The Decade of Chaos Part 1: 1991-1994

Karen and me dressed as earth children for Halloween

At the end of March, 1991, Karen and I welcomed our first baby into the family, and composition activity slowed down considerably. We had very cleverly announced the impending event to our mothers (and my dad) while we were visiting with my folks toward the end of the previous Summer, by mentioning that we had tickets to an opera in April and that we would be needing a babysitter that evening. General astonishment and celebration ensued. We let the news filter out to our choir while, during a rehearsal of some crowd noise, Karen said "I will be over my pregnancy in [some number of] months" rather than "salt light" or whatever else was written in the score.

As our activities with the choir, and with choral music in general, were becoming a large part of our lives, I tried once again to see if I could write effective music for choir. fourpartsongs (1992) is a setting of a hymn by Charles Wesley that appeared, sans tune, in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal. I set each of the four stanzas separately (four part-songs) for SATB (four-part songs). As compositions go they are solid and, I think, singable, but difficult. They are diatonic, a few degrees skewed off of tonal practice, and don't shy away from what I regard as tasteful tone-painting. Later, I recast one of them - O Love, how cheering is thy ray - as a solo for Karen to sing, and even later re-set the entire text, with new music, as a hymn.

wave for the camera

1993 saw the first of what became many recitals that I gave at our church. The main impetus was to present A Cat's Life, with narration provided by Ellen Dessler, a drama student at the University of Washington. The program also included Elaine Barkin's Brandeis, and Benjamin Boretz's Partita, Liebeslied, and ("...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious Sonata..."). 

That year I also composed a big concert piece, originally for organ: "...finish then thy new creation...". The title is from another Charles Wesley text. Looking back at it now I was struggling with how to feel my way through a large-scale piece without any way to think clearly about where I was going and what I was carrying along. It is not a bad practice as such, but the result in this case is rather woolly. A few years later I arranged it for string orchestra, and it was performed in that form by a community orchestra on Vashon Island, under the baton of my former composition teacher Dell Wade.

More successful was Nocturnes or Discourses, a procedurally structured improvisation project realized with the kind assistance of sound engineer Tom Stiles. Tom had access to the big piano in Brechemin Auditorium at the UW, so, late one evening we set it up with a microphone. Tom was recording digitally, and this was my first experience working with that innovation. First I sat silently for a span of time (5 minutes? 9 minutes? - something that divided 45 evenly so that the finished thing would fit on a 45' cassette side). Then Tom would play that recording back to me through headphones while I improvised to it, as though I were reading it as a score. Then we took that recording and repeated the process  until we had enough sessions to overlay the recordings so that each improvisation would be paired with its "score". In 2006/2007 I was able, thanks to the acquisition of a multi-track digital recording device to redo this on my own, using two separate pianos - or perhaps on each piano separately - and then combining them. 

your blogger and his boss

Doomsome Otherings (a non-Latinate translation of "Canonic Variations") is a set of five variations (inclusive of the 'theme') for viola and piano prompted by a possible mis-construal of a movement from one of Prokofiev's piano concerti. What I thought I had heard in that movement was the intrusion of one variation's figurations into another variation's flow. I thought it would make an interesting form if I were to do that systematically. I wrote a 'theme' of 50 measures that uses a homogenous figuration scheme for the first 30 bars, then switches to the figuration scheme of the variation two slots later (music like variation two into the 'theme', of three into one,  four into two, 'theme' into three, and of one into four) for the next ten bars, switching back to the music like that of the first 30 bars for the last 10. I also had a scheme for determining the pitch material of each bar that ran, as I recall, somewhat independently of the figuration scheme. It involved several layers of overlapping sequences of pentachords, but details of that determination have faded from memory. I still like the piece, though the piano part is beyond me and it seems to have a vanishing effect on violists, so I stopped shopping it around lest I lose any more violist friends.

your blogger failing to home improve

During this time Ben had asked me whether, based on my flimsy knowledge of formal logic notation, I would help proof-read and prepare computer engraved files of the formal definitions in "Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought", which he was preparing for publication by OpenSpace. While re-reading it I started to wonder what tonal music, as generated analogously to the "Outline of a Tonal-Syntactic System" contained in Part V of Meta-Variations, would sound like if it were 'stretched' so that all the generating intervals were made larger. I quickly settled on a 17-tone "octave" (or "modular interval") as being an interesting choice for the modular partitioning (an octave plus a perfect fourth rather than a perfect octave) because that would make the second partitioning interval (analogous to the 7 semitone "Fifth") an interval of 9 semitones (a major 6th), and the third partitioning (analogous to the 3 and 4 semitone intervals of minor and major thirds) intervals of 4 and 5 semitones respectively. I was also amused that my root position "major" triad would be "C F A", punning on a tonal root position "F A C", and that my "minor" triad would be "C E A", punning on the tonal minor triad of "A C E". We love puns so there it was. My 1994 setting of Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths...") was my first go at it and I was intrigued by the results, using just the most basic of tonal functions: "tonic", "dominant", and "subdominant" harmonies, and possibly a secondary dominant or two. The expanded octave and variability of sounding pitches across the registers opened up a world for me in which I could compose unique harmonic paths using fairly simple pitch functions. I have been following up on ramifications of this speculation ever since and consequently my subsequent oeuvres is peppered liberally with "mod-17" pieces of one kind or another.

