N, Extracts, Zither Film, Improvising a Framework for Composition so as to Compose My Thoughts About Improvisation 2008-2009

at Mt. Rainier National Park

N is a composed-out idea concerning Neal's Gradus project. On one level it is a list of all the notes on the piano, one at a time, each played once, starting in the middle, and progressing chromatically in pairs of tones matching those ascending to those descending. The rhythm and dynamics are designed to group certain pitch-class sets together, making it simpler to hear their cyclic repetitions as the piece goes along. It is, in that sense, a form of musical analysis by composition. Ken Benshoof remarked to me that the effect of its directness as a structure was to immediately let listeners off the hook from any need to figure out what was going on, since that was so blatantly obvious that no figuring was required.

If a composition could be made out of an analysis of a domain, then one could regard an analysis as a composition. One common tool of musical analysis is the grouping of related notes together in order to show how those groups work with each other. I had been thinking about Scriabin's penultimate Prelude, Op. 74 #4, and came to think of it as being based on a certain group of four notes (0,3,4,7), such as (C, E-flat, E, G), which could be thought of as a major and minor triad sharing their outer members. What if, my thought went, I were to play the prelude but leave out all the notes that weren't those four? and what would each of the twelve transpositions of that set sound like? Using midi I was able to accomplish this without too much fuss, resulting in Extracts, the first set of which is just each of those transpositions one after the other. The next step was to see what combinations of two such sets sounded like together. Since there are twelve transposition relationships, and each such bi-tetrachordal combination has twelve unique transpositions there are 144 total possibilities. My 12 Extracts are those 144 pieces divided into twelve groups. I finished the first set of them in 2009.

at Yellowstone

But the bulk of my composing energies were bent toward my Music as a Film project. Zither Film is, as the title suggests, based on a recording of me strumming three zithers: an autoharp that used to live in a box under my parents bed, a german concert zither that found me from the estate of a woman from our church, and an old handmade zither with heavy strings and a profoundly cracked soundboard that was given to me by a harpist. As with Lids Film I kept most of the preliminary tracks intact, so that in my mind the project includes more than just the finished item. A related endeavor was a multimedia piece that had several iterations: Improvising a Framework for Composition so as to Compose My Thoughts About Improvisation. Using various portions of the preliminary tracks from Lids Film, a recitation of the (re-ordered) list of tempo indications used in Scriabin's Sonatas, a recording I had made in 1984 of the Sealth High School Band performing our national anthem at Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, and a text I wrote for the occasion. For the first performance, at Seattle Composers' Salon, I finished up by pouring 200 ping-pong balls down the back of the stage onto the Chapel's wooden floor. Huge success! Another performance was my part of Chapel Event (a collaborative concert with Neal and Aaron) that involved dancers Sheri Brown and Lin Lucas. And lastly I set a version of it to a video taken out the side window of our car as we drove home from West Seattle one morning.

As an afterthought to the Music as a Film project I put together a sound collage based on an early text-to-speech rendition of the headers of a bunch of spam emails I had collected advertising various sexual products. I called it Torch Song. I also continued writing hymns, completing four: Day is Dying in the West (text by Mary Ann Lathbury); Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me (text by Charles Wesley); Jesus, My Saviour (also by Charles Wesley); and Who Would True Valour See (text by John Bunyan).

at Dot, WA

Although 2008 saw no recitals I did join with Neal and Aaron in the above-mentioned Chapel Event in the fall. In addition to my piece Aaron presented Wake, an electronic work; and Neal performed an hour-long rendition of three rungs from Gradus, all of which was pulled together by the astonishing Butoh performances of Sheri Brown and Lin Lucas. In June of 2009 I gave my first solo recital at The Chapel Performance Space: Preludes in Seattle Part 3, featuring Preludes 9-12 from the sets of Lockrem Johnson, Greg Short, and Ken Benshoof; as well as number 9-12 of Ken's Patti's Parlour Pieces; my Intermezzo V, Sonata 1980, and I; Elaine Barkin's Brandeis: Four Short Pieces for Piano; and J. K. Randall's some old troubador songs recollected from around 1200 on the piano with interludes. And of course Banned Rehearsal and Gradus carried on regularly. 

In 2008 our family took to the road once again, touring Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks. In 2009, as the economic crisis lingered, we mostly stuck close to home, though we did visit Mt. Rainier National Park at least once. It was at about this time that my work responsibilities moved into the commercial segment of the title insurance industry, which was fascinating and kind of fun, but which, eventually, got the better of my stress level.

