Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Part 3 - Summer 1983 - Spring 1984

My Red Hook door

Five Movements

Seven Cues Without Film

The second summer term of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts proceeded along much the same schedule as the previous term. One notable event was the visit by the eminent composer Morton Feldman, who struck me as among the most unpleasant people I have ever met.  The afternoon session went OK. He played us some recordings and provided some scores for us to follow along in. But in his evening presentation to the entire school, he came across, to me, as arrogant and boorish. Who tells the school they're visiting that they're a cheap summer camp and that clearly none of us are serious. After all, how could we be? Many of us were not born in New York City, and hence were beyond the pale. By the time he was through I was pretty hot. I went up afterwards to, well, I'm not sure what my intention was, but we ended up in a verbal altercation, the upshot of which was that he called me the unholy progeny of John Cage and himself. Ben commented that he did not want to witness that act. I told the story to my kids a few months ago, and they thought the whole thing was hilarious, especially since they had no idea who either of them was.

Far more pleasant was the visit from my University of Washington counterpoint teacher Diane Thome. It is the only time I can recall her looking relaxed. This may have been an early clue to me that academic life was not the bed of roses I had imagined it to be. When the term was over Jill, Dan, Bruce, and I took a road trip to visit J. K. Randall at Princeton. My memory is hazy but we may have engaged in an outdoor improvisation session that first evening and then filled two sides of tape the next day, followed by lunch and conversation. It was on this occasion that as Professor Randall was peering at the tape machine, considering whether to use Dolby B or C, he straightened himself and asked of us with rhetorical bravado “Noise reduction? Who wants noise reduction?!” It was in one of those sessions that he waxed rhapsodically and hilariously about baseball stats and non-standard notations. This became the Inter/Play tape “Labor Day”. My recollection is that Bruce Huber was also on that session but that he isn't credited on the tape. 

If I wanted my degree, I had to put together some sort of project to present and defend. My intention became to do what I could to strip away any overt rhetorical obfuscations, and to get down to basics. Over the course of a few weeks at the end of the fall of 1983 I produced five scores, collectively called “Five Movements”, each named by the date of its composition.  The first, “November 11, 1983” is scored in the form of four concentric cycles, each cycle containing combinations of pitches taken from a set of eight (F, G-flat, B, middle C, F, G-flat, B, and C). In the middle is a C Clef which I intended to pertain to the whole score. The next, “November 17, 1983”, contains just three pitches in a cluster: F-sharp, G, and A-flat, arranged in groups of three simultaneities of one or two notes in all their combinations, all arranged as a stylized sine wave. The third, “November 22, 1983”, scored as a stylized eye, has combinations of pitches from a set of five: A-sharp, B, C-sharp, D, and G. “December 1, 1983” is a study in articulation. Its pitches, F-sharp, G, A, C, D-flat, and E-flat are arranged in three lobes an octave below the bass staff. “December 8, 1983” is just two low notes at opposite corners of an empty space spanned by long slur marks: the lowest E on the piano, and the A-sharp at the bottom of the bass staff.

The height of my fame

I made recordings of each of the Five Movements on Ben's piano as I finished them, allowing each a 45-minute cassette tape side. I also prepared a large format ink score for each movement, which scores hung on the walls of our home in Greenwood and perhaps here for a while. They currently reside in the big pine box under my piano. I presented them at Bard Hall on March 2nd, 1984, garnering an above-the-fold headline and picture in the Dutchess North Register Star. This was the absolute pinnacle of my fame. I enlisted the help of Matthew Crain to play percussion in order to articulate the movements. I played each page for 10 minutes or so. I had arranged Bard Hall with dim lighting, the chairs set in irregular groups around the floor. My hope was that it wouldn't look like a generic concert hall. Matt and I had rolled the remains of a large steel barrel we had found in the woods (somebody's sculpture material?) to the door of Bard Hall and the presentation opened with Matt hauling off and whacking it five times with a stick. A truly glorious sound. One of my piano students left right after it was over. When I asked them about it later, they said that they had needed to take a walk to think it all over. I take that as a win.

