Playlist

Preface

"We are experiencing an intimate, self-reflexive and interpersonal touch: beneath your and my hardened forms of self-representation in public situations we experience our obsessions and internal contradictions as being touched, understood and identified; and only in this process do we experience being in transformation. We thus come close to each other through understanding the same deep-seated inhibitions or forms of desire. An access to one another is revealed,a possibility for change, a convergence. As possibility. Intimate utopia, folie à deux. You and I." - Helger Schulze, (translated by Laura Schleussner), Berührung (Touched by Sound) - The Open Space Magazine issue 8/9 Fall 2006, Spring 2007

Texts

Live

June 18, 2016
The Spectrum Dance Theater
Cornish Playhouse - Seattle
The Minstrel Show Revisited - Donald Byrd

DB and company are not shy to reveal what we successfully forget. Black face in your face. Let's share racist jokes. The permeable skins between the bodily languages of clowning subservience, and the bodily languages of self- and other- identification, and the bodily languages of desperate aggression are co-opted to grind our faces into the shards and sparks of our minstrel show past still present among us, barely transmuted: jazz hands, MJ's single white glove (a coded reminder?), white liberal church choirs trying to sing gospel told "to be more black", hip hop's posturing choreography and on and on ad nauseam and beyond. Intentions were and are well and ill on and from all angles, but clearly, the code of silence has failed.

On a more strictly aesthetic note, the inter-disciplinary play among dance, song, spoken word, direct address, audience participation, and reportage (not a complete list), was seamless where it needed to be and abrasive where it needed to be. SDT is a dance theater, but one that takes the theater part seriously. Dance theater for thinking people.

Recorded

June 15, 2016
Keyboard Sonata in E minor Wq. 65/30 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Each note's decay envelope is so steep (we are hearing a clavichord) that their inter-relative weights, both their dynamics and their agogics, is packed with at- and in-tentions. Climbing a cliff on the merest of holds.

Keyboard Sonata in B minor Hob. XVI:32 - Haydn - Christine Schornsheim

And now we are orchestral.

June 16, 2016
Le Nozze di Figaro Act II - Mozart - New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

It opens with a drop-dead killer song then dissolves into recitative - first among the female voices and gradually adding (through Cherubino pants role mediation) male voices, during which Mozart constructs an elaborately elaborating ensemble. It is no surprise that the recitative, the ensemble, and everything in between is awesome in the extreme (listen to that recitative again, dig that crazy rhythm!) But we the audience also undergo a shift in perspective, from fly-on-the-wall clinical observer to fully immersed (or enmeshed) co-operative - or more perhaps: over the course of the act the action has moved from out there on the stage to entirely within each of us, overwriting what is us with what is it. A brilliant insurgency.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

June 13, 2016
Gradus 291 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Every couple of weeks Neal comes over and improvises two 20 minute rungs on a new combination of piano keys. This session ended with a rung made of all the A naturals, all the E naturals, all the C sharps, and the highest G natural. I am allowed 40 minutes to consider how music is put together, or to think critically about how I habitually regard music as being put together.

What signals 'start over': repetition as return || end of long duration || novelty
What signals 'moving on': increment || transformation
(double whammy 'start over and move on': non sequitur)
What signals 'working on it': parametric invariance || not starting over, not moving on
Pointillism: each moment starts over, each moment of each moment starts over. updown backforth allthesame.

Playlist

Preface

"A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is." - Gertrude Stein, Sentences and Paragraphs

Texts

Live

May 14, 2016

Donald Byrd

Spectrum Dance Theater in Association with Seattle Repertory Theatre
The Leo Kreielsheimer "Leo K." Theatre - Seattle

A Rap On Race - Created by Anna Deavere Smith & Donald Byrd

A theater of two and more theaters concerning the minds among two and more minds. On a platform above, seated at a table, drinking, actors playing James Baldwin (Donald Byrd) and Margaret Mead (Julie Briskman) hashing out their differences at mid 20th century: liberal humanism being faced down by a desperate existentialism. On the stage below, at intervals, groups of pairs and more of dancers grope into each other's bodies' spaces to selections from Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Minds, talk, and language bodies - face  minds, dance, and music bodies.

May 21, 2016
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seatle

The Flying Dutchman - Wagner

This is one of those apparently popular works that just doesn't make it for me as a thing, as though Wagner were still trying to figure out how to manage what he wants to accomplish. The music starts in the middle of a storm but never really gets anywhere by it. Instead it waffles into a light comic mode overdosed with pious syrup. The erstwhile hero is a half-baked Manfred and, in a queasy trope of that era, the only faithful woman is a dead one.