Banned Playout:

2008:

Numbered: 731-749 09:13:34

Total 2008: 09:13:34

2009:

Numbered 750-769 10:14:06
Assembly Rechoired (one session) 00:30:03
Peripheral (two sessions) 00:20:14

Total 2009: 11:04:23

Grand Total: 759:14:34

Scores:

N
Day is Dying in the West
Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me
Jesus, My Saviour
Who Would True Valour See

Recordings:

Day is Dying in the West

Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me

Jesus, My Saviour

Who Would True Valour See

Zither Film

Improvising a Framework for Composition so as to Compose My Thoughts About Improvisation

Torch Song

High and Inside, Woe My Road Is Spoken, Pavan, Old Bangum, Sputnik Love, Consider The Birds, Lids Film 2006-2007

We purchase a new horseless carriage

I had been working on Benjamin Boretz's solo piano piece O for a recital and my interest was piqued by its closing gesture - a rising figure in regularly diminishing intervals: 11 semitones, 10, 9, up to its final single semitone A-sharp, B-natural - how its dissonance hovers quietly in the piano's upper registers. I was thinking how like a shimmer of partials it was, such as might have been produced by notes lower down. The next step was to ask which lower notes would generate the partials (overtones) represented by those two high notes. Once calculated I schemed out an arpeggio-like figure that descended from each such high note then climbed back up. Starting with Ben's final semitone I inverted his series of intervals (sort of) continuing to climb the keyboard while expanding, and then re-contracting, the intervals, each of which intervals was repeated, dampers lifted, a prime number of times, separated by my descending/ascending arpeggios, finishing up on the 17 times repeated A-sharp+B-natural an octave up from Ben's final. This was the first piece I played at The Chapel Performance Space, which had been recently opened by Non Sequitur in a former home for "wayward girls" in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle. Somebody from a now defunct daily paper was there to review the concert and thought my piece was an example of "outdated minimalism". I guess I aimed over his head. Well, truth be told, I was aiming at his head, hence the title: High and Inside.

I find myself quite happy, for the most part, to compose for solo keyboard, but occasionally I have an idea that requires expanded forces. Such was the origin of Woe My Road Is Spoken, a set of quasi-variations for string quartet. The title is from Allen Ginsberg's poem Pull My Daisy. The spark was a hocket-like figure outlining a set of pitches that trade places among four instruments of like but not identical sounds - the very stuff of string quartet writing. There is a system for generating the pitch material for the next succeeding variation from the pitches that end their respective preceding variation, but aside from that it is freely composed, and even quite agreeably melodic in places. I spent considerable time getting the midi version to sound passable, but would dearly love to hear a quartet of real instruments give it a go. What I don't remember is whether it uses any mod-17 transformations or not. My vague hunch is that it does. 

Pavan, a piece for violin and piano, got its name from the heading I gave the first sketch page: "PA VN" - abbreviations of "piano" and "violin" - happily close to "Pavan" which, as a character of dance, seemed to fit the material pretty well. As with Woe My Road Is Spoken I don't recall any of its transformational details, other than that they were carefully worked out. One aspect of its articulatory surface that pleases me especially was the idea to have the violin play in two different modes for different segments: "with vibrato" and "without vibrato", or, as I put it in the score "like playing violin" and "like playing fiddle".

In my listening at that time I had come across a traditional song that stuck firmly in my ear and imagination: Old Bangum, an epic tale of valor in just a few quatrains, featuring some finely wrought nonsense syllables in crucial spots of each verse. The best way to rid myself of the earworm was to compose the heck out of it, the result being something like an opera, for solo piano and voice(s) in which the song itself plays the part of the character on stage. When Karen and I performed it we both sang the part of the song, so that (given my untrained voice) it wouldn't come across as an art song. Compositionally I am pleased with the care I took in the selection of pitches that accompany each successive stanza as it is sung. They are selected from the pitches found in the tune, with no two such selected sets being identical. The music between the stanzas is freely composed.

