Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The, Toccata, Lamb of God - 2002

your blogger and son playing with rockets

In 2002 I made several experiments composing music based partly or wholly on mod-17 pitch-class procedures. Toccata is, I think, the loosest of the bunch. It is an arrangement for solo piano of my 1986 oboe piece Retrato de Euchababilla, made by adding additional lines and harmonies that I could convince myself were mod-17 derived, resulting in a kind of hybrid music, some mod-12 serial and some mod-17 something or other. However, I don't remember what it was about those mod-17 notes that made them so in my head. It is very much a toccata, in the sense that it lives and dies in the touch of the pianist, and less in the sense of toccatas as being music of quick notes and tricky fingering.

Lamb of God is a setting, in English, of the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass, for voice and piano. It is flat-footedly serial, based on a 17-tone row, but using that row as a melody and not as a means of integrating vertical structures with horizontal. Karen and I had been working up Stravinsky's The Owl and the Pussycat and the influence of its surface texture is obvious. I remember putting some time into designing the row, but the details of that design are hardly worth digging into.

Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The, or 

Work

Architecture

Unity

And

The, 

went through quite a process before it came out the other end as what it is now. The original image I had was of a music consisting of shards of sound that would be come upon suddenly, as in fog, unexpected and fearsome. I thought that I would compose a set of such shards for piano and then combine that with improvised percussion accompaniment. Banned Rehearsal made several valiant attempts, much of which yielded some interesting sessions, but none of which were really what I had in mind. At some point while I was working on it, Ben was in town and in conversation he suggested that, as a general rule, if one wanted something specific it was best to do it oneself, and if one wanted to work with others it might be better to ditch the conception and work with those others on an equal basis, which is what I eventually did. I recorded my piano score, which consisted of 17 shards, derived by mod-17 multiplicative transformations of a small pitch-class set, at Jack Straw Cultural Center, then recorded myself improvising along on percussion. The results were fine but there was a lingering dissatisfaction. The piano bits, brief as they are, form together a stronger piece than when combined with anything else. I performed it several times as a solo, leaving long spaces between bits. When I picked it up again recently to see what I could make of it now I ended up being most happy with not giving the breaks between any more special treatment than I would give the breaks between any other set of disjunct but related pieces, allowing the tonal and affectual distinctions to serve for both fog and fearsomeness. In aesthetic matters image always trumps fact.

your blogger on a hike

Two small compositions were completed that year: an interlude for four French Horns based on my hymn Depth of Mercy, written (and recorded!) for a horn quartet my uncle Jim Meyer (Karen's dad's brother) was in; and a variation for piano trio of Diabelli's much varied Waltz, written for an ensemble that the clarinetist Sean Osborn had put together (Quake). They performed it (quite well) along with a bunch of others, in the recital space at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle, possibly the most prestigious venue any of my music has been heard within, before or since.

2002 also saw a shift in Banned Rehearsal, as Aaron chose to take a sabbatical for a few years while those of us who were parents worked out the kinks of doing sessions with kids about. We eventually cut back to meeting every other week or so, chalking up a mere 17 sessions. On the alternate weeks Neal re-started a project that he had first assayed while in San Diego: Gradus for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler. the short version of the idea was that he would teach himself to play piano one combination of keys at a time, starting with the lowest A-natural, followed by a session on the second A-natural up, followed by both together, thence to the third A-natural and onward into the abyss of virtual infinity. From the beginning I have been his listener, recordist, archivist, and commenter, and in those capacities Neal's project has been an important part of my own musical life ever since. That year alone saw 34 thirty-minute sessions. It would be many years before all the combinations of A-naturals would be exhausted.

