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drawing by Karen Eisenbrey |
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Anarchy |
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Amnehitabel |
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your blogger, as Skeeter for Halloween |
Considerations of my music through the years with links to scores and sounds
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drawing by Karen Eisenbrey |
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Anarchy |
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Amnehitabel |
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your blogger, as Skeeter for Halloween |
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Karen in Avon, MT |
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your blogger in Avon, MT |
I also made another stab at writing choral music, an Agnus Dei for choir and organ. It was performed, quite bravely, by the Chancel Choir of our then church, Bellevue First United Methodist, with Huntley Beyer conducting. There are a couple of versions of it, but in the end the experience told me that I had not found a voice for myself to compose for such ensembles.
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Neal and Anna at Yellowstone |
At some point around that time I was directing the bell choir at Bellevue First, arranging some of my more melodic pieces for them and even trying something original which is best forgotten. One dark and stormy October night our car stalled out midway across the 520 floating bridge (the alternator had failed so we also had no lights) We were rescued by the driver of a Metro bus on its way back to base, which pulled up behind us and let us on and called the State Patrol. The trooper pushed our car off the bridge (onto dry land, not into the drink), where we waited for an hour or two for a tow. That experience decided us that commuting across the lake at night was not for us, so I resigned the position and we started to think seriously about finding a new church home closer to where we lived. And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on, at first mostly by Telepath, Assembly Rechoired, and Sectional, but also in regular session once Aaron had returned to town for a clerkship at the end of his school term.
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Karen and your blogger at Yellowstone |
Banned Playout:
Numbered: (118, and 128-165): 30:46:44
Telepaths: (10 sessions):
07:54:16
Sectionals: (3 sessions): 02:22:33
Assembly Rechoireds
(41-42): 01:35:05
Peripherals: (11 sessions): 08:21:24
Total 1988: 51:00:02
Grand Total: 287:37:57
scores:
Sonata in 2 Movements
Serenade
recordings:
Sonata in 2 Movements
Serenade
Retrato de Euchababilla en la noche
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Karen at the Barrytown Post Office |
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your blogger with Karen and Jill |
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at Brook House |
Banned Playout:
Numbered: (105, 107, 109-117, 119-127*): 16:35:35
Telepaths: (13
sessions): 10:18:46
Sectionals: (5 sessions): 03:55:49
Assembly
Rechoireds (12-40): 22:52:43
Peripherals: (6 sessions): 04:42:13
Total 1987: 58:25:06
Grand Total: 236:37:55
*105 and 107 were from telepaths that I didn't mix together until 1987, and 118 was from a telepath that wasn't mixed until 1988.
scores:
recordings:
Seeds
Sonatina
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Karen near Bickleton, WA |
On January 9, Banned Rehearsal put on our third public concert, again at Brechemin, consisting of nearly the same trio of activities we had done for our second show: Hunting and Gathering, Trance Butchered Knight, and The Singing (this time with Ukuleles), adding to that a segment of Sudden Songs. I also participated in three performances at the University of Washington that Spring: A joint recital with Neal of music by Ben Boretz and J. K. Randall*, and attempts at John Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4** and György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique***.
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your blogger emerging from the South Pacific |
In March I began to keep a journal of my listening activities, which journal, as of this writing, fills 20 notebooks of various formats, and eventually spread to include, as its public face, my blog "Now Music In New Albion".
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seeing what they had done to our getaway car |
*program
Boretz: Liebeslied (me)
Randall: Greek Nickel #1 (Neal)
Boretz: (...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious Sonata...) (me)
Randall: Greek Nickel #2 (Neal)
Randall: from my diary (a Meditation on Rossignol) (Neal)
Randall: "...such words as it were vain to close..." (Neal)
Boretz: ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...")
**Neal put this piece together, and he and I were in charge of the "first radio", which had the most to do of the twelve. We were using boom boxes. Unfortunately the batteries had fallen out of the one we were using while backstage, so when the conductor cued us all we could do was shrug.
***from my blog post of July 23, 2011:
Poème Symphonique - Ligeti - University of Washington Contemporary Group
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best dressed Banned Rehearsal ever |
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our new housemates |
Banned Playout:
Numbered: (62-104, 106, and 108): 38:28:32
Unnumbered: (8 sessions): 5:46:36
Telepaths: (8 sessions): 6:18:16
Sectionals: (6 sessions): 4:44:00
Assembly Rechoireds (sessions with just Karen, me, and guests): (11 sessions): 8:06:29
Peripherals: (5 sessions): 1:34:31
Total 1986: 64:58:24
Grand Total: 178:12:49
And so I did, having rented a little "mother-in-law" house in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, The Greenwood Half House on NE 89th St, most of a block west of Aurora Ave, set behind a larger house occupied, at the time, by two nurses. It had one bedroom, a living room, a bathroom (tub only no shower), and a small kitchen. It was heated by a gas furnace that stood in the middle of the living room. For awhile the only keyboard instrument I had in the house was the Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite.
So I wrote a piece for it. Back then I was calling it "Trance Butchered Knight" since I thought it sounded like a take-off of Transfigured Night, or at least swam in the same ocean. Having later made attempts to suppress my snarkiness I renamed it "Lacrymosa", largely because it is somewhat weepy, befitting its Expressionist background, and the title could be sung to its dominating figurations. It worked well on the Sprite, milking its crude swell-pedal effect to good effect. The pitchwork isn't too shabby and it works well on piano as well.
