Playlist

Preface

"And lady stardust sang his songs
Of darkness and disgrace"

David Bowie, "Lady Stardust" The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

Texts

Live

January 8, 2017

Star Anna & Synergia NW Orchestra perform Ziggy Stardust

Neptune Theatre, Seattle

My introduction to David Bowie was his amazing performance of "Life on Mars" and "Ashes to Ashes" on The Tonight Show in 1980. Scary Monsters is still, for me, the gold standard of all things Bowie. As I write these words I had to find the clip online to listen. 37 years ago. Still a knockout.

Star takes back orange hair

Being somewhat obsessive about collecting music, under the general theory that if I like one thing somebody does I'll probably like everything, I quickly amassed most of the existing vinyl releases. Ziggy, of course, came up early on, and its iconic status is easy to understand on several levels. The song writing is strong throughout, and though the musicianship is as superb as one expects from DB he hasn't yet got to the point where the image of hyper-professionalism is so upfront as to be a smokescreen. This, as intricately thought out as it is, is personal. My interest, at the time, was mostly in the clockwork of his performance - in how each line is sung as though from an entirely different persona, the lyrics not spelling out a clear narrative but acting more like a scrapbook, each song being a page of scattered thoughts / quotes / comments / overheard conversations and the like. There is no single voice that talks to us, but a multitude of voices, most of them, it would seem, not Bowie's, but ours.

Until, that is, at the end of "Rock and Roll Suicide", he reaches out his hand to those voices, most of them ours, in what may be pop music's most sincere attempt at rescue.

Star Anna's voice sits a little lower than DB's, and she chose not to take some of the higher full power notes, but on a few remarkable occasions she moved to a light high falsetto that took my gasp away. (More please.) She also chose to use her prodigious vocal charisma to bind all the disparate voices that Bowie commanded into single, extraordinarily rich and supple presence. By her own admission she had been working toward this performance for the last 24 years. It showed. This was personal. This was for family. For all of us in the road of salvation, we have each other.

She gathered a fine orchestra, warmed us up with a short set of her own, and followed the album's tracks with encores, including "Changes" and "Rebel Rebel". The costumes were great. My phone pictures from the Neptune's balcony only capture the glow.

Recorded

January 10, 2017

I Guess I'll Have to Dream the Rest- Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra

Sleep and dream as a stand-in for sexual surrender, played from the outside. Teasing by accusing the teased of teasing. Kind of a dicky move Frank.

Hollywood Hi Hat - Tommy Dorsey [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

In its light tight staccato, a precursor to James Brown.

Early Spring - Miles Davis, The Metronome All Stars [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Everybody checks in with a quick solo. Is it just me or had Miles heard a little Tommy Dorsey in his day?

January 12, 2017

Ooby Dooby - Roy Orbison [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

A question for my sound engineer friends: Was the fingerboard of the upright bass mic'd separately? Is that the clicky sound I'm hearing that more or less tracks the rhythm section? What is that?

Rotate the Body in All Its Planes - Harry Partch - Freda Pierce, John Garvey

No effort is made to obscure the fact of its assemblage, in production, from individually recorded snippets, discrete sets of moments. I am reminded of J. K. Randall's recording of his some old troubador songs collected from around 1200 with interludes, including his in your face low-fi announcements of the titles.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 9, 2017

Banned Telepath 53 In Flight 010917

Banned Telepath 53 Seattle 010917

Banned Telepath 53 Tucson 010917

Banned Rehearsal 926 010917 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer (Seattle); Steve Kennedy (Tucson); Aaron Keyt (In Flight)

A first! Sound from midair!

Playlist

Live

January 6, 2017
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Nadya Kadrevis

Little Big Blue - (if I got the name right). Whatever else this was or was intended to be, what got my attention was a sense of quantum jumping from one style-world to another, from one musical-poetical realm to another, from one established set of givens to another, often within the same part, or even, as they intersected, within a single gesture or note. Given enough such jumps a ghostly image could arise, a tracing of the exact points where nothing could possibly be.

