Seeds, Sonatina - 1987

Karen at the Barrytown Post Office

Seeds is a set of six tiny scores that arose out of my frequent, if no longer quite daily, epistolary discipline, which continued for a while after Karen and I were married. Each is dedicated to a specific person, whose name is in the title. Being seeds, I wasn't thinking of them as finished pieces as such, but rather as raw ideas to be put to whatever purpose the dedicatee might think of. For instance, the one I labelled "for Keith" became the opening figure of my Sonata in Two Movements of 1988. Years later, as I was transcribing my old scores into engraving software, I took them up as something to perform. I played them at an early Seattle Composers' Salon, when it was being held at SoundBridge on the lower floor of Benaroya Hall, and, during the same epoch, at University Temple United Methodist Church, (March 17, 2007).

your blogger with Karen and Jill

Sonatina, or Lenztanzen as I was styling it at the time, was written principally for clavichord, and uses one of the few "extended techniques" I have found myself desirous of perpetrating. At one point the music descends to a low D-natural , which is held with one hand and then thumped with the other, transmitting that thump through the key and tangent directly to the strings, producing a satisfying pitched impulse to the held note. It consists of two or three episodes or movements, depending on how one parses it, the first being of a stern and dramatic character in dialogue with obsessive sequences of four-note figures. The stern bit lent itself to transformation under multiplication by 5 ("M5" or "4ths Transform"), as under that transformation the intervals of the material twist around each other in interesting ways, effecting a clearly audible but homogenous shift in the tonal feel. A decade and more later I was to discover how useful these "M transforms" could be under arithmetic based on cycles of 17 digits (mod 17) rather than 12 (mod 12). The next part is more oratorical, and the musics of the various episodes are then set in dialog to finish it up. I'm still quite fond of it, and it also works well on a nicely resonant piano, though my extended technique can't be duplicated, as there is no direct contact between key and string after it first struck, as there is on clavichord.

at Brook House

Banned Rehearsal and its related activities continued throughout the year. When Aaron was in town between terms we would get together for sessions, otherwise relying on Telepaths to hold us together. Karen and I would also make tapes pretty regularly, under the rubric "Assembly Rechoired", often with guests who were curious about what we meant by free improvisation. For our anniversary in October we travelled back to Bard College and environs so that I could introduce Karen to my friends there. She had already met Ben when he came out West on the occasion of Neal's and my "Jim and Ben" show the previous Spring. Dan, Penny, Jill, and Chuck were still around, and several others. We spent the week tooling around the countryside and making tapes with whoever felt like hanging with us. It was during that visit that we became acquainted with Tildy Bayar, a stalwart of the News of Music and Open Space communities. For our first anniversary dinner we went to 4 Brothers pizza, in Rhinebeck, if memory serves.

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: 

Seeds

Sonatina

recordings:

Seeds

Sonatina

Cantus, Retrato de Euchababilla, Wedding Suite, House Prayers - 1986

Karen near Bickleton, WA

1986 was a busy year. Karen and I became officially engaged on April 5, on the strength of a loss leader diamond ring from a mall jeweler. She moved up to Seattle, staying first with Neal and Anna, then renting an apartment in the basement of a friend's house about a mile East of my half-house. She got a job at an insurance company downtown. Neal and Anna got married in May, just before Anna was to depart for San Diego for her graduate work. Neal followed later in June after he'd finished up the quarter at the UW. Karen and I got married on October 11, at 6th Avenue Baptist Church in Tacoma, honeymooning at my family's cabin on Whidbey Island. The nurses who had been living in the big house in my front yard conveniently moved out that September and Karen and I moved in. A couple of weeks after we got hitched we acquired our first brace of kittens - Anarchy and Amnehitabel.

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***. 

your blogger
emerging from the South Pacific

What with all the excitements I wasn't composing much, but I did manage another recorder quintet, Cantus, for the Fehrwood Ensemble (performed at a local recorder society concert on May 1); a piece for solo oboe, Retrato de Euchababilla; a set of pieces for our wedding; and two house prayers on Karen's texts (my wedding present to her). These two short unison songs, one for meals and one for bedtime, quickly gained status as my most frequently performed pieces. Retrato was written at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, where my Mom, Dad, older brother, and I traveled in early May to see Halley's Comet (comet badge achieved!). While there we lawn bowled, saw several different versions of rugby and football, did some sight-seeing (the ocean, a boat trip on the Macquarie River, drives in the countryside, and one quick touring day in Sydney before heading back home). We also managed to snag tickets to see Crocodile Dundee, which was a Star Wars level hit in Australia at the time. Having now seen it in theaters both in Australia and in the states, I can attest that it is two entirely different films, one as seen by Australians (our guy gets the blond American babe), and one as seen by us Yanks (man from mars visits the Big Apple).