Me with my diploma in Latin

My defense later that spring was uneventful other than one exchange when I realized that my use of the word interval confused some of the visual arts folks. Apparently in that field it denotes a regular distance between marks, whereas in music it is typically used to refer to the relationship between 2 pitches regardless of the regularity of the distance. I did get my diploma, so I guess my defense was a success.

That year I went home to Bellevue for Christmas and January. My folks almost didn't recognize me when I got off the plane. My hair had grown out and I was amply bearded, not having shaved since before I left 18 months before. By the time I returned to Red Hook the weather in Seattle was almost Spring-like but of course it was still midwinter at Bard. The snow was deep and the temperature was in the 20s and teens and, alas, while I was gone Ben's cat Roger (my name for him not Ben’s) had passed away suddenly. Over the next few weeks I came to the decision to abandon any further academic ambitions, and to move back to Washington. There were several reasons for this decision, which I have never regretted. Foremost among them was the realization that the necessity of making a living at music would, for me, inevitably poison my relation to it, and that academic life in particular, though it had distinct advantages, was just not one I had any rabid eagerness to pursue. Figuring that nobody was likely to be willing to provide the kind of hands-off funding to support me in following whatever crazy thing my imagination presented and finding myself worrying about money for more than 8 hours a day, I figured I could just get myself a job that would occupy only 8 hours and be free to fund my own music. Ben thought I should hang out through graduation anyway, which seemed fine.

My living quarters

And I'm glad I did, as those months were full of some wonderful experiences. It was during this time that what became known as the Barrytown Orchestra, or OMOO (Orchestral Music Of Opportunity), coalesced out of our frequent session work. I have dubs of more than twenty recorded improvisation sessions from June of 1983 through to May of 1984 and there were several weekly large group sessions at Bard Hall that I don't have dubs of. I also became friends with Penelope “Penny” Hyde, a graduating senior who ended up as part of our sessions at Bard Hall and at “The Carriage House”, off campus on the grounds of “The Oaks” in Barrytown. One large painting of hers has been hung on a wall of wherever I have lived ever since. Several of us visited Wesleyan University at some point where we improvised with some of the residents at the Holistic House, where everybody thinks alike and nobody smiles, but where they had an amazing lentil soup in a perpetual simmer on the stove. Just the thing for the miserable cold I had. My brother Glen visited at some point, prompting a train trip down to DC to visit museums and on the way back quickly spending all the cash I had in our own version of escape from New York.

Penelope Hyde at The Oaks

That Spring was when I wrote the little pieces that are now called “Seven Cues Without Film”, as studies in combining two things, “two” being broadly defined. The first version of the score was penned with fine tipped colored markers. I did eventually abandon such elaborate gimmicks after it dawned on me that gimmicks were what they were. These were the last pieces I recorded on Ben’s piano. The rest of the Spring was occupied with packing and shipping all my stuff, bidding my friends farewell, and attending graduation. Much to my delight, my diploma was written in Latin, so that I can claim to have a degree in a classical language. Penny was kind enough to drive me to the airport to see me off.

Recordings:

Five Movements - March 2, 1984, live at Bard Hall

Seven Cues Without Film - recorded in 2012

Living Among Others Part 1: Red Hook, Fall 1982 - Spring 1983

your blogger in his field

The School of Music at Bard, together with its various hangers-on, such as me, consisted of a small population scattered around a largely rural environment. Sessions of musical improvisation, being an essential part of the curriculum then at Bard, were also an integral part of us all just hanging out together. Between July of 1982 and June of 1983 I count dubs of 18 such sessions involving diverse groupings of Ben, Jill, Dan, Sarah Johnson (see below), Aaron Keyt (visiting from Princeton), and others, but that certainly wasn't all we did. Dan and I would often find ourselves in Jill's and Nancy's apartment, up several steep and narrow flights of stairs, tucked under the roof of "The Oaks", a large house located, more or less, between Red Hook to the East and Barrytown down by the Hudson River. Now my mom was not a bad cook (her pies were top-notch), but Jill and Nancy were resourceful and imaginative, and loved to cook for others. It was really with them that I first had an inkling of what cooking could be. The fare was largely vegetarian, since none of us had much money to buy meat. Some time that I year I also became acquainted with Sarah Johnson, an undergraduate with a lively mind and an engaging conversationalist who lived down by the river in the same boarding house (rumored to have once been a brothel) as Charles Stein.