Tom Baker

from Three Movements: Slalom and Butoh - Satchel Henneman, guitar. Concordance between name of sound and motion sounded. Slalom? Yep, that's slalom all right. Butoh? you betcha, nailed it. Except that the dynamic of the concordance moves in both directions. Sound sounds name as name names sound. Switch the names. What happens? Ditch the names? Not the same at all.

Jay Hamilton

Impossible Thoughts - a live-action sci-fi-film, dancer Erica Akiko Howard living a bird mask, JH in bodily indication of verbless text. Equal parts of the best aspects of Harry Partch and Ed Wood. What could possibly be better?

Andrew Olmstead and Elk Paauw (Spooky Action)

Acts of making unmasking. A collaborative reveal. There was some discussion after about the aesthetics of the webcam's slow frame rate. Here's my take: Pushing an image (of any media) through a technology isn't about perfecting the technology, isn't necessarily done in the hope that the technology will be transparent to composerly intent. It is (or could be) about the activity of the pushing through. Not revealing its transparency but its resistance, what arises, or what can be made to arise, through its limitations. Especially when the subject matter of the whole is, exactly, unmasking.

Recorded

Patsy Cline

January 1, 2017
Doggin' Blues - Linda Hopkins and Johnny Otis [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Ray Charles must have stayed up at night thinking about this.

Go Go Go - Roy Orbison [from Sun Records Definitive Hits]

Stripped down vocal, but hadn't lost the ornate instrumentals.

I Fall To Pieces - Patsy Cline [collected from Dave Marsh's The Hear of Rock & Soul]

Soft landing, then press hard. or: working, as an ornamentation, on specific places within an attack. or: multiple attack envelopes per word.

I Want You - Bob Dylan [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heart of Rock & Soul]

The Band is a rich set of springs. Bob is jumping up and down on it.

Tired of Being Alone - Al Green [collected from Dave Marsh's The Heatr of Rock & Soul]

The smooth sound of the backing allows the vocalist a huge dynamic range / articulative space.

Comin' - Chocolate Milk [a Rescued Record]

Solid musicianly soul/r&b sound in how the rhythm rolls around the beat.

Count On Me - The Heats [a Rescued Record]

Kind of a Beatles-y vibe, due to the close harmony singing, and placement of the voice high up inside, toward the sinus.

These Days - REM [from Life's Rich Pageant]

Wide clear space between each track, lots of space for the vocal to hold forth, the backing vocals poking their words out from behind, here and there, as from behind the trees.

The Telephone Tree - The Young Fresh Fellows [from Electric Bird Digest]

Always space left for response. Up to the mic, down then and back away to wail the guitar.

Stay Where You Are - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

No room here for response - but deep in the back the sub-vocals are magnificent.

Work Architecture Unity And The ("17 Crags" 010504) - Keith Eisenbrey - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer
(16 years ago, a first, experimental, stab at an idea for a piece. The underlying idea was an image of coming upon sounds suddenly, hurtling through dense fog sparked with crags.)

An odd thing about chamber music, as a thing for a group of humans to do together: no talking!

An attempt at self dismemberment.

Utterly unlike the piece I imagined and explained (or attempted to explain) but utterly its own thing itself instead.

An attempt to collaborate between workbenches.

Problem: The overscore flattens time.

I think there are still some of these scores lying around in the studio . . .

the fellows in electic bird drag

Eazy - The Cripples [from The Funhouse Comp Thing]

Space! By which I mean actual rests (except in the chorus). Perhaps a bit too musicianly for a punk song.

Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze - Michael Langton - Lafayette string quartet (Ann, Sharon, Joanna & Pam) [on Hendrix Uncovered - New Music Inspired by Jimi Hendrix]

Little pokes above string tremolo. Each poke pokes or twists one's sense of the subdivisions within the violin jitter.

