After and Before 1981-1982

Book of Windows

Seven Strays

After graduation from the UW in the Spring of 1981, and before my pilgrimage to the East coast in June 1982, I worked part-time selling men's jeans at a department store at Northgate Mall, a job I got thanks to church connections. At the end of Summer I got a full-time job in the mail room at the home office of a cookware sales company in Bellevue.

your blogger in 1981 at home with a beanbag frog

I wrote several short solo piano pieces, none of them ever intended to be included in a set of anything, just quick sketches made when I happened to have a figurational idea I felt like working out. I bundled these together many years later as Seven Strays. I've performed a few of them on occasion, and even transcribed one of them for bell-choir the year I was directing one at our church in the late 80s. Being quasi-tonal for the most part, they can be made to seem intelligible and even attractive to those that might not go for the crazier stuff.

But most of my individual creative time was spent on a massive score-making project called Book of Windows. It involves a lengthy list of words derived from various sources, all arranged carefully using a system focusing on syllable count, line count, and a global multiplex acrostic in which the first letters of several equal subdivisions of line groups form sequences of words that are like unto lines within the greater text. In the final such subdivision, which divides the whole into three parts, the first letter of each respective segment spells the word ART. Very clever.

your blogger spinning vinyl and inking Book of Windows

In the final score the text unfolds on the left of each set of facing pages, and on the right-facing pages two sequences of notes spool out. The most extensive of these is written for piano and consists of carefully charted quantities of notes, lengths of passages as measured in quarter notes, vertical density, and number of times each segment is to be repeated. The other sequence of notes is a line of single pitches, intended for saxophone. I developed intricate charts to determine all sorts of aspects of how it would fit together. I added inscriptions (Gertrude Stein and Wilhelm Müller) and a preface to get it going, and finished it up with a chorale for the instruments.

I didn't want to specify how a performance of it might be accomplished, but it was given a table-read just before I left for Bard, with me on piano, Aaron reading the text, and my brother Paul playing clarinet. I think Neal was turning pages and helping to keep track of the whole mess. In 2005 I realized a midi-enabled version that clocks in at about 32 minutes. It was performed in public, for the one and only time, in a common space outside the cafeteria at Bard that Summer, with me playing Crumar, the inimitable Jill Borner reciting, and Bruce Huber transforming the sax part on electric guitar. As luck would have it another member of what has become my virtual colloquium of senior colleagues, Elaine Barkin, was visiting for a few days and suffered through the whole two-plus-hour ordeal. At the end, or so I was told, she pointed to my date-and-place mark in the score "Bellevue, 1982" and silently inquired of Ben whether I was really from the mental hospital. Ben, of course, just nodded in affirmation. "Bellevue, yes".

your blogger (in glasses), Neal Meyer (in t-shirt),
and Aaron Keyt (in jeans)

In the end it constitutes my one and only extensive experimentation with that oh-so-chic American stylistic juggernaut, Minimalism. When I was done I figured that I could thenceforward ignore the whole movement, having written something far more repetitive and ugly than anyone else would ever care to. Considering it now I can't think it's Minimalist in any essential way and isn't particularly brilliant as commentary either. Its worth, within my personal creative history, is as a compositional exercise in working with algorithmically derived structures.

Seven Strays - recorded February 10 and 11, 2010

Keith Eisenbrey · Seven Strays (100210 & 11) 1983

Book of Windows - digital version realized March 20, 2005

Keith Eisenbrey · Book of Windows 050320

From Stuart Dempster to Dave's Basement 1981-1982

your blogger with employment worthy haircut ca. 1981

During my last quarter at the UW I was a member of the University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble, led that quarter by Seattle's legendary musical provacateur Stuart Dempster. I had been improvising on my own for years by then as part of my piano studies and later on of my compositional process, so I was comfortable with the concept, but this was my first experience doing so in a group setting. The focus was, crucially, on listening to each other, and less crucially for my later practice, listening for the endings of things so as to make satisfying pieces of music.

