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