January 2, 2017
Finnegans Wake Chapter 2 - David Kahne [from Waywords and Meansigns]

Persona Speaking: a reporter of knowledge from manuscripts books and writings.

Punmeanings: little drawings made on the letters, inter-cavorting, often inter-transforming the letters upon which they play and posture.

Proper Venue: A dark street, somewhat chilly, en route from public house to home.

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

Upward trendingness and downward trendingness, tending to a tightly sprung inward warpingness.

Menuet I and II in E-flat Major Wq 116/1 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Unlike Bach the elder's culture of ornate ramification, Bach the younger's is of elegant decoration and balance - not that he plays it straight, mind you. These come off like teaching pieces, demonstrating simple figuration transformations. "See? Here are two ways to play the same motion."

Symphony in B-flat Major (#77) - Haydn - The Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

Completely sure and at ease with itself and its surrounds. Enlightened. Insufferable. The aural equivalent of a set of fine china depicting a rustic peasant dance. "How quaint!"

January 3,2017
Concerto in A Major K. 622 - Mozart - Mostly Mozart Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, David Shifrin

The most interesting thing about this recording is the soloist's use of an extra long clarinet (like the one M wrote for, if I recall the program notes correctly) that allows passages to be played "as written". I guess with a modern clarinet some of these passages are transposed or otherwise altered. Unfortunately the tempi trend slow, as though trying to impose a Schubertian sprawl. It doesn't do the job for me.

Sonata in A-flat Major op. 110 - Beethoven - Artur Schnabel

As AS explains here, making a unified statement of the opening sequence misses the point, and would obscure the way it is, actually, a unified statement of disarray. It keeps heading in directions and then jump-cutting to where it would have been going had it always been heading there by another route. Or: This stuff here is necessary for you to hear (as JKR might have put it: it matters that order doesn't matter) before I can lay this new jive on you. Love the way the fugue keeps fast-forwarding through fiddly bits to catch up with itself.

January 5, 2017
Red Pepper Rag - Prince's Orchestra [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

This has a toy-orchestra hit. The audience must be brought along slow, must be taught.

Ma - Eubie Blake [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

A study in extended joplinesque keyboard figuration. See "CPE Bach" above.

Lost Your Head Blues - Bessie Smith, Joe Smith, Fletcher Henderson

Bessie and Joe converse across Fletcher, whose piano ping-pongs head turns one to the other. Or: Joe provides an interlinear translation of Bessie into trumpet (or cornet, not sure which).

Daniel Saw The Stone - Silver Leaf Quartette of Norfolk [from Goodbye Bablyon]

With this sort of rhythmically charged arrangement I wonder if the particulars of the text are more an excuse than a message. The music makes perfect sense, but the text is all over the biblical map.

Romeo and Juliette Act IV Epilogue - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juraitis

Two minutes plus. The clowns carry out the bodies. Xylophone hollowness could be a macabre cliche, except that Serge nails it. Brevity and clarity.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 2, 2017
Figure Study 170102 - Keith Eisenbrey
Neal couldn't come over for Gradus, so I made some noise on my piano myself.

Playlist

Preface

"The time has long gone since the monumentality of the written text, having found its niche in the great halls of literature, could experience such achievement in proxy for its poet as ultimate bulwark against the flotsam of history and the underlying tussle and torque of time. Neither Keats' Urn nor Yeats' Singing School nor even the dusty owls of Robert Duncan's grim Museum, can hold out any longer against the utterly transitory character of even the most heartily well-wrought artifact. The artifactual nature of reality itself is now felt to be so keenly ensconced in its fleeting identity, that 'the work of time's' subjection to time's ravages hardly evokes a whimper. You must find a way to live with a moment's grace and let the matter of durative identity take care of itself as it can." Charles Stein "Magic Without Tears in the Writings of Lissa Wolsak" - Open Space Magazine Issue 12/13 fall 2010/winter 2011

Texts

Recorded

December 26, 2016

Fletcher Henderson

That Devilin' Tune - Stella Mayhew [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

An oversize stage presence in the service of cringe-worthy minstrel-show lyrics.