This was also my first opportunity to work together with Neal Meyer, who was also a member. We met in a large rehearsal space in the upper somewheres of Meany Hall and took advantage of the various percussion instruments and pianos in residence there. At the end of the year we played several such pieces as part of Neal's piano recital: Manhasset, Music With or Without 12 Chairs, Undifferentiated Functions, and Ein Hundenleben. After the term was over a group of us put together a free-range show at The Seattle Concert Theater, a former church building in the Denny Regrade, long since demolished. Several of us played solos, including my Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes, and members of the Improv Ensemble did a couple of improvisations: Son of Manhasset and Well I Just Might Do That, in the latter of which Neal blew shaving cream into my ear through a PVC didgeridoo. Thanks. 

Aaron Keyt with others in Dave's Basement 1981

A few remnants of this crew, Dave Jones, Neal, Aaron Keyt, and me, would meet over the next months at various locations around town, centered on the basement of the house where Dave was living a few miles North of campus and not far from where I now live, to improvise together, often beginning with a warm-up activity courtesy of Pauline Oliveros' Teach Yourself To Fly. It was during this time that we became less fastidious about finding endings for things, though we still revolved loosely around the idea of making pieces. Most of the sounds from those days, though recorded at the time, have vanished, but what is left, notably our 3 Act opera Eliza, peripherating upon Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slapstick, is convincing evidence that the greater culture won't miss any of it much at all. 

your blogger displaying his unmistakable fashion sense

It was during this time that Aaron, Neal, and I began in earnest what has become now a lifetime of lobbing ideas back and forth, becoming as close to a band of brothers as can be got - including, eventually, in a literal sense, when, in 1986 I married Neal's kid sister Karen, who, as chance would have it, had been there at Neal's recital and thus in the same room I was in for the first time. Her first glimpse of me was of a long-haired dude coming out of the piano closet at Brechemin with a gavel in his hand. Meet weird. We were not introduced.

Post settings Labels Stuart Dempster,University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble,Neal Meyer,Aaron Keyt,Dave Jones,Seattle Concert Theater, No matching suggestions Published on 12/14/22 11:36 AM Permalink Location Options Loaded more posts.Post: Edit

John Rahn to the Rescue 1981

I was 22 and had been living at home while at school, commuting by bus across Lake Washington to the UW, following a more or less self-prescribed path to fulfill my firm ambition and expectation to finish my undergraduate work, get a masters and a doctorate, and finally to become a famous and renowned professor of composition somewhere. It was that somewhere that I had never thought through, and the slowly dawning realization that I would soon need to apply, and to go, to elsewhere for graduate studies was, I admit now, terrifying. I sent out a few feelers, but had no clear idea where out there would be a good fit and that might be willing to consider taking me on.

John, knowing how fascinated I had become by the various works of Benjamin Boretz that he had shared with me - both in our lessons (the score of ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") was open on the piano in his office) and in theory seminars, notably Language ,as a music and Meta-Variations: Studies in the foundations of musical thought - suggested that I write to Ben for advice. Had Ben been teaching at a school that had a graduate program that would have been an obvious choice, but that was not the case as far as we knew. So I sent off a "Hi there, I feel like an increasingly square pig in a narrowing round hole, and am at a loss as to my next step" letter. I didn't know this until later, but John also wrote him a short note of introduction, for which, and for his timely encouragement, support, and tireless opening of intellectual doors, I am ever grateful. I also found out even many more years later that I was one of only two students who had ever written Ben a letter. Try it kids!

One evening that Spring, much to my surprise and amazement, I got a call from Ben. This in and of itself was a total flabbergast to me, who hadn't a clue that a venerable figure such as Ben would condescend to pick up a phone to call a nobody, and to my great excitement it turned out that Bard College was starting an interdisciplinary MFA program to take place during Summer terms and he asked if would I like to apply and come out East in June. Neither I nor my family were in a financial position to accomplish that so suddenly but I thanked him profusely and applied for the next year. The application, as I recall, was little more than a single sheet to provide a name and address.

And so a year later, in June of 1982, a day or so after an end-of-school-year party held at the house Neal was sharing in Wallingford, wherein I was introduced to his kid sister Karen, who would become my spouse 5 years later, I was launched across the continent to who knew what out in the sticks 100 miles north of New York City, in a mysteriously foreign sounding Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, never having gotten a clear idea about how to fend for myself in any significant way, and never having been so far from anyone I knew. But all that will be story for a later chapter.