Your blogger at Mt. Rainier

I also began tinkering around with a method of slicing and re-assembling sound files to create rhythmic and pitch textures out of them. I was inspired partly by the work of film-maker Stan Brakhage, especially his remarkable Mothlight, in which moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass were assembled, frame by frame, and by having noticed, while editing sound files, that even where some track or other was substandard in some way or other (noisy, muddy, boomy, etc.) that a tiny blip of it was often quite interesting as a sound. My idea, which I thought of as Music as a Film, was to assemble those tiny blips as frames and see what I could come up with. I found a software solution that allowed me to easily produce a quantity of tiny blips, with control over the durations of each blip and of the increment between the blips. The rest of the process was one of successively overdubbing and re-slicing the files. The first such experiment, using a segment of a Banned Rehearsal file, was Consider the Birds. The title came from Karen, who thought it sounded like birds bickering. The second was Sputnik Love, also based on a Banned Rehearsal file. I thought it sounded like satellites booping and beeping. For Lids Film I recorded the sounds of various bells and potlids and gongs to get a variety of pitches and timbres. While assembling all the parts I realized that each of the preliminary files was interesting to me on its own, so I kept most of them.

Two hymns rounded out my compositional activity that biennium: Through All The World Below (to a traditional text) and Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read on a text by Charles Wesley.

the new old piano

Meanwhile, I gave three recitals. The first was on June 10, 2006, called "Preludes in Seattle Part 1". I performed the respective first four preludes of the sets of 24 written by Greg Short, Ken Benshoof, and Lockrem Johnson, as well as the first four of Ken's other set of 24 - Patti's Parlour Pieces. Also performed were my 3 Strathspeys (1979), High and Inside (2006), and the electronic version of the Abyss (2005); Benjamin Boretz's Liebeslied, and O; Doug Palmer's Another Sad Song Littering The Highway of Life; and I collaborated with Tom Baker to perform his piece On-Off. "Preludes in Seattle Part 2", on March 17, 2007, brought Preludes 5-8 of Ken Benshoof, Greg Short, and Lockrem Johnson; Pieces 5-8 of Ken's Patti's Parlour Pieces; Marcus Oldham's Fragments; my first attempt to re-compose (at his invitation) Ben Boretz's Liebeslied, under the title Liebeslied (Amended); and my Intermezzo 3 (1983), Diapsalmata (1979), and Seeds (1987). The third was on October 17, 2007. On it I performed Gavin Borchert's Prelude and Two-Part Invention; Lockrem Johnson's Fifth Sonata and (with soprano Lori Froggét) his song cycle Songs In The Wind; Benjamin Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") my Sonata 1979 (1979), Intermezzo 4 (1983), and Old Bangum (2007), with Karen joining my on the voice parts. This was to be also the last recital I gave at University Temple United Methodist Church, moving on to The Chapel Performance Space, which was to offer some significant logistical simplicities. 

Newberry National Volcanic Monument (Oregon)

Banned Rehearsal continued its merry way, being mostly Karen, Neal and me, occasionally joined by Steve; and Neal continued his Gradus project. It was still all A-naturals, but by the last session of 2007 he was into rungs that included the 7th of them (counting up from the bottom), and we were doubling up the rungs - two 19-20 minute rungs per session. The last significant musical event of these years was the replacement of the 1976 Yamaha studio grand that my folks had bought for me with an 1890 Chickering grand. The Yamaha had a habit of breaking strings on me, and I had, frankly, learned about as much as I could from it. The Chickering had some clunks and un-evenness, as might be expected, and I wouldn't say it was an easy piano to play (its action was an older type, and was not particularly good at quickly repeating notes) but it did help me rethink how I was playing - and it sounded fabulous for the most part.

Our family had been going camping at Mt. Rainier for several years, but 2006 was the last of those trips. Instead we began doing longer road trips. In 2007 we drove south into Oregon to tour some volcanoes, stopping at Newberry National Volcanic Monument, which is a fabulously strange place, Crater Lake National Park, and finished up at Mt. Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument.

Banned Playout:

2006:
Numbered: 694-711 - 9:10:58
Assembly Rechoired: (one session) 00:31:09
Peripheral: (two sessions) - 00:41:37

Total 2006: 10:23:44

2007:
Numbered: 712-730 - 9:48:23

Total 2007: 9:48:23

Grand Total: 738:56:37

Scores:

High and Inside
Woe My Road Is Spoken
Pavan
Old Bangum
Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read
Through All The World Below

Recordings:

High and Inside

Woe My Road Is Spoken

Pavan

Old Bangum

Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read

Through All The World Below

Consider The Birds

Sputnik Love

Lids Film

Chaconne, Hockets, The Abyss - 2004-2005

your blogger, playing with fire

My compositional energies during these years centered on two ambitious projects: a Chaconne (2004) for solo clarinet and a work for solo piano called Hockets (2005). I've loved clarinet as an instruments since I was a kid, my older brother Paul studied clarinet through to an undergraduate degree, and its sound has been in my ear since I was 8 or 9. I conceived of my Chaconne as an appreciative gift back to the world of clarinetdom, hoping for a similar gravitas as Bach's famous Chaconne for solo violin, or at least to aim in that direction. My recollection is that the pitch material was conceived in mod-17 terms and the "ground theme" is subjected to a series of transformations whose details are no longer important, but which were intended to make the logic seem to flow naturally, even if tracing the ground theme through that logic is likely not possible, and more likely to be simply perverse.