Unknown Blues - Fletcher Henderson [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Loose-jointed piano playing.

Panama City Ltd. - Ada Brown [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Delicious horn section.

I'm Crazy About My Baby - Fats Waller [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

The sophistication of the performance leaves the song far behind.

December 27, 2016
Romeo et Juliette Act III - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juratis

Clearest bliss layered on clearest bliss, but viewed from an angle that fragments each line, especially in secret, where intricacies are worked out.

Nat Cole

Just a Sittin' and a Rockin' - Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Sets up shop and stakes a claim.

Somebody Loves Me - Lester Young, Nat Cole, Buddy Rich [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

All three of them are fabulous, but Nat Cole's piano playing is astonishing in the way it folds rhythm and tune together.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 25, 2016
UTUMC - MCC Coffee Makers 161226 - Keith Eisenbrey
When we got to church Christmas morning Karen and I took our choir folders, which we had taken home with us late on Christmas Eve, back to choir room in the basement. In the hall was a coffee maker, and in a kitchen off the hall was another, all by themselves, happily singing carols.

December 26, 2016
Banned Telepath 52 161226 Anchorage
Banned Telepath 52 161226 Seattle
Banned Rehearsal 925 161226 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, and Steve Kennedy, in Seattle; and Aaron Keyt in Anchorage

Playlist

Recorded

December 15-18, 2016

Die Zauberflöte Act II - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Karl Bohm

An allegory of the patriarchy in all its splendor and misogyny. As wonderful as the individual numbers are, and even as well as the Act II works as a sequence of pieces (somewhat better than Act I), the thing itself fails as drama, in part because the characters are motivated by the necessities of the allegory rather than by their personal interactions. They aren't making it up as they go along, it is made up for them from above. I also have trouble with the disjuncture between the sung sound and the spoken sound. The sung sound is so huge, so developed in itself, so wedded to its accompanying harmonic processes, that when characters simply speak I can't reconcile the sung and spoken voices into single persons.

December 22, 2016
Sonata in A-flat Major,op. 110 (#31) - Beethoven - Wilhelm Kempff

1. Figuration playing over the surface of what is held dear. Clouds on sky.
2. The perfectly wrong tempo, WK nails it throughout. I wanted to jump up and down.
3. Between-ness, one person, a singular voice, profane. (Alternating with:
4. The fugal sacred, corporate, universal. (Neither looking back to the other, but each finding cause, common or un-, within each, to be found to be having been moved back into the other.

In Session at the Tintinabulary
December 19, 2016
Gradus 304 161219 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

A new G. Anew! G! A gnu, gee! (Agnew) )Gwenga.( Eeg! Ungag! Wen, Ag; Wen, A.

Feeling felt. Bone of wood flesh of felt. Felted hammer fleshed bone wood resonanced wire.

The exact timing of an attack in relation to where the wire is in its vibration cycles can make such a difference in color as one could imagine a voice: back or front of palate, raised, lowered, the tongue just so.

The piano is an empty mansion, of which to approach is to inhabit. Guest or haunt? This music is some where. Some. Where.

Playlist

Live

December 17, 2016
Finnegans Wake Chapter 3 - James Joyce
Neal Kosály-Meyer
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

memory fragments in the dark

Recorded

December 10, 2016
Thunder Road (live) - Bruce Springsteen [from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live 1975 - 1985]

American Pie, bye bye
American Pie, escape from
American Pie, escape from within the language of

but hardly a moment in there that doesn't tell.