I gave two recitals at my church that year. The first was in February. I played: Preludes 1-8, by Lockrem Johnson; Untitled (Slow Waltz), by Gavin Borchert; Diapsalmata, Ruth 1:16-17 (Song for Yvonne and David), Psalm 22:9-10, and Jeremiah 17:5-8, by me, the latter three with Karen singing; The Owl and the Pussycat by Stravinsky (again with Karen); Liebeslied and O, by Benjamin Boretz; and "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." by me to finish it up. The second recital was in October, at which I played: Preludes 9-16 by Lockrem Johnson; A Cat's Life (with Neal providing the narration), and Three Strathspeys, both by me; ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") by Benjamin Boretz; and Toccata, by me.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: 627-644 - 12:00:19
Peripheral (2 sessions with me and Pete Comley): 1:00:58

Total 2002: 2:05:24

Grand Total: 700:07:18

Scores:

Toccata
Lamb of God
Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The
Interlude on Depth of Mercy

Recordings:

Toccata

Lamb of God

Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The

"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose.", Ms. Found in a Bottle - 2001

your blogger

Lingering in my piano bench since 1982 was the original reel-to-reel master tape of my synclavier piece AKU. Some artifacts had crept in to the cassette copy the listening library folks made for me at the UW, and I was certain that if I could, someday, find a working reel-to-reel tape deck and the equipment to transfer the track to digital I would finally have a record of the piece in all its pristine glory. And so, when I learned that my friend and occasional Banned Rehearsal collaborator Pete Comley had all those parts I asked if he would be willing to help me out, which of course, being as interested in hearing an old synclavier piece as I was, he did. He was living just a few hundred yards away at the time, so one day in May I walked my tape over to his apartment. He threaded the tape and prepared the DAT for recording, and set it all going. It is difficult to describe the combination of dismay and delight that followed as it became clear what time's ravages had worked upon my master tape, transforming what remained into a magnificently tortured parody of what it had been 20 years prior - a sound unattainable by any other means. A few months later I took that file (on DAT) to Jack Straw Cultural Center and dubbed into it a recording of my more recent text piece Confessions of a Polyphonist, calling the result Ms. Found in a Bottle after the tale by Poe. 

I also completed several new compositions that year: Lauda Anima and How Firm a Foundation, for organ; The Farthest Shore, for flute trio; a setting of Jeremiah 17:5-8, for voice and piano; and "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." for solo piano. Marcus Oldham performed Lauda Anima magnificently on the big organ at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral. Much to my regret the event was not recorded (at least to my knowledge) so it lives only in my memory. Both of these short organ works live perfectly well on piano as well. I don't recall the exact incitement for my flute trio, but I have a vague recollection that it was involved with some sort of call for scores sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum. I have never heard it played on real flutes, but Sarah Bassingthwaighte had a group of her students (nine of them, if I remember correctly what she told me) perform it while they were touring in Russia. Somewhere I have a copy of the program, complete with my name transliterated into Cyrillic. Fortunately the robot flutes of midi get the idea of it across pretty well. The Jeremiah setting was intended for Karen to sing at church. At the time Karen's dad was an associate pastor at a church in Olympia, so for a few years, most summers, I would write something we could play for them.

your blogger

And in December I completed the first large-scale piano piece I had done since Slow Blues: "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." The first ideas I sketched were for violin and piano, but it took on a life of its own and the violin thoughts were left behind. It follows a similar tonal scheme to Slow Blues - the notes used in each figuration-segment are derived from successive (mod-17 multiplicative) transformations of a set of pitch classes. I allowed myself considerably more freedom in composing the relative hefts of each segment, so that the piece as a whole moves along much like a set of preludes, or variations on a theme, performed without any breaks between them. I played it at a Seattle Composers' Salon (probably early in 2002), the video of which performance may have played a role in securing grant funding for that long-running project of Tom Baker's. 

All in all it was quite a productive year for me, and though I didn't give any recitals I was trying to be an active participant in the Salon, then being held at a Mennonite church a few miles north of my house, in a space that used to be a movie theater. And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on as best we could, adding 30 or so sessions, and adding just over 20 hours of recorded sound to the corpus.

Banned Playout

Numbered:(596-626) 20:05:30
Assembly Rechoired: (one session) 00:06:37
Peripheral: (three sessions) 00:08:48

Total 2001:  20:20:55

Grand Total: 698:01:54

Scores:

Lauda Anima
The Farthest Shore
Jeremiah 17:5-8
How Firm a Foundation
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."

Recordings:

Lauda Anima

The Farthest Shore

Ms. Found in a Bottle

Jeremiah 17:5-8

How Firm a Foundation

"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."