Recorded

Arturo Toscanini in excellent hat

May 15, 2016
Symphony in B-flat (#4) Op. 60 - Beethoven - NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini

It spends enormous amounts of time and energy nowhere: befores- betweens- and afters-ville. The scale degree functions are adrift, the meters unmoored to any downbeat. Everything is exactly clear as to where it is as it, but where we are with it, as it, is just out of reach.

Fantaisie in F minor Op. 49 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot

Phrases escape the square. As long as we can keep an eye on the tiniest thread of where we've been we can find our way to a place to land.

Symphony in D minor (#4) Op. 120 - Schumann - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - Herbert von Karajan

Coming in around upon it again. Tunebits fan out like cards. The second does not follow the first, but occupies the place of the first's centering, within which we find a little story book violin concerto. From then on it is neither clear on which side of the cover we are, nor whether the music is told from in or out as we pass through the quiet fields and woods, along the brook, discovering bit by bit, turret upon turret, a distant glory nearing.

May 17, 2016
Trio für Klavier, Klarinette und Violoncello Op. 114 - Brahms - Christoph Eschenbach, Karl Leister, Georg Donderer

Fronted ideas melt into the back, nothing is here heard whole. The threads of stray variations (they may have been a part of it, had it ever all been there) lift in the wind like battered flags.

Playlist

Live

February 20, 2016

Rambunctious 2.0 - Spectrum Dance Theater - Cornish Playhouse, Seattle
Simple Measures: Brittany Boulding, violin; Liza Zurlinden, violin; Mara Gearman, viola; Rajan Krishnaswami, cello and artistic director; Judith Cohen, piano

At the Octoroon Balls - String Quartet No. 1 - Wynton Marsalis
Layered Text Samples - Pamela Z
Spirit Songs for Cello and Piano - T.J. Anderson
And the Movement of the Tongue for String Quartet with tape - Pamela Z

Of course there were dances too, and if, like me, you're interested in finding your way into an understanding with dance, Donald Byrd's SDT is an excellent place to do it. It's difficult for me to understand a theater in which the music is at the service of something else, and so I regret more than I should the compromises deemed necessary to forefront the dance: primarily amplification and the side-staging of the ensemble. Nevertheless, the company uses live music, and for that I am truly grateful.

Wynton Marsalis's String Quartet No. 1 is a hugely sprawling, immensely lyrical work with room to spare for long spun solos and crunchy heterophony - a sure way to my heart these days.

Pamela Z's works both use studio/computer-reassembled collages of text sound, with a sense of humor joyously reminiscent of Charles Amirkhanian and a wonder and poignancy all her own.

T.J. Anderson's Spirit Songs lost the most, I think, for being amplified, and disappeared behind the dance (which, for the record, I thought was superb and moving) more than the other works on the program. I would need to get another crack at it, without distraction, to get a shareable sense of it.

Recorded

RS raises his right eyebrow, I can raise my left!

February 23, 2016
Carmina Burana - Carl Orff - Atlanta Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, Robert Shaw, Judith Blegen, Hakan Hagegard, William Brown, Atlanta Boy Choir

Carmina's life as a wildly popular set piece has largely overshadowed its life as a piece of music. It is difficult to hear behind the 10,000 action film previews that have glommed onto it. I like to hear it as a sequence of abutting bits, each bit tempo-ed and metric-ed and timed to a fare-thee-well. Nothing bleeds into what follows, each is a shiny surface, glazed stone. Les Noces it is not, but it ain't hay neither.

I have been told that I am a cousin (of some several degrees and some several removes) of the late Robert Shaw, and I couldn't help feeling a bit of family pride in the clarity of performance and balanced presence of this fabulous recording.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

February 21, 2016
Autoheterophony 160221 Kum Ba Yah - Keith Eisenbrey

Sunday school songs, camp songs - kiddie hymns. These are my musical beginnings, known even before I knew myself. This project is an attempt to start coming to terms with that more directly. The process is very simple. I sing the song eight times, each successive time while listening to a rough mix of the previous tracks, and each successive time allowing more and more freedom of variation in melody and rhythm. When completed I mix them together, add reverb to suit, and that's it.

February 22, 2016
Banned Telepath 44 Seattle 160222
Banned Telepath 44 Somerville 160222
Banned Rehearsal 905 160222 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer, in Seattle; Aaron Keyt in Somerville

If I were to consider Banned Rehearsal as a goal-oriented project, and to consider where we are now to be nearer that goal than where we started, (both very big fat ifs, each more like an ifsissississimo than a mezzo if), then we are headed to a place where the sound of us is indistinguishable from the sound of people bumping around in a room full of noisy toys. We have become, or perhaps always have been, a complex slow motion rattle.