Ghosting (for Pat Graney Dance) - Amy Denio [from Tutto Bene]

Color me blown away. Barely a minute and a half long, the tonality is seeming solid but treacherously slick, and the rhythmic sense hovers between flatfooted folkish 3+3+2 and one of Cortot's floating riffs on a Chopin triplet. It would take a graduate seminar to tweeze out all the nested partitions of thirds and fourths winding around in there. All that and then a suckerpunch quasi-double-time cadence that would have made Machaut smile. Amy was kind enough to grant me permission to play around with this: Theme and Variations? Fantasy On? Riffy Etudes? Hmm.

Anonymous - Sleater-Kinney [from Call The Doctor]

Buried in the mix, a guitar's bare hint at reflection, like the dull glint on a gun barrel.

Banned Rehearsal 607 - Isaac E, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Aaron Keyt, Anna K, Isabel K, Neal Kosály-Meyer - April 2001

prolonging the lead in, the sense of getting ready to start. The sound world: percussion is in front drums bells wooden bars, guitar in imitation; slipping around inside strands of sustained tones sliding around, back into the percussion chattery. Inventing a mix, an instrumentation, a pattern of weedy tangled sounds. Regularity emerges, but always challenged by some angular, obtuse momentum. Doors open and close. A healthy hang-in-there attitude. Winds down even more prolongedly than it wound up. In the end we present multiple short fragments of possible mixes bending toward the oh-so-composed, long fades perpetually reawakened.


Just Keyboard Respect - Mark Zuckerman - Peter Winograde [from Open Space 21]

Beautiful keyboard writing! (and beautifully played). A clear, delightful, but frightfully quick game of Randallian pinecones.

December 11, 2016
And The Wind Still Cries - Randy Raines-Reusch [from Hendrix Uncovered]

An undulating drone and what gets pulled from it.

Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 - Mr. Smolin and Double Nought Spy Car [from Wayroads and Meansigns]

Recited, for the most part. Music enters though the relation between the reciting and the various musics over which it is recited. The big thunderclap near the opening joins the two. As deeply embedded in the humanities as the text is, this take on it comes across like stitched-together missives from space aliens, or as though on latenight downchannel TV. Or: brazenly neo-modern: the old text surrounded by ready-mades. Defiantly not integrated with itself.

December 13, 2016
Die Kunst der Fuge Contrapunctus IV - J. S. Bach - Lionel Rogg

Clotted keys, knots of partial centrality. Occasional clarifications: red herrings?

Polonaise in E-flat Wq. 116/2 - C.P.E. Bach - Miklos Spanyi

Carl finds some very peculiar ways to count to three.

Symphony in C minor (#78) - Haydn - The Hanover Band, Roy Goodman

Sequences of types, as sets, sequenced into sequences of types as sets of sets, articulating the picture of life painted for their masters by their servants. The ordered day. It's hard to imagine (if you will excuse the inexcusable) Haydn hiding anything, but then...

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 12, 2016
Banned Telepath 51 Seattle 161212 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy

December 13, 2016
Banned Telepath 51 Anchorage 161213 - Aaron Keyt
Banned Rehearsal 924 161213- Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt

Playlist

Preface

"can we see it without words? do words block the view? if words are the view, what lies beyond, behind? behind beyond // what to write in, on. what? and // in what language? // not the mother tongue, but    the other tongue" Pedro Rivadeneira "Corporalmente" - Open Space Magazine Issue 11 Fall 2009

Texts

Recorded

December 3, 2016

Luigi Dallapiccola

Concerto per la notte di Natale dell'anno - Luigi Dallapiccola - Philadelphia Composer's Forum, Joel Thome, Valarie Lamoree

delicate tracing 

dove tails

joined by the repetition of a curve

so that each moment glows or burns

distance or undistance

deep space behind a stone wall of voice

December 6, 2016

It Will Stand - The Showmen [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

Outing the trope of genre promotion (rock and roll will live forever) as an affirmation of the audience (you will live forever). It is essentially an altar call.