Composing for Others - 2000

your blogger

The year 2000 found me toe-dipping into a more public arena. Not only did I become active in the Washington Composers' Forum, but also began attending and presenting at Tom Baker's Seattle Composers' Salon, which quickly became my favorite place to share what I was up to and to hob nob with my fellow wizards. By way of introducing myself I gave two house recitals in February, at which I played Slow Blues (1999) in its trio formation with Karen (drums) and Neal (cornet), as well as 7 Cues Without Film (1984), (then called Leideslieder), Create Desolation and Call It Peace (1984), and Ben's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."). 

Karen with tam tam

The greater part of the music I completed that year was intended for two or more musicians. Two Rose is a prelude (Spring Rose) and fugue (Fall Rose) for flute, clarinet, and bassoon that I wrote as part of a call for scores sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum. It was performed quite wonderfully by Sarah Bassingthwaighte, Deborah Colyn, and Ryan Hare, at the little recital hall at the Seattle Art Museum. Like several other works of that time it reuses material from The Abyss (1998). Although pitch material was conceived within a mod-17 syntax, I was interested mostly in what thinking that way did to what is otherwise recognizable concert music, in the Stravinsky-adjacent neo-classical vein. Five Duets for two clarinets is like unto it in both particulars. Since no clarinetists stepped forward I arranged and performed them later for solo piano. They're kind of fun and clever and present some interesting fingering challenges. I would still be interested to hear them with clarinets.

The WCF also sponsored an orchestral score reading session with Roger Nelson's Seattle Creative Orchestra, for which I orchestrated my 1994 viola/piano piece Doomsome Otherings. This was to be the last time I promulgated any music for orchestra. Too much work for too little pay-off.

Aaron drumming

Psalm 22:9-10, for voice and piano, was composed without recourse to mod-17 thinking. The idea was to set the verses as though the words were being squeezed though narrow passages - the poem's imagery is of child-birth. I believe the writing is strong for most part, though when Karen and I were performing it at church a few years ago I came to the sudden realization that one particularly troublesome spot, a few measures hence, could use some serious compositional attention, which my brain then began to do, which, alas, pretty much derailed my fingers for a bit. Karen sang on valiantly. When I eventually sat down to work out the problem I ended up recomposing it from the ground up, which is why there are two different settings of the same verses in my oeuvre.

My mom was playing violin then in a string quintet (2 violins, 2 violas, cello) so I wrote them a fun little Humoresque. At some point they decided to play it as part of a Maundy Thursday evening service at a large church in Oak Harbor, on Whidbey Island. It was programmed as a musical meditation on the Crucifixion, so they renamed it "Quintet". In the service this was preceded by the celebration of the Eucharist, by the entire congregation of several hundred people, in what seemed to me the least efficient method imaginable. It took ages. Never before or since have so many suffered so long to hear my music.

Neal operating a guitar

On a lighter note I wrote down a little 12-bar rock&rollish ditty that I had made up to amuse the kids while in the car: Do the Weedy Weedy at the Bop. Those are pretty much the whole of the lyrics, each line being punctuated at its end with whatever word you felt like adding in that rhymed with bop (or not, I suppose).

The only finished piece of the year that didn't explicitly involve more than one performer was the text-sound piece Confessions of a Polyphonist, a structured matrix of homo- and hetero-phones that found its way into several activities over the next few years. Tom Baker invited me to present it to one of the classes he was teaching at the UW, much, I'm sure, to their bafflement.

And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on more or less weekly, producing more than 30 hours of recorded improvisation.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: (556-595):  31:01:28
Assembly Rechoired: (two sessions) 01:02:11
Peripherals: (eight sessions) 03:07:54

Total 2000:  35:11:33

Grand Total: 677:40:59

Scores:
Two Rose
Five Duets
Psalm 22:9-10

Recordings:

Psalm 22:9-10

5 Duets

Slow Blues, Entracte, Depth of Mercy - 1999

your blogger

Since early in my composing life I had been intrigued by the idea of inventing a tonal system of my own, as Scriabin was rumored to have done with his system "based on fourths". My problem was that what that might mean, technically, was not clear to me. The first constructive step I took toward an eventual solution was to start working with mod-17 structures overlain on the familiar mod-12 pitch universe. I had a breakthrough in this regard with Slow Blues, for solo piano. Several tracks of thought converged therein, of which the most crucial was the realization that a tonal system could reveal itself under transformations - particularly, for my purposes, the "M-transforms" or "Multiplicative Operations". In mod-12 arithmetic (arithmetic on a clock face, for instance, with a "0" in the place of "12") these transforms reveal symmetries inherent to the number 12, i.e. while M1 transforms a set into itself, M2 converts a chromatic scale of 12 notes into a whole-tone scale of 6, M3 into a minor-third scale of 4 notes, M5 into a Major-third scale of 3 notes, etc. But because 17 is prime, under mod-17 (like a clock face with 17 hours: 0 - 16) each transform yields a unique ordering of the same size - a two-note set yields a two-note set, a six-note set yields a six-note set, etc. - except M0 of course, which flat-lines no matter what your modulus. In addition, a whole slew of relations within derived pitch sets remains intact, mutatis mutandis. It should also be noted that notes 17 semi-tones apart are not always the "same" acoustic note - C-natural is the "same" pitch class as F-natural an octave and a fourth above it - which tilts acoustic pitch-geometry in what I have found to be an interesting way.

Karen Eisenbrey

I had also been thinking about what I would now call the stanzaic  structures of American demotic music such as the blues, and wanted to see what framing a composition within such an harmonic rhythm as, for instance, a basic "I I I I / IV IV I I / V V I I" 12-bar blues, might allow for metrical cross-relations among like-situated segments of music.

Putting this all together, the opening 12 bars of Slow Blues (echoed in the closing 12 bars) is based on an "M0-transform", a single mod-17 pitch class represented acoustically as D-natural below middle C (for I), A-natural 17 semi-tones below that (for IV), and G-natural 17 semi-tones above the D (for V), in a punning inversion of the usual tonic-dominant-subdominant relationship among those three notes. The next 12-bar stanza was M1, using both "minor" and "Major" versions of the triads freely; the next was M2, etc. all the way back around to M16 and M0 at the end. Beyond that my method was to compose each stanza under a new figuration regime, as in a classical theme and variations, which schema remains one of my go-to favorites. 

Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer

What gratified me most was how well it all seems to hang together through all the pitch shenanigans. I have performed it and recorded it several times over the years, both as a solo piece and as a trio with improvised accompaniment by Neal Kosály-Meyer on cornet and Karen Eisenbrey on drums. A solo performance of it served, in November of 1999, as my introduction to the Washington Composers' Forum. I was active in the group until 2010, much of that time serving as Treasurer.

Entracte is, so far, my only piece for piano 4-hands. The original idea was that it could be paired with another composer's 4-hand piece of the same size, so that the parts could be cross-matched with each other. A few years later Gavin Borchert came through and we performed all the versions during a joint recital at Polestar Music Gallery (the precursor to Gallery 1412). Musically, its material is salvaged from The Abyss (1998).

Aaron Keyt at the piano, with Karen and Neal

Depth of Mercy is my first attempt at writing a hymn. The melody is broadly diatonic and is matched squarely with the syllables of its text, which is by Charles Wesley. The accompaniment is heavy on open harmonies, so as not to alarm a congregation. Karen sang it for a service at United Churches in Olympia, where her dad was serving as an assistant pastor. I recall one congregant telling me afterwards that it sounded like Hovhaness, a remark that puzzled me at the time. I don't deny a certain surface similarity of affect, but I imagine now that Hovhaness was one of the few living composers that they may have had some experience of.

Banned Rehearsal wound up the century, and began the next, with a somewhat inebriated two-hour session that straddled midnight. 

Banned Playout:

Numbered: (518-555):  27:10:08
Peripherals: (one session): 00:20:06

Total 1999: 27:31:04

Grand Total: 642:29:26

Scores:

Slow Blues
Entracte
Depth of Mercy

Recordings:

Slow Blues

 

Entracte

 

Depth of Mercy

The Decade of Chaos Part 2: 1995-1998

your blogger and family visit Bickleton, WA

During the latter half of the decade of chaos I spent a lot of time working on a cantata - The Abyss (1998) (since withdrawn) - for small SATB chorus, with an orchestra of five wind players and string quartet. It is based on several stanzas from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Being flush with how well my first mod-17 piece - Psalm 130 (1994) - had come together I wanted to make something ambitious to see if it would work on a large scale. The resulting piece has some significant performance challenges, chief among them being ridiculously aspirational ranges for the singers. That aside I was struggling with what it meant for a music to actually be "in" mod-17, and not just some funky bespoke diatonicism. Although many parts may be quite effective from an expressionist standpoint, the whole is hopelessly wooly. But no work is wasted and I did accustom myself to thinking outside the mod-12 box. I also re-used some of the melodic ideas in other smaller pieces such as Two Pomes Play (1997) for clarinet and bassoon.

