
pre: nervous energy hums chest high among those who prepare their desires: what are they for, their desires? what about their desiring makes their nerves dance?
Note: I don't mean bad nervous, not at all. Rather: expectant, alive.
Morsel - Luke Fitzpatrick
cinematic
slow back panning shots of frozen immobilities
drama of ceremony
Rite of Winter
oracle
what remains for aye after dragon's passing?
a long low lingering ice
The old is dying and the new cannot be born - Daniel Webbon
modern dance, even unscreened, must tell the tale in its own movements
triadic harmony and diatonic tunes
skirt mighty close to the edge of tonal disambiguity but never cross
Memories from Within a Valley Fog - Charles Corey
careful is its use of the bigger now
until it lets loose
since when let loose
it evaporates
at several rates
Light and Matter - Kaija Saariaho
not afraid to get similarities of sound and resonance from the various instruments all digging into the same dirt spades clanking
not to paint an encompassing world but to portray the spirit of the single minded, adventuring
whiff of political energy (Dmitri?)
what could be the tune
struggling mightily with what would be an harmonic undertow
Massive kudos to this superb young trio for this ambitious program of strong and completely believable compositions - three quarters local! More like this from each and every one of you, please!
March 7, 2019
Piano Drop
Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle
On a beautiful afternoon late in April of 1968 a thrift store-purchased piano was dropped from a helicopter onto a farm near Duvall. Several thousand had gathered to picnic and observe. It missed the woodpile, and those gathered, landing with a less than spectacular thump in the sod. Its harp and what of the frame it remained attached to was rescued to a basement to wait for its next adventure.
In honor of that long ago plunge to earth a successor to one of the institutional perpetrators laid the remains upon a table in a room and called upon the local composing community to comment and respond. Among those who took the bait was my band-mate Aaron Keyt. He asked Karen and me, and his wife Jennifer Chung, to help perform Piano Gusting, which involves blowing through straws at contact microphones placed or clipped to various parts of the wreck and plugged into handheld battery powered amplifiers.
The recordings of the dozen or so pieces have been strung together to play into the room on a loop. A video projection constructed from films and stills taken at the event plays on one of the walls. Print displays contain some press of the original event, some information about the current event, and related graphical content.
It's a bit like visiting a tomb inhabited by clearly joyous spirits. Oh that good feeling vibe of hippieful happenings, and how they linger! I arrived earlyish in the morning and stayed through all, I think, of the sound loop. Just about the time I thought I was hearing sounds I had heard before (about an hour) the Jack Straw lobby began to fill with 5th graders. Life does go on.
Recorded
March 1, 2019
The Hustler - The Sonics [from Boom]
aspirations of the high school geek guy surfer dude wannabe
Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland - Thelonius Monk [from The London Collection]
experimentation
exploration
big nix on the expostulation
Blood on the Floor - Throbbing Gristle [from Greatest Hits]
fades out longer than it is
hint of an artifact, audio catalog entry
Banned Rehearsal 93 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]
FW in progress
chains and expanses and repetitions
vectors accumulate causes before the beginnings of 'em (prevenience!)
her mirth is uncontrollable
quietly joined by music box wound very slow
a text constructed of the images of the root objects mentioned in the text
scribicide
recording is a phonograph of the place I lived hidden beside and illuminaudiating the insides of the old howits
a ramskin
face to the east face to the west face to face addressing the plane
cuts off in the middle of the prankquean
Everybody and Their Dog - Fitz of Depression [from Kill Rock Stars]
The size or focus of the guitar sound in comparison to the bass and drums disconnects the sense of beat location unity. Each focus has its own exact locus of it-ness.
High and Inside - Keith Eisenbrey [from Preludes in Seattle, June 2006]
a terrific "what if" piece
Q: What [would it be like] if [A were B]?
The answer is the image of the specifics of the question.
A: structural refraction of imputed overtones, in this case. (is that what the guy in the paper meant by "outdated minimalism?")