One of Seattle's superb clarinetists, Sean Osborn, performed it (with some cuts) at a concert sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum, and the recording of that performance is a treasure. The cuts were likely necessary if the clarinetist hoped to have any lip at all for the end of the piece, which asks for a long quiet high note to sail off into the ether.

Hockets began when Neal, commenting on some hockety goings on in something I had written, suggest I should write some, an idea that appealed to me immediately. A hocket is a passage of music in which two or more voices combine to create a third, apparent, voice or statement. In early vocal music this was sometimes used for comic ends, weaving the words of separate texts together to make the whole "say" something else entirely - often ribald. What I wanted to do was to compose a piece that combined two different ways of thinking about pitch: a "content determinate" music in mod-12, and an "order determinate" music in mod-17. After I had spent several weeks composing a mod-17 tone row that could be combined with another version of it to outline a workable "mod-12" pitch set to use as the basis for the content determinate structure, then, for each successive segment of the content determinate music I would need to find forms of that mod-17 row that could generate the needed mod-12 notes among the piano's 88 keys. This would be trivial if the piano had 17X17 notes, but that would require very long arms or very narrow keys, and a human auditory mechanism capable of hearing 24 plus octaves of pitch.

There are, all told, 17X17X17X17 row forms available (using both transposition and multiplication of pitch-class and transposition and multiplication of order-class), and though there are many duplicates and many forms that "zero out" one way or another it was still a daunting task. So I wrote an algorithm to brute force the calculations. After all that, what aspects of the finished work result from which number system? The mod-12 pitch classes in each segment were derived from the pitch-class content of the opening statement, while their order and their registral positions were determined by the mod-17 row forms used to express them. Rhythm, dynamics, touch, pedaling, etc. were all composed unsystematically.

I had also been tinkering around with some sound editing software, and decided to have another go at the set of Byron texts I used for my big Cantata of the 90s: The Abyss. The electronic version (other than the words it has nothing in common with the original) is constructed out of a sound file of me reciting the words, supplemented by at least one then recent Banned Rehearsal session. I also composed two hymns: one for Christmas - There's a Song in the Air (2004) on one of my Mom's favorite carol texts - and Like a Bird on the Deep (2005) on a hymn by Fanny J. Crosby.

Banned Rehearsal had slowed up somewhat, but managed 16 sessions in both years, mostly with just Karen, Neal and me, but with Steve Kennedy dropping by on occasion also. I also find in my records an improvisation session with Pete Comley and his friend Jason Volk, but I find myself without any memory of doing it. I'll be interested in hearing it when it comes up for listening.

And then - oof! - four recitals, or, rather, three and a half, since I shared one with Gavin Borchert, whom I had met through the WCF. The first was in February of 2004, at University Temple United Methodist Church, which featured all of my extant sonatas: Sonata 1979, Sonata 1980, and Sonata in 2 Movements; as well as Lockrem Johnson's Fifth Sonata, and my Work / Architecture / Unity / And / The. In July of that year was the recital I did with Gavin, at Polestar Gallery in the Central District (the former occupant of the space now known as Gallery 1412). I don't have a recording, but I think that I played Gavin's Prelude, Untitled (Slow Waltz), and Berceuse (though one or two may have been played by Gavin), as well as my Create Desolation and Call It Peace; Sonata in 2 Movements; Mrs. Ramsay Rose, Lily Rose; and Work / Architecture / Unity / And / The. Gavin played some additional pieces of his, my Intermezzo VI, and together we played my 4-hands piece Entracte combining it with a like-sized duet by Gavin, mixing and matching the parts. And then, in November, back at UTUMC, Karen joined me in performing all of my recent songs, plus a few other pieces to fill out the program: Sonatina; Depth of Mercy; While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night; Lamb of God; Ruth 1:16-17 (Song for Yvonne and David); O Love, How Cheering Is Thy Ray; Song of Solomon 3:1-4; and Create Desolation and Call It Peace; as well as Gavin Borchert's Berceuse and Ken Benshoof's set of folk pieces Sweeter Than Wine. Moving on to November of 2005, also at UTUMC, I played my Two Interruptions; Ben Boretz's Partita; my Intermezzo II; Elaine Barkin's Brandeis pieces; John Verrall's Four Pieces for Piano; and my Hockets.