Neal and Karen in Bickleton, WA

In 1995 I arranged one of my fourpartsongs of 1992 - O Love, How Cheering is Thy Ray!- for solo voice and piano so that Karen could sing it for a church service. And for a while after that I was composing a song for that purpose every year or so, among which was Glory to God (1998), a setting of the first few stanzas of Charles Wesley's hymn, later stanzas of which appeared as the first hymn in the Methodist Hymnals of the last century as Oh For a Thousand Tongues To Sing.

Karen and I remained quite busy with our church choir through these years. We rehearsed in the choir's church-basement room, but would often work our way upstairs to the sanctuary to practice with the organ. Our organist, the fabulous David Di Fiore, usually got to the loft before the choir got themselves together, and would often accompany our straggling procession to the chancel with rousing quasi-calliope music. This amused me enormously so I wrote a piece for him, based on the hymn tune "Foundation" (popularly known as Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing) that, at one point goes into full calliope mode. I named it after one of my favorite lines in the hymn -  "Here I raise mine Ebenezer" - and being the clever lad I was I folded in an adaption of the hymn tune "Ebenezer" as a counterpoint. David played it magnificently and I treasure the recording I have of his performance.

In 1995 I gave another recital - Local Flavor - at our church. The program was:

Six Piano Pieces - Aaron Keyt
Short Forms - Ken Benshoof
Fifth Sonata - Lockrem Johnson
Oracle from Dark Wood - Neal Kosály-Meyer (with Neal joining me in a speaking role)
Sonata in 2 Movements - Keith Eisenbrey

your blogger with kids having a picnic

In August of 1996 we welcomed a second baby into the family, wisely deciding to stop right there. Besides our rapidly shrinking house, Karen made it quite clear that she now considered child birth to be a younger person's sport, and that she was done. In 1998 we travelled once again to Yellowstone, destroying the radiator in our car (a used Volvo with a turning radius to die for I had purchased from a co-worker). We met Karen's folks there, staying at a cabin at Canyon. Karen's sister, her husband David and their two kids also made it there, but Neal's little family were stymied by breakdowns and only got as far as Coeur D'Alene. 

your blogger in mid chaos

And Banned Rehearsal just kept right on making tapes. some highlights were two live performances - two 1996 sets at The Speakeasy Internet Café in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle (a few months before a fire closed it down) and back at Brechemin Auditorium at the UW School of Music in 1997 for Banned Rehearsal 440. Shortly after that I bought a DAT recording device and we have been recording ourselves digitally ever since. We also put out our one and only CD - Teach Yourself to Drive (1998). It was a milestone for us, but definitely added some stress to the system on top of the general struggles of life with small children.

Banned Playout (1995):
Numbered: (380-409): 26:27:52
Peripherals: 15 Sessions: 07:31:01
Total 1995: 33:58:53

Banned Playout (1996):
Numbered: (410-439): 27:15:52
Sectionals: 1 Session: 00:46:05
Peripherals: 8 Sessions: 03:55:53
Total 1996: 31:57:50

Banned Playout (1997):
Numbered: (440-477): 34:49:45
Peripherals: 1 Session 00:25:58
Total 1997: 35:15:43

Banned Playout (1998):
Numbered: (478-517): 29:14:24
Sectionals: 1 Session: 00:28:01
Peripherals: 4 Sessions 02:06:54
Total 1998: 31:49:19

Grand Total: 613:58:22

Scores:

Two Pomes Play
O Love, How Cheering is Thy Ray!
Glory to God
"Here I raise mine Ebenezer"

Recordings:

O Love, How Cheering is Thy Ray!

"Here I raise mine Ebenezer" (performed on piano)

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: 480:49:37

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: 371:04:22

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)