Aaron's Sudden Song "Bickelton Burger" got me thinking along similar lines: sit down with an instrument and an idea for text and a tape recorder, and let 'er rip. During that summer I recorded a bunch of them and called the group "Summer Songs". The sudden song project persisted in Banned Rehearsal, and may have encouraged Neal in hopes that we would soon go electric and become a rock band. For my part, I have never had any desire to walk that path.
Our second produced show "A Short and Simple Concert" (Banned Rehearsal 43) was held in Brechemin on July 13, 1985. We began with an activity Neal had developed called "Hunting and Gathering" that involved multiple play-back decks and multiple recording devices. Each of us, on a schedule, would start recording while we circled the performance space. We would then put the cassette tape in a playback machine, rewind to start and punch Play. After a short while we had quite a din going. At some point I started playing Trance Butchered Knight on the Funmaker, and when that was done, and as the playback tapes winked out one by one, we started to sing long tones, eventually fading to a finish.
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Karen at the Greenwood Half House |
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Anna and Neal at the Half House |
When I left Bard I had brought back a list of my friends' addresses, and as a discipline I would write one letter every day. If someone wrote back I moved their name to the top of the list. Karen was still living in Tacoma after she graduated from University of Puget Sound, and she would often be up visiting with Neal and Anna. Once we had a Banned Rehearsal Session while she was visiting and she noticed my list. Being rather forward, she added her name. My first letter to her, penned and spoken out loud during a Banned Sectional (a session with just two of the original members) started with the words "This is a test. This is not a test." It was printed several years later in News of Music as "Keith's First Epistle to The Tacoman". She kept writing back, and soon became my most loyal correspondent. It was probably a foregone conclusion, but Neal and Anna (well, mostly Anna) did their best to set us up now and then, leaving us to ourselves while they went to get ice cream, and once inviting us along with them to hear Jonathan Richman. On December 22, after weeks of fog, and during a day that involved two trips to to pick up Aaron at SeaTac (one attempt of which was successful and some of which was recorded to become Banned Rehearsal 59) two trips to Karen's apartment in Tacoma, a dinner with Aaron's family, an Advent service at Neal & Anna's apartment on Brooklyn Avenue, and some mistletoe, we divulged to each other our mutual smittenhood and have been a couple ever since.
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Banned Rehearsal out on the sidewalk |
Numbered: (20-61): 35:40:29
Unnumbered: 00:17:19
Telepaths: (3-5):
06:55:10
Sectionals: 20:04:29
Building the Banned Day:
24:35:49
Total 1985: 87:33:16
Grand Total 1984-1985: 113:13:25
Links:
Lacrymosa
https://imslp.org/wiki/Lacrymosa_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)
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Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer, early 1985 |
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Aaron Keyt, Anna, Neal, and your blogger, early 1985 |
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Banned Rehearsal, early 1985 |
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Banned Rehearsal, early 1985 |
1984 Banned Playout:
Numbered (1-4, 6-19): 16:30:05
Unnumbered: 01:55:41
Telepaths:
03:09:58
Sectionals: 00:47:33
Images from a Day: 00:21:40
1984
Thology: 03:55:12
Total: 26:40:09
Links:
Pastorale:
Create Desolation and Call It Peace:
https://imslp.org/wiki/Create_Desolation_and_Call_It_Peace_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)
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your blogger working hard |
I figured that a relatively mindless office job would leave me free to do music the rest of the time. I went to an agency in downtown Bellevue, which sent me to interview as a typist at Ticor Title Insurance near the waterfront in Seattle. The supervisor mentioned that they were also looking for someone to fill a position as an "abstractor", which involved sorting through court filings for information relevant to the title industry and typing up abstracts in a species of typographical shorthand - "NWC" was "Northwest Corner", "NH SEQ NEQ" was 'North Half of the Southeast Quarter of the Northeast Quarter", etc. Short story made shorter, the super felt that if I could read music I could read legalese and I got the abstractor job. I worked for Ticor until the company was purchased by Chicago Title Insurance in 1991, and for Chicago until my retirement in 2021. I also picked up a coffee habit, largely by accident.
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gluing down the sound board on the clavichord |
I thought I might never be able to afford a place suitable for a piano so I decided to buy a build-your-own clavichord kit. I hadn't been at work long so my dad co-signed on a loan for $1600 and I was delivered of a box of boards, a full-sized schematic drawing, a thin book of instructions, and a sinking feeling that I had just wasted a wad of cash I didn't have yet. But thanks to my dad and some help from my brothers we got it finished a year later.
The Sprite |
It was also during those first few months that we devised a way of having our (by then) weekly sessions even when we weren't all in town. We would each make a tape wherever we were (called Banned Telepaths) and would then mix them together later (using multiple cassette decks, two-in-one-out mixer cables, and a cheap Realistik mixing device. Truly low budget and low fi, but the method has served us well over the years through geographic displacements and the recent pandemic. This equipment also enabled us to create what we called the Stack-O-Decks so that we could play several sound sources at once into our session space (usually my bedroom) - another commonplace of our early sound. During one such telepath session Aaron picked up the guitar and came up with the first Sudden Song: Bickleton Burger.
It's rhythms, chords, and slide button |
it's a Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have 'em away
yes it's a Bickleton Burger
have 'em away
no relish
no special sauce
no sesame seeds
no bacon
no cheese
just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have it away
have it away
just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
have it away
drawing by Karen Eisenbrey These years found me working on the idea of telling a story in music, the upshot of which was A Cat's ...