Jill Borner and Bruce Huber

For amusement various subsets of us would be off to the movies, in Rhinebeck or across the bridge in Kingston, or to breakfast at one of several nearby diners, and once even as far down south as Poughkeepsie to see a concert. Jill was kind enough to invite me to her family's Thanksgiving dinner in West Hurley, which was exactly what one would expect of a mid-20th Century small-town family gathering: the menfolk watched football and the women cooked. The pies were to die for. Since I was visiting from what must have seemed to be Mars, I'm sure they thought I had an accent.

Nancy Chase, at The Oaks

At some point that Winter I decided I was finished being a tee-totaller and I relied on Jill and Nancy to decide what my first alcoholic beverage ought to be. They decided on a Guinness, and so it was off to a dark bar in Rhinebeck, tended by an acquaintance of theirs, wherein I valiantly sipped through about half before giving up and letting Nancy finish it. Bruce's local band, "The Trolls", put out a single that year, and that counts as the first 45" vinyl record I ever owned. The cover was hand decorated by Jill, and Nancy was one of the "Oobah" singers on the flip side. They were also the first rock band I ever saw at a dive bar, of which there were two such establishments close to the college. One was known colloquially as "down the road" and the other wasn't. It was also by virtue of a mixtape that a friend of Nancy's had made for her (known forever after as Nancy's Mix) that I first became acquainted with any 80s bands at all - REM, Bow Wow Wow, Flipper, The Dictators, U2, et cetera.

For Spring Break Dan invited us to stay at his family's beach-house in Ship's Bottom, New Jersey, on the shore between Asbury Park to the north and Atlantic City to the south. I promptly burned myself to a crisp, but had a wonderful time. Memorable was a flash flirtation with an adorable redhead emerging from the waves, a side-trip to a nearby wild-life preserve (Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge?) to dance with the birds and sand (but sans redhead, who seems to have vanished as suddenly as she had appeared), and collecting sculpturally broken seashells with Sarah. I'm afraid Dan's family, some of whom were also there, were somewhat puzzled and possibly alarmed to find Dan hanging with a bunch of what must have appeared to be latter-day hippies. I had grown my hair out and would occasionally garner passing cat-calls, the most common being "Hey Charlie Manson!" The whole thing mystified me.

Red Hook, Malabar - September 1982-June 1983

My neighbor across the street

Six Intermezzi

I stayed in the Red Hook barn into the middle of December. Campus was a mile or so off. I kept myself busy by providing music for dance classes (ugh), auditing classes, teaching a few piano students, observing life in the cow pasture across the road, and generally setting myself up to stay for an unspecified duration. The barn's only source of heat was a wood stove down the hall, and when the owner left us tenants over Thanksgiving weekend with no wood for the fire I'd had enough of that nonsense. Ben came to the rescue and offered to rent me the apartment in the basement of his house, which had its own bathroom and central heating. I moved in at the end of January, having spent Christmas and the bulk of that month as a guest of Alison and her family in Malabar, Florida. I lived in Ben's basement until moving back to Washington in 1984.

Your blogger, long ago in a galaxy far away

The first two Intermezzi were written that Fall, the third in Malabar, and the last three over the course of the next few months. The first is an exploration of the interval between A-natural and E-natural, in its guises as Perfect Fourths and Fifths, both filling in the gaps between them and extending the registers in play step by step, all in a one-note-at-a-time texture, save for a few instances of two-notes-at-a-time, in a slow tempo with only two durations in play - short and long, indicated by quarter and whole notes.