In my own ever so humble opinion it's a pretty sophisticated hunk of meta-minimalism.
for Milton - David Saperstein - Peter Jarvis, vibraphone [from Milton Babbitt: a composers' memorial]
toy piano, as sound making tool, is more like a vibraphone than like a piano. (duh!)
The key is the what of what is struck not the how of how it is struck. A truer toy piano would be more like a hammer dulcimer I think.
delightful actorly narration
world building
work world
work shop building
world work
building shop world work
world in which to work
world work shop
even quotes my Sonata g e g e g e g e
defies editing into anything to be tossed at the market
Difference between:
A. composer as originator of the score
B. composer as the image the audience constructs in their own heads as the image of the source of the sound speaking
(this is getting downright Taylorish)
using the one note that's out of tune as the lovely and natural focus
March 3, 2019
Paduan XII and Galliard XII - William Brade - The King's Noyse, David Douglass [from Mascharada - Music at the Bückeburg Court of Ernst III]
a picture of a courtly dance
or a stage tableaux with actual folks peopling it
Variations on a Romance Wq. 118/6 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi
instructions on compositional keyboard figuration
instead of this you could do that or this other or or or
or how to transfer plain into fancy
tricks of the trade
rather slight though, for CPEB
I Met Him On A Sunday - The Shirelles [from Shirelles Anthology]
each of them magnificent all on their own. Babado!
Vomit Express - Allen Ginsberg [from Holy Soul Jelly Roll]
doin' his Dylan
which shows just how similar they are
and precisely how they differ
crazy tin whistle back there
In This House That I Call Home - X [from Wild Gift]
tombstone shoes
attractive rhythm section
You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon [from Graceland]
To what extent is any signed-up-with-a-label recording artist anything but a brand?
Feels Blind - Bikini Kill [from Kill Rock Stars]
sung loud no matter what is being said in order to be heard over the kind of band that sings loud no matter what is being said in order to be heard
Track 1 - Bob Dylan [from Key Arena October 13, 2006]
BD: I'm playing with a blues band as a poet, sensitive to the rhythm of each line
where it accents
where it moves along
where it sticks
and where within the blues of it
it touches down
Time Stratifications II Song From The Deep Silence - S. Eric Scribner [from Storm Sound Cycle, May 2011]
past settles deep into ocean floor
almost lively compared to some of the storm sound cycle pieces
poco poco poco piu poco vivace
a lively moil
a roomsized tam tam wham
Terrible Touch - Ancient Warlocks [from Ancient Warlocks II]
Aaron Kraus at the top of his game slow surfing on gooey wall magma
indulgent?
for sure, but just letting it shine
March 5, 2019
Paduana XVIII - William Brade - The King's Noyse, David Douglass [from Mascharada - Music at the Bückeburg Court of Ernst III]
drapery
the body from which it hangs
its own weight
and how it moves freely to the floor
Tomorrow Never Knows - The Beatles [from The Beatles Anthology Volume 2]
processed wisdom
audio processing obscures the song's weakness as both music and poem
Animal Cycle - The Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey, director [December 1971]
cute humorous poems with illustrations
just good enough
be kind and tender to the frog
Girls on Film - Duran Duran [from Duran Duran]
fancy funk rhythm
recorded with money
Banned Rehearsal 94 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 1986]
for singing long tones
another
for chatting (which stops)
leaving long sung tones and breaks
tones zeroing in on particular resonances within the mouth's shape
we join forces with slow deliberation
and stick clacks
and a recurring avalanche of distorted bells
holler tones
and tambourine signal scour
we stuck with it
This was the seventh and last of the tapes we made on June 7, 1986, pressing forward to get to 100 before Neal up and left for San Diego for several years.