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".

seeing what they had done to our getaway car

And Banned Rehearsal forged valiantly ahead. In the weeks before Neal followed Anna to San Diego we pushed ourselves to complete our 100th session, accomplished in Bickleton on July 14. The tape of our wedding became Banned Rehearsal #104 (best dressed session ever) and of course includes the music I had written for the ceremony (a Prelude, a Procession, and a Postlude; and two songs). The Postlude was completed in a bit of a hurry, and I fully admit to padding it out with completely unnecessary repeats, thinking that people would be in the process of leaving the sanctuary and not be listening very carefully. My newly invested mother-in-law, apparently decided that the guests should listen to the whole thing, stolidy stuck to her seat, and since by tradition the parents of the bride are the first to leave, the multitudes were blessed with lots of notes I had not thought that anybody would be listening to. One of many little jokes that Marilyn played on me. 

*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

best dressed Banned Rehearsal ever

This performance was spearheaded by Neal Meyer back in the mid-eighties. I'm guessing Fall of '84 or sometime in 1985 {NB 1986}. We found ourselves unable to locate the requisite 100 metronomes, or to convince 100 music students to loan them to us, but we were able to locate 10. So Neal and I spent at least one long day making 9 tapes of 10 metronomes each for playback on boomboxes that we could place around the audience. I think this was in one of the lecture spaces at Kane Hall. Neal wanted each metronome to be set at a different tempo, and he wanted the piece to end naturally, with all the metronomes simply winding down on their own. The challenge of course is that each wind-up metronome is unique as to how many winds it takes to generate 10 minutes of ticking at a specified tempo. But Neal had carefully worked it all out and had all 10 metronomes set up backstage ready to go when another performer picked one of the metronomes up and, winding it helpfully a few times, asked "So Neal, have you figured out how many winds each one of these needs?" There was not time to let that metronome run itself out to be wound back up before the show, so on we went with one wild card. It turned out to be one that was set at a pretty slow tempo (and Neal was loath to reset it) so 10 or 12 minutes after the ticking began everything started to thin out, finally leaving the one metronome slowly ticking all by itself. This went on for 10 minutes or more, generating a certain amount of audience anxiety and a few walkouts, before someone walked on stage and put the last metronome out of its tickery.

our new housemates

It is still one of my favorite UWCG fiasco stories. Unfortunately the recordist didn't include the long single ticker coda, but the sound is oceanic and lovely, each boombox source layering itself softly like eternally breaking waves.

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

Lacrymosa, Summer Songs - 1985

On January 18, 1985, Banned Rehearsal produced a concert at Brechemin Auditorium, at the University of Washington. The first half consisted of compositions: Aaron's "Pastorale for Helena" and "Pastorale for Keith", performed by me; Neal's "1/3 Poem x N" and "Pastorale: The Color of Water", performed by Neal; and my "Pastorale", performed by The Fehrwood Ensemble. The second half was an extended improvisation affectionately labeled "The Fishcritic" (Banned Rehearsal 23). Stu Dempster, bless his heart, had made attendance at our show a requirement for one of his general music classes, so we actually had folks in attendance outside of family, the performers, and a few friends with nothing better to do. We even got copies of their written responses. A highlight that doesn't show up in the auditory record was the use of an overhead projector to display the shadow of a glass fish-shaped plate across much of the stage. Some of us went out for pizza afterward in a group that included Neal's sister Karen. Legend has it that this was the occasion at which she was set straight as to which of us was Keith and which was Aaron. The tell was that it was the Keith fellow who was moving to a new place the next day.

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.

Karen at the Greenwood Half House

Another highlight of the first full Banned Year was our visit to The Loft, a residential facility for middle-school boys who had run afoul of one thing or another. We distributed toy noisemakers in a gym, pushed record and reveled in the ensuing mayhem. It was during this year that Neal put together a performance of John Cage's Music for Piano in the Studio Theater at Meany Hall, with four pianos, four pianists (Lise Mann, Neal, Aaron, and me), four headlamps, a chance-operationally generated lighting scheme (hence the headlamps), and a chance-operationally generated schedule of which piano each of us would be playing at any one time. I might add that this schedule quite often had more than one of us playing scores on the same piano at the same time. It ended up being quite a bit of fun.

Anna and Neal at the Half House

In the Fall, Aaron decamped for Law School, leaving Neal, Anna, and I to carry on. I finished building the clavichord that September, recording an improvisation on it before I had even brought it up to the correct octave. Fun with overdubbing continued apace, the major project being to stack the first 32 sides of Banned Rehearsal together in successive pairs: 16 Banned Couples (two sides each); 8 Banned Mixers (4 sides each); 4 Banned Seminars (8 sides each); Two Banned Thologies (16 sides each); and the Banned Day (all 32 sides). Many decades later I re-mixed this project digitally, as the original process had no good way to adjust balances, and the loss of fidelity attendant on successive overdubs made for awfully murky listening.