Alison Watkins

Intermezzo 2 is similar, but instead of starting with one interval it begins with a sequence of three pitches, G-natural, E-flat, and C-natural, in ascending order, so that I was working with the two flavors of sixths and also the larger span of an octave plus a fourth (17 semitones). It was not the first time that "17" had come up in my compositions, but is the first time it did so as a generative element, internal to the music as it goes along. Each of these were presented in small recitals at Bard, sharing the stage, if memory serves, with Dan Sedia and Jill Borner.

The third was written while visiting Alison in Florida, and is based on a similar idea but with a two-notes-at-a-time texture, in sevenths and ninths, and the fourth like that but with sixths. Intermezzo 5 is a text drawn mostly from my correspondence with Alison and a dream journal I kept at the time, edited down and re-arranged so that it flowed to my ear. To the extent it has an explicit subject matter it is the same as that of the other Intermezzi: the beginnings of an exploration of thinking about thinking about music. Intermezzo 6 is one of my few 12-tone works, with nothing particularly esoteric about my use of the procedure, other than making it sound like an extended riff on 4-3 suspensions. It mixed one-note and two-note textures freely.

Your blogger, Jill Borner, and Dan Sedia

I made performance scores for each of them, but also large-format scores with giant notes on hand-drawn staves, a few notes per page. That for Intermezzo 1 was scribed carefully with ruler and stencils, but for the rest I used a big black magic marker. I'm pretty sure these are all now in the big pine box coffin that lives under my piano. All six were presented at Bard with Intermezzo 5 consisting of Jill Borner's taped reading, overlaid with a recording of some crickets to mask the tape hiss, divided into four segments interspersed between the piano solos - inter-intermezzic, as it were.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 2

Alison in Woodstock

That summer I shared some of what I had been up to recently in various configurations of ad hoc seminars. For Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes I put together a talk in which I tried to explain some of its technical specs. Another time I shared a tape of my big Synclavier piece AKU, which Ben thought would benefit from some reverb, so Bruce Huber brought a guitar amp to a stone chapel, left over from Bards' days as a seminary, and we recorded the sound of it as it was thus blasted into reverberant space. We even managed a performance of Book of Windows, with me playing the piano part on Ben's Crumar, Bruces' electric guitar standing in for the saxophone, and Jill Borner reciting the text. Elaine Barkin was there that evening and I have reported her response in a previous post.

New York City

I found that Alison Watkins, who was there to work on her poetry with Robert Kelly, had a similar sense of humor and general level of articulateness and we hung out quite a lot. It was in her company that I visited the local sites, such as Woodstock across the Hudson River, which had a nice bookstore, and a sort of permanent outdoor craft market, presumably populated by some of the festival visitors who never went home. We also took a train down to the city for a couple of days, visiting museums, going up to the observation deck at the World Trade Center, and finding more bookstores. I discovered that my usefulness to Alison was in lugging books, but I did grab a few for myself at The Strand - a nice edition of Chaucer and a 1939 cloth-bound edition of Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" from The Modern Library. That may also have been where I snagged my copy of "Morte d'Arthur".

I can't recall that I did much composing that summer; the experience itself was so overwhelming that it was almost all I could do to soak some of it in. I did get together with Ben at his house for a couple of improvisation session/composition lessons, and joined as best I could in sessions with others. I may have started working on what became Intermezzo I, which arose as a way for me to compose myself into an understanding of what I thought Ben was on about with his concept of 'Partitioning'  in  "Meta-Variations", but I also remember making some egregiously false starts on at least one huge project, trying to outdo myself in Book of Windows-type chart-heavy structures.