Banned Rehearsal continued doing regular sessions, mostly just Karen, Aaron and me, later joined by our toddler, but toward the end of 1994 Neal and Anna were back in town with their little one so things began to get busy indeed. We had been holding our sessions in the spare bedroom, but soon our toddler would need that room. There happened to be a two-car garage on the lot, but the configuration made it nigh impossible to get a second car into it, so with the assistance of my dad we framed half of it in for a studio. The Tintinabulary has been collecting instruments ever since.

Banned Playout (1991):
Numbered: (243-279) 29:03:17
Total 1991:29:03:17

Banned Playout (1992)
Numbered: (280-315) 28:14:01
Total 1992: 28:14:01

Banned Playout (1993)
Numbered: (316-347) 26:02:49
Total 1993: 26:02:49

Banned Playout (1994)
Numbered: (348-379) 24:54:42
Sectionals: 2 Sessions: 1:32:42
Total 1994: 26:27:24

Grand Total: 480:47:31

Scores:
Doomsome Otherings
Psalm 130

Recordings:
Psalm 130 (1994)

Nocturnes or Discourses (1993)

A Cat's Life, Ruth 1:16-17, Psalm 23 (meditation, responses) - 1989-1990

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 Life, a little opera for solo piano (and narrator (optional)). I wrote the narration myself, developing the story as I composed the music. I loaded the score up with what would later be called "Easter Eggs": There are three "Act"s (anagram of "cat") played "attacca". The music is openly diatonic, though I wasn't thinking in "keys" as much as shifting stances among segments of material. In addition to the narration I made use of a bunch of tricks of the trade, including something like leitmotives or idées fixe, (including one "secret" leitmotive that is labelled in the score but never mentioned by the narrator), and egregious tone painting (twittering birds, a forest sunrise, a ferocious tiger). I was under some hope that some better pianist than I would pick it up and give it a whirl, but so far I have had no takers. The keyboard writing is flashy and fun, and includes a rather wicked double fugue in the second act ("The Great Task"), the first subject of which spans multiple octaves. It was among the last pieces that I made a fair copy of by hand (in pencil), getting up early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to work on it while the house was quiet. It was probably about the last time I payed much attention to television, which I would turn on low to keep me company. I vaguely recall some early morning interview shows, fishing adventures, and Thomas the Tank Engine. After the score was completed Karen drew some cute cat drawings in it,  which I managed to carry forward into the digitally engraved score. I've trotted it out in public three times over the years, but it takes me longer and longer to relearn the notes, and the last time was pretty spot-on anyway, and fabulously narratived by a high-school actor, Olivia Sterne, who also let me make a recording of the narration so that I could assemble a "studio" version of the whole.

Anarchy

My setting of Ruth 1:16-17 ("Song for Yvonne and David") was written for Karen's sister's wedding, and is the first piece of vocal music of mine that works well and that sounds like me. I figured it would be inappropriate to the occasion to flaunt what intellectual pretension I have, so I tried my best to make it approachable: tuneful and without blatant dissonance. There is a tempo change at a structural point in the text, and I was quite pleased with my solution. The music needed to broaden so I switched from quarters and eighths to halves and quarters, but marked it "faster". The result, to my ear, sounds less like the deployment of a drag-chute than like suddenly breaking out into open country and clear sky.

Amnehitabel

Although the score is brief, my treatment of Psalm 23, the quintessential Judeo-Christian centering meditation, there is much ado in it. I wanted to treat the text plainly, as a deliberately and clearly spoken object, read aloud, one verse at a time. Each verse is printed whole on its own page while on each facing page are two fragments of music (I was thinking clavichord, but guitar could also be an interesting choice). The first fragment of each pair is the same throughout, while the second of each is unique. One way to interpret it, which is pretty much how I eventually realized it, was to alternate/intersperse the reading of each verse with an improvised trajectory from the first music fragment to or through the second. I may have recorded the clavichord part shortly after completing the score, but didn't get around to putting it together with the text for several years, taking advantage of a visit by Neal to record his voice speaking. Much later, after I became more adept at digital editing, I was able to realize a version I am pleased with.