Girl Germs - Bratmobile [from Kill Rock Stars]
nyah nyah nyah DIY
singularly lacking in professional pretension
my people
Gradus 100 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 2006]
experiments in pedaling
dampers and their careful application
an aside: odd how when the dampers are ON the string, damping it, we call it "dry," but when they are out of play, OFF the string, we call it "wet." the more damper the drier, the less damper the wetter.
back in 06, when the kettle still whistled
for Milton - John Melby - Patricia Sonega, soprano [from Milton Babbitt: a composers' memorial]
a nagging puzzle
how to or why to join a virtual, i.e. mathematically manufactured, resonance with a biological resonance. A matter of skulls and algorithms underlining each other's limits.
March 7, 2019
Gradus 292 - Neal Kosály-Meyer [June 2016]
one note then two notes
What might writing be like if our alphabet had multiple octaves?
Lexical counterpoint
hold a single pitch in mind
there are no others
tonality, as a conception, involves various highly specific relations among approximated acoustical relations - not all of them the closest.
or
from an ad hoc selection of close acoustical relations a spherical surface of relations is formed, the heirarchicality of which depends on its moment to moment attitude toward us, as projected by the pitches presented
replace the constants:
what gives?
Satyr's Dance - Thomas Simpson - The King's Noyse, David Douglass [from Mascharada - Music at the Bückeburg Court of Ernst III]
melodic treatment of tempo changes (oh give me some of that old ritornello show!)
i.e. the notes these melodies are made of are tempos
Sonata in A Op. 1 No. 3 - G. F. Handel (arr. Milstein) - Nathan Milstein, Georges Plademacher [from Nathan Milstein The Last Recital]
the fewer the forces at hand, for Handel, the more I find I like it. Why? because the wee-est of inflections tell big.
Laudate Dominum - W.A. Mozart - Lake Washington Singers, Betty Eisenbrey [April 1966]
Ferocious precision:
Nice work Mom! You made it sound like something I wish I might have written.
"Why yes, actually. This is my mother's Mozart."
Dave - Cheech & Chong [a Rescued Record]
predecessor to Monty' Python's Holy Grail guards routine
or postdecessor to Who's on First?
using a conceit of misunderstanding as a study in timing
Bella Donna (Remastered) - Stevie Nicks [from Bella Donna Deluxe Edition]
each backing bit is calibrated to her ping
she is lit just so
Stand On It - Bruce Springsteen [from Six B Sides (private tape)]
fills the space your brain be in
(encouragement)
March 8, 2019
I.O.U. - Kreviss [from Kill Rock Stars]
blundering into Ritornello!
modes on a dial
Marriage of Figaro Overture - W.A. Mozart - Philharmonia Northwest, Roupen Shakarian
from my Mom's collection, Mom playing second fiddle, as it were, in this near professional community orchestra in the 90's. Perfectly enjoyable.
Oklahoma Cry Song - Dean Evenson [from Native Healing]
too-o-o- m-o-uchm-muchr-er-ev-er-b.b.b.b
I would prefer to hear a recording of these instruments in their accustomed architecture, but I suppose they are just trying to put forth a sound. Not for me. Remember.
Revolution #1 - Thee Emergency [from Can You Dig It]
action film
hot rod racering
for the thrill of it
battle comin' in fast
get pumped
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| Hoary Marmot, Sourdough Ridge, Mount Rainier National Park ca. 1994 |
that frog there has a fine career waiting as a master guiroist
one could do this with a live frog chorus
if it weren't for the fact that we really creep them out when we try
(and so enters David Dunn . . .)
piano player playing piano using a technique with no name
Rock Bottom Rag - Mark Pascen and Robber's Roost [from Cuatro]
That guitar playing: no slouch Mark!! such a deft touch! A strong cut from this young man that Karen and I happened upon busking on a still night in Ellensburg many years ago.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
March 4, 2019
Oak Harbor Marina - Keith Eisenbrey
My brother had an errand at the marina so we walked the finger piers. On the way back I recorded our 30 second traversal of the gangway.