My home, Fall 1982 (not New York City)

By the end of the summer I decided that I wanted to hang around Bard between the summer sessions. I was, at the time, in a hurry to get my degree so that I could continue my journey toward doctoral fame and fortune. Three years was just too long to spend on a Masters. I worked out a plan with the school wherein I would replace one summer with a residency over the rest of the academic year. Finding housing was a bit of an issue but I did finally secure a room on the ground floor of a barn in nearby Red Hook that had been converted to a living space and workshop for the owner's furniture refinishing business; and Ben rented one of his older cars to me so I had a way to get around. So I gave back my return ticket and prepared to winter over.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 1

My acceptance letter

Jet lag due to the three-hour time difference between the West and East coasts was never an issue for me. I have always been a morning person, waking at about 6 and fading around 9 or 10. The program's schedule did not presume wakefulness until after 9 AM and regularly extended toward midnight and beyond, so I simply didn't adjust and meshed with prevailing trends.

The studio space I was provided consisted of a key and use of Brook House, a sizable cottage out in the woods with a piano it it where I could practice in the mornings. The offices of Perspectives of New Music were in the basement. Official activity commenced with softball in the late morning. It was never a game as such but consisted of shagging fly balls for each other. I wrote home soon after arriving to ask for my mitt. Later I would assert, with some underlying truth, that I had received my master's degree in hitting and catching. 

The afternoons and evenings were taken up by seminars, often featuring a visit from a local-ish composer or other artist. It was in this context that I met, among others and over the course of two summers, Milton Babbitt, Elaine Barkin, Arthur Berger, Warren Burt, Morton Feldman, and John Zorn. I'm sure J. K. Randall also visited that first summer, but I must have been in an odd head-space at the time and kept my distance. 

Presentations by the various MFAers were frequent events. Everyone gathered together to discuss what was being shared. It was interesting to me that there was apparently some friction as to the general vibe and purpose of these events, in the sense that there was some notion afloat that critiquing (in the sense of judging worth and professional merit) was expected and valuable. This attitude, which occasionally got rather acidic, was quite familiar to me from the weekly UW Composer's lab, but the usefulness of this approach to the community was in question, especially from Ben. This may have been my first exposure to a different way of looking at what we as community members were to each other - not competitors but collaborators. It rang a bell in my head.

Kingston Bridge

Late evenings often ended with a bunch of us getting something to eat at one of the several pizza places or diners in nearby Red Hook, Rhinebeck, or across the river in Kingston. This would often include some of my fellow music students - Jill Borner, Bruce Huber, Dan Sedia, Ben presiding. We were joined regularly by Charles Stein, whose exact relationship to the program was never clear to me, but who was nevertheless always ferociously interesting. Some of the students from the other disciplines would also join us, notably the poet David Abel, and occasionally one of Ben's guests - thus my claim to have had pizza with Milton Babbitt. Many a Greek Salad (it was cheap) and late-night omelette (breakfast any time) was devoured amid lively and wide-ranging conversation.

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York June 1982

Late in June of 1982 I caught an overnight flight to JFK, and at six the next morning found myself outside the terminal waiting for a shuttle to travel 100 miles up the Hudson River to Rhinebeck. The sky had no discernible color and it felt like it was 90° out with 90% humidity. I wondered how anyone managed to eat in such an oppressive climate. Once arrived in Rhinebeck I had been instructed to find a phonebooth, from which I was to call a cab to take me to Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson. This accomplished I was duly installed in a dormitory room in one of several wooden structures perched on pilings on the sides of a ravine. It had a lovely shaded view into the forest's mid-canopy, and was rumored to have originated as some former undergraduate's senior project in architecture.

Installed blogger - June 1982

That afternoon a get-together had been arranged at the home of Leon Botstein, the College President. It was there that I finally met Benjamin Boretz in person. He asked me if I had heard the Clash. I had not (though I had heard of them). I probably met some of my fellow music students as well, many of whom became good friends and collaborators - Jill Borner, Bruce Huber, and Dan Sedia among them. I was also introduced there to the poet and classicist Charles Stein, who extended his hand in greeting with a hearty string of glossolalic gibberish. Strangely, it made me feel, for the first time, out there on the far side of the continent, quite at home.

That evening I was hanging out in the open stairwell of the dorm building and met another fellow student, the poet Alison Watkins, who proceeded to haul me along with another returning student to a late snack at a long since forgotten establishment in Rhinebeck. They were amused by the fact that I was apparently a dead-ringer for a composition student from the summer before, right down to my leather satchel. They must have thought I was a replacement acquired by the school at central casting. 

