KCBOL - 1980

 KCBOL

During one of our lessons Ken showed or described to me a single-panel cartoon in which five parking meters, each a different height, stood in a row in order of size but for one, which one had a sign hanging from it: "out of order". I believe that the subject of our discussion was the perceived relative specificity of orderings of notes and other structures in music. The image has stuck with me, but at the time it became a structural motif for "KCBOL: A Minimal Extravaganza For Two Pianists". 

I wrote five piano pieces, each of different heft, from the smallest with just two notes, to the largest with over 200 notes. I asked a fellow student, Andrew Buchman, to assist in the performance. The stage was set with a piano in the middle, and a small table and chair in the bend, facing the audience. We entered, wearing matching tee-shirts with "KCBOL" blazoned upon them. I took my seat at the piano and Andrew at the table. The "program notes" and script are the graphics herein. The last diagram is how the blocks would look to the audience, in the same "mis-ordering" as the letters in the word BLOCK in "KCBOL". I also used that ordering, and possibly variations of it, for many of the internal figures and melodic contours throughout.

Of particular interest to me, later, were the largest "K" piece and the smallest "B". At a background level, the pitch material of K explores the notes making up a minor seventh chord (B, D, F-sharp, A) in ways that were similar to the procedure used in my later Intermezzos 1, 2, 3, and 4, (1981-1982) and is also a "one note at-a-time piece as Intermezzos 1 and 2 almost are. B, with its two notes, is echoed later in the fifth of my 5 Movements (1983), which also consists of 2 notes.

Performances

March 4, 1981 - Meany Studio Theater, University of Washington, Seattle - Andrew Buchman, Keith Eisenbrey

Recordings

March 4, 1981 - Andrew Buchman, Keith Eisenbrey

June 29, 2009 - Keith Eisenbrey

July 29, 2009 - Keith Eisenbrey

Keith Eisenbrey · KCBOL (090729) 801230

blogposts

July 5, 2017

"As cockamamie as the scheme was, there are many features of this 1980 piano piece that continue to be of use to me. As originally conceived there is a theater bit that goes with it, involving stacking alphabet blocks and ringing finger cymbals (which idea came back as whacking an oil drum at the beginning of Five Movements as performed at Bard in 1984). The original performers were Andrew Buchman and me. The midmost movement of the five is a two-note piece for piano four-hands."