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.

Banned Rehearsal out on the sidewalk

1985 Banned Playout:

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)  

Pastorale, Create Desolation and Call It Peace - Fall 1984

Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer, early 1985

I wrote Pastorale for The Fehrwood Ensemble, an amateur recorder group my Mom was part of. I was intrigued by the ultra-precise intonation of the recorder's straight tone, but felt it was wasted on simply being in tune. In order to force the issue I filled the piece with long held tones and asked the players to tail off the ends so that the pitch would sag. Being amateurs, they were remarkably game for such shenanigans. Structurally the piece consists of the gradual emergence of a melody out of a bed of long foghorn-like tones. It was performed at Brechemin Auditorium at the UW in January of 1985.

Aaron Keyt, Anna, Neal, and your blogger, early 1985

The title of my solo piano piece Create Desolation and Call It Peace is a quote of graffiti I had seen near the UW campus, which was, as I understood, a translation from Tacitus - a complaint against Roman occupation. I think of it as a long, slow, funeral oration. I was also (and remain) interested in structural repetition, such as permeated European concert music well into the 19th Century, especially the effect at the hinges, where what was heard the first time through as an old thing repeated is upon continuation heard as a new development entirely. Both Pastorale and Create Desolation open with directly repeated passages.

Banned Rehearsal, early 1985

Banned Rehearsal continued apace. By the end of the year we had 19 numbered sessions, one of which (#5) fails to exist {we were up at Whidbey Island in July and were hoping to record on a boombox while we trudged to our knees out in the Holmes Harbor mudflats, but the batteries had died}, and two of which are dubbed together from Telepaths; three named but unnumbered tapes (our procedure was still in flux); added one new member (Anna K, who appeared first as a guest on Telepath #2 Bickleton, and then as a member on Banned Rehearsal 18 on December 16) and included six additional guests. We performed with dancer Julie Ludwig at The Studio Theater in Meany Hall, at the UW, by playing back pre-recorded sounds on boom-boxes as part of her dance "Images From A Day". On top of all that we were preparing for our first self-produced live event that next January, part of which involved us doing whatever it was we had found ourselves doing, and part of which involved performances of various of our recent compositions.

Banned Rehearsal, early 1985

As side projects and one-offs I also recorded an hour and a half of a mid October high-school football game. My Dad was an administrator at Sealth High School at the time, so I was able to sneak in to Memorial Stadium with him. I had also started monkeying around with overdubbing on the cheap, using multiple cassette tape decks, one of which I had had altered so that there was a button on the back to turn off the "erase" head. Oddly, it's that deck (a mid 1970s Sanyo) that still works - perhaps the oldest chunk of functional electronic hardware in the house. One particularly successful project was to overdub Banned Telepath #2 Bellevue on top of itself 2, 4, 8, and 16 times, resulting in a cruddy flange of detuned recorder tones and clothes-hanger gongs. Less aurally successful was the Banned's idea to dub all the numbered sides of Banned Rehearsal together into one grand Banned Thology. The first attempt resulted in four "Mixers" each being four sides piled together, and one "Thology" being the four mixers in a single heap. Four hours of murk.

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:

Keith Eisenbrey · Pastorale 850118

Create Desolation and Call It Peace:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Create_Desolation_and_Call_It_Peace_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)

Return to Puget Sound - Summer 1984

your blogger working hard

Several things happened quickly upon my return to the Puget Sound area at the start of June 1984. I moved back into my parent's home and took a week off before seeking employment. One afternoon that week my brother Glen and I took his wooden rowing boat to the Arboretum and paddled around Foster Island. Coming around a bend we came upon a less than fully clad sunbather, who smiled charmingly as we tipped our hats and paddled on. Welcome home!

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.

gluing down the sound board on the clavichord

On the musical front, I had met up again with Neal and Aaron and we decided it might be fun to try improvising on instruments we didn't know how to play for a few sessions. Unable to resist the pun once it arose we called ourselves Banned Rehearsal before we had even made our first tape, which occurred on June 24, the weekend after I started work.

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

As the Banned Rehearsal project persisted odd little instruments began to amass. I commandeered my mom's guitar and autoharp, which had both been languishing unused for decades. On a whim I spent $200 on an old Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite - a little electric organ with chord buttons, drum rhythms that could all be played at once (great function!) and another button that dropped the pitch down almost, but not quite, a half step. This first appeared (if I am not mistaken) on Banned Rehearsal 10 of September 23, 1984, and quickly became a mainstay of our sound for years to come.

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

no pickles
no mustard
no ketchup
no buns
no meat 

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

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.