The house over the ravine

That night there was a massive Catskills thunderstorm, such as has resounded down through literature by way of Washington Irving. The next morning I was enjoying the cooler air on the balcony outside the dormitory kitchen chatting with another music student who had just arrived form Korea. He asked me, somewhat hesitatingly, if I thought that "this house" was safe. I immediately answered in the negative and we thus found ourselves culturally simpatico. Welcome to New York.

After and Before 1981-1982

Book of Windows

Seven Strays

After graduation from the UW in the Spring of 1981, and before my pilgrimage to the East coast in June 1982, I worked part-time selling men's jeans at a department store at Northgate Mall, a job I got thanks to church connections. At the end of Summer I got a full-time job in the mail room at the home office of a cookware sales company in Bellevue.

your blogger in 1981 at home with a beanbag frog

I wrote several short solo piano pieces, none of them ever intended to be included in a set of anything, just quick sketches made when I happened to have a figurational idea I felt like working out. I bundled these together many years later as Seven Strays. I've performed a few of them on occasion, and even transcribed one of them for bell-choir the year I was directing one at our church in the late 80s. Being quasi-tonal for the most part, they can be made to seem intelligible and even attractive to those that might not go for the crazier stuff.

But most of my individual creative time was spent on a massive score-making project called Book of Windows. It involves a lengthy list of words derived from various sources, all arranged carefully using a system focusing on syllable count, line count, and a global multiplex acrostic in which the first letters of several equal subdivisions of line groups form sequences of words that are like unto lines within the greater text. In the final such subdivision, which divides the whole into three parts, the first letter of each respective segment spells the word ART. Very clever.

your blogger spinning vinyl and inking Book of Windows

In the final score the text unfolds on the left of each set of facing pages, and on the right-facing pages two sequences of notes spool out. The most extensive of these is written for piano and consists of carefully charted quantities of notes, lengths of passages as measured in quarter notes, vertical density, and number of times each segment is to be repeated. The other sequence of notes is a line of single pitches, intended for saxophone. I developed intricate charts to determine all sorts of aspects of how it would fit together. I added inscriptions (Gertrude Stein and Wilhelm Müller) and a preface to get it going, and finished it up with a chorale for the instruments.

I didn't want to specify how a performance of it might be accomplished, but it was given a table-read just before I left for Bard, with me on piano, Aaron reading the text, and my brother Paul playing clarinet. I think Neal was turning pages and helping to keep track of the whole mess. In 2005 I realized a midi-enabled version that clocks in at about 32 minutes. It was performed in public, for the one and only time, in a common space outside the cafeteria at Bard that Summer, with me playing Crumar, the inimitable Jill Borner reciting, and Bruce Huber transforming the sax part on electric guitar. As luck would have it another member of what has become my virtual colloquium of senior colleagues, Elaine Barkin, was visiting for a few days and suffered through the whole two-plus-hour ordeal. At the end, or so I was told, she pointed to my date-and-place mark in the score "Bellevue, 1982" and silently inquired of Ben whether I was really from the mental hospital. Ben, of course, just nodded in affirmation. "Bellevue, yes".

your blogger (in glasses), Neal Meyer (in t-shirt),
and Aaron Keyt (in jeans)

In the end it constitutes my one and only extensive experimentation with that oh-so-chic American stylistic juggernaut, Minimalism. When I was done I figured that I could thenceforward ignore the whole movement, having written something far more repetitive and ugly than anyone else would ever care to. Considering it now I can't think it's Minimalist in any essential way and isn't particularly brilliant as commentary either. Its worth, within my personal creative history, is as a compositional exercise in working with algorithmically derived structures.

Seven Strays - recorded February 10 and 11, 2010

Keith Eisenbrey · Seven Strays (100210 & 11) 1983

Book of Windows - digital version realized March 20, 2005

Keith Eisenbrey · Book of Windows 050320