your blogger, as Skeeter for Halloween

In April of 1989 we bought a house in the Maple Leaf neighborhood of Seattle. It seemed like a financial stretch for us at the time, but home prices were rising fast so we jumped. We may have been the last people in Seattle to be able to buy a house for under $80,000. Our interest rate was 11%. Karen and I took a two-week vacation that September. The first week was spent in Palo Alto, to be at, and in, Karen's sister's wedding (at which Karen sang my setting of the Ruth text) and the second week was spent visiting Neal & Anna in San Diego. We probably made some tapes, but the big news was that, while we were there, they learned they were to expect a baby that spring. In other Banned Rehearsal news, Aaron was back in town, more or less to stay, and in consequence of both those happy events and the loss of spare time and energy ensuing upon the arrival of a new baby, the Telepath project fell by the wayside, not to be revived for many years. The Seattle contingent made a Telepath for Banned Rehearsal 200, but alas, it was never consummated by a corresponding San Diego session, and so #200 remains undone to this day.

Banned Playout (1989):

Numbered: (160-199): 27:38:54

Telepaths: (3 sessions): 02:22:09

Assembly Rechoired (43): 00:47:16

Peripherals: (1 session): 00:20:30

Total 1989: 30:30:49

Grand Total: 338:08:46

Banned Playout (1990):

Numbered: (201-224): 33:54:30

Total 1990: 

Grand Total: 371:03:16

scores:

A Cat's Life

Ruth 1:16-17

Psalm 23 (meditation, responses)

recordings:

A Cat's Life

Ruth 1:16-17

Psalm 23 (meditation, responses)

Sonata in 2 Movements, Serenade, Retrato de Euchababilla en la noche, Assorted Fancy, Sordid Crude, Agnus Dei - 1988

Karen in Avon, MT

If my Sonatina of 1987 was primarily conceived as a clavichord piece, Sonata in 2 Movements, then dubbed Langstonstod, was piano all the way. I grew it from the Seed for Keith that I had written for myself, fully intending to compose something along the lines of a Chopin Scherzo. But as I followed where the material led my ear its time scene slowed, sending long dramatic roots outward into a stony tonal substrate. At its first movement's most intense the music is interrupted suddenly by a quiet, simple, almost bluesy figure that, to follow the metaphor, unfurls into a series of lush arpeggiations. Its a fun piece to play even without all the sostenuto (middle) pedal folderol that I loaded into it originally, which, never having been all that effective, I chose to ignore in my later performances.

your blogger in Avon, MT

I might have made a decision at the time to alternate piano pieces with clavichord pieces, as my next large project, Serenade, with its lighter, more Baroque-like figurations, was intended for the latter instrument. Its several movements don't flow together without breaks, but are each discrete thoughts. One of the pieces, of which I was quite fond, was giving me trouble coalescing into a shape until I gave up on making it into a single thing, divvied it up into chunks and interspersed them between the other pieces as interludes, or Intermezzi. It ends with a two part canon in which the time separation between the parts reduces itself incrementally until they join at the end.

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.

Neal and Anna at Yellowstone

I had acquired my folks' old Teac reel-to-reel tape deck and was having a great time playing with tape loops during various Banned Rehearsal and Assembly Rechoired sessions, and also with tape-speed alterations. One project was to make iterations of my original recording of Sonata in 2 Movements at successively quicker speeds (and pitch), stringing them together in a track I called Assorted Fancy. I then took the most extreme of those tracks and slowed it back down to its approximately original time and called it Sordid Crude. The results in both cases are splendidly grotesque in a way unachievable except with physical media. Somewhat more presentable was a performance of my oboe piece Retrato de Euchababilla on piano, in big octaves, accompanied by Karen improvising on percussion, which I then slowed down to about half speed (and consequently by about an octave in pitch) and called it Retrato de Euchababilla en la noche.

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.

Karen and your blogger at Yellowstone

Our other big adventure that year was a trip to Yellowstone for a reunion with Karen's Mom's branch of the family. We travelled with Karen's folks, leaving our car in Bickleton, and visiting various relatives along the way. We stayed at a dude ranch on the Snake River between the Tetons and the south entrance of Yellowstone. Neal and Anna also made it up from San Diego, and we made several Banned Rehearsal tapes by the river, and for the first time heard Neal recite a goodly portion of the first chapter of Finnegans Wake from memory. While we were there the park was visited by a massive series of fires. the attendant road closures forced us to come home South through the Tetons, rather than more directly through West Yellowstone as had been the plan.

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

Keith Eisenbrey · Retrato de Euchababilla en la noche 880213

Assorted Fancy

Keith Eisenbrey · Assorted Fancy

Sordid Crude

Keith Eisenbrey · Sordid Crude 880430

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)