Banned Playout:

2004:
Numbered: 662-677 - 8:19:17
Peripheral: one session 1:01:43

Total 2004: 9:21:00

2005:
Numbered: 678-693 - 8:19:56
Assembly Rechoired (one session) - 00:30:46

Total 2005: 8:50:42

Grand Total: 718:44:30

Scores:

There's A Song In The Air
Chaconne
Hockets
Like a Bird On The Deep

Recordings: 

There's A Song In The Air

Chaconne

Hockets

Like a Bird On The Deep

The Abyss

Sarabande, Eurydice, Song of Solomon 3:1-4 - 2003

Your blogger with Karen and sons
more or less in 2003

As one ages into what passes for compositional maturity the example of the upstart from Bonn is difficult to avoid entirely. The ubiquitous notion of the three biographical periods (Early, Middle, and Late) of his output lurks behind the unwary memoirist, seducing them into divvying up their own putterments into neat piles, or distinguishing between 'working-out-ideas' pieces and 'putting-it-all-together' pieces (my favored self-adulatory delusion), or jumping enthusiastically into the cesspool of self-mythology to claim that one had planned it all from the start, each fresh piece lined up in a continuous revelatory spew of masterpieces, predestined and inevitable.

Of course that isn't how it seems while living it. Whatever ideas arrive do so much as any whim might - some stick and some don't. I work out a piece or a project because it interests me while I'm doing it. As past work piles up, habits of thinking reappear. Procedures that worked well in one piece might be tried again in another, their details shifted around to fit new circumstances. But the fact is that I have never had a grand plan beyond whatever the current projects happen to be. For instance I continued to be intrigued by the possibilities of working with mod-17 arithmetic applied over the mod-12 universe of traditional western pitch collections, but also indulged in regular mod-12 thinking, whether diatonically or with more esoteric reference sets, and in 2003 I composed pieces in each of those modes.

I had become acquainted with the local composer/trumpet player Jim Knodle through the Washington Composers' Forum, and for a while my oldest son was taking trumpet lessons from him. At some point he asked if I would like to write a piece for him (one of the very few instances in which anyone ever asked me to write something for them) and I obliged most gratefully with Sarabande, which is based on a mod-17, 17-tone row. He was participating that year in the Blind Youth Audio Project at Jack Straw Cultural Center, so we spent several hours there being the test piece while the engineers and students tried out various microphone placements to see how they affected the final sound. The recording we made there was quite fine, but we did go back later to make me one for keeps.

For my setting of Psalm 133 (also mod-17, 17-tone) I revisited the essentially two-voice texture of my recent Lamb of God, but expanded the range of the keyboard part and indulged quite freely in large vocal leaps and occasional extra voice sonorities. It's a bit of a bear to work up but kind of fun to play, and I hope also to sing, once you get there. Two other songs that year fall into the diatonic-adjacent mod-12 camp: a setting of Nahum Tate's Christmastide hymn While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, and another of a few verses from Song of Solomon. Both of these are, I think, quite approachable and attractive.

In a somewhat more esoteric mod-12 vein is a clarinet duet called Eurydice, which features pitch sets that mirror each other between the parts, riffing on Cocteau's image of Orpheus (from the film "Orpheus") accidentally catching a glimpse of Eurydice in the rear-view mirror of the poet's automobile. The midi version is fine as far as it goes, but I'd love to hear it with real players.

In other news, I gave a recital in June, at University Temple United Methodist Church. On the program was my 17 Prepuntal Contraludes (1981), 5 Duets (2000) {clarinet duets arranged for piano}, and Slow Blues (1999); Preludes 17-24 of Lockrem Johnson (finishing up my first cycle of live performances of his 24 Preludes); and Ben's Soliloquy {also known as ("…what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious sonata…")}. 

Banned Rehearsal and Gradus settled into our new routine of alternating weeks. The biggest news being that late in 2003 we were joined by Steve Kennedy, whom I had met at Seattle Composers' Salon, and who just seemed to get us right off the starting block.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: 645-661 - 08:46:10
Peripheral (1 session with me and Pete Comley): 1:00:20

Total 2003: 09:46:30

Grand Total: 709:53:48

Scores:

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night

Eurydice

Psalm 133

Sarabande

Song of Solomon 3:1-4

Recordings

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night

Eurydice

Psalm 133

Sarabande

Song of Solomon 3:1-4

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

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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.

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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

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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