Cup of Faith / Beaudoin Quadrille - Fidel Martin [from The Art of Field Recording Vol. 1]

The ornaments on this (a fiddle tune) are touched lightly, articulate feathers on a muscular frame.

Birds of a Feather - Paul Revere and The Raiders [from The Legend of Paul Revere]

Trying for a Sonny and Cher sound? Captain and Tenille? (of which, by the way, I saw an album in the rack at Value Village this morning).

Stevie Nicks

New York State of Mind - Billy Joel [from The Essential Billy Joel]

Oops. Billy forgot to attach a song to this performance.

Edge of Seventeen (live) - Stevie Nicks [collected from Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock & Soul]

The bass player makes this song ecstatic, accenting from the hip.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

December 9, 2016

312 Bus Chain Song 161209 - Keith Eisenbrey

Yesterday morning there was a wee bit of snow on the ground so the buses had their tire chains on. They must be good for exactly one trip, because they started to come loose as soon as we got on the freeway. I was sitting there wishing I had brought my zoom with me to record the WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM WHAM when I remembered that my phone could record audio. The result is 6 minutes of rhythm as I desire it. Enjoy!

Playlist

Recorded

November 26, 2016
Sonata in A, Op. 101 - Beethoven - Artur Schnabel

There are no straight paths. Grumbly trills. The pianos of Beethoven's day possessed a wider assortment of tone colors from top to bottom. Moving material into a different register didn't simply change the pitch level, it also changed the color of the sound. B doesn't rely on this bare effect, but also composes his own color shifts at every level of detail, putting his thumb on the scale, as it were, so we don't miss the point. This is part of why these pieces seem to shift so easily onto modern instruments with their more even tone-quality from top to bottom.

Barcorolle in F-sharp minor, Op. 60 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot [recorded on July 5, 1933]

Chopin loved finding deliciously odd pivot points for his multi-step modulations. Changing keys is a dance move.

Some Of These Days - Sophie Tucker [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Her voice is simply too big for the recording technology available at the time.

Shake It and Break It - Ladd's Black Aces [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Some fancy stop time shenanigans in there.

November 29, 2016

Sippie Wallace

Jack O' Diamonds - Louis Armstrong, Sippie Wallace, Hersal Thomas [from Alan Lowe's Really The Blues]

According to the notes I have, this piece was recorded on the day my dad was born: March 1, 1926. Heavy beat, but touched lightly, in an instant, like perfectly synchronized eye blinks.

God's Getting Worried - Virginia Dandies [from Goodbye Babylon]

About (y)our wicked ways.

Romeo et Juliette Cinquieme Tableaux - Prokofiev - Orchestre du Theatre Bolchoi de Moscou, Algis Juraitis

The topsy-turvy world of R&J is a dramatic composer's dream, just begging for extremes.

Portrait of a Guinea Farm - Claude Thornhill [from Alan Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

This is a very strange thing indeed - somewhere between a tone poem, a novelty song, and a fugue.

December 1, 2016
We're Through - Sarah Vaughan, Dicky Well's Big Seven [from Interlude - Early Recordings 1944-1947]

Trying to arrange the cushions of consolation just so. It's so hard!

The Rake's Progress Act III - Stravinsky - Orchestra of St. Luke's, Robert Craft, Jayne West, Jon Garrison, Arthur Woodley, John Cheek, Shirley Love, Wendy White, Melvin Lowery, Jeffrey Johnson, Gregg Smith Singers

Pulling the rug out from under is standard operating procedure. This is theater in all its artificial glory, perfectly believable even with artifice tipping its hand at every moment. Ties everything up and puts a bow on it.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

November 28, 2016
Banned Telepath 50 161128 Anchorage
Banned Telepath 50 161128 Seattle
Banned Rehearsal 923 161128 - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steven Kennedy, Neal Kosály-Meyer (Seattle); Aaron Keyt (Anchorage)