On January 18, 1985, Banned Rehearsal produced a concert at Brechemin
Auditorium, at the University of Washington. The first half consisted of
compositions: Aaron's "Pastorale for Helena" and "Pastorale for Keith",
performed by me; Neal's "1/3 Poem x N" and "Pastorale: The Color of Water", performed by Neal; and my "Pastorale",
performed by The Fehrwood Ensemble. The second half was an extended
improvisation affectionately labeled "The Fishcritic" (Banned Rehearsal 23).
Stu Dempster, bless his heart, had made attendance at our show a requirement
for one of his general music classes, so we actually had folks in attendance
outside of family, the performers, and a few friends with nothing better to
do. We even got copies of their written responses. A highlight that doesn't
show up in the auditory record was the use of an overhead projector to display
the shadow of a glass fish-shaped plate across much of the stage. Some of us
went out for pizza afterward in a group that included Neal's sister Karen.
Legend has it that this was the occasion at which she was set straight as to
which of us was Keith and which was Aaron. The tell was that it was the Keith
fellow who was moving to a new place the next day.
And so I did, having rented a little "mother-in-law" house in the Greenwood
neighborhood of Seattle, The Greenwood Half House on NE 89th St, most of a
block west of Aurora Ave, set behind a larger house occupied, at the time, by
two nurses. It had one bedroom, a living room, a bathroom (tub only no
shower), and a small kitchen. It was heated by a gas furnace that stood in the
middle of the living room. For awhile the only keyboard instrument I had in
the house was the Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite.
So I wrote a piece for it. Back then I was calling it "Trance Butchered
Knight" since I thought it sounded like a take-off of Transfigured Night, or
at least swam in the same ocean. Having later made attempts to suppress my
snarkiness I renamed it "Lacrymosa", largely because it is somewhat weepy,
befitting its Expressionist background, and the title could be sung to its
dominating figurations. It worked well on the Sprite, milking its crude
swell-pedal effect to good effect. The pitchwork isn't too shabby and it works
well on piano as well.
Aaron's Sudden Song "Bickelton Burger" got me thinking along similar lines:
sit down with an instrument and an idea for text and a tape recorder, and let
'er rip. During that summer I recorded a bunch of them and called the group
"Summer Songs". The sudden song project persisted in Banned Rehearsal, and may
have encouraged Neal in hopes that we would soon go electric and become a rock
band. For my part, I have never had any desire to walk that path.
Our second produced show "A Short and Simple Concert" (Banned Rehearsal 43)
was held in Brechemin on July 13, 1985. We began with an activity Neal had
developed called "Hunting and Gathering" that involved multiple play-back
decks and multiple recording devices. Each of us, on a schedule, would start
recording while we circled the performance space. We would then put the
cassette tape in a playback machine, rewind to start and punch Play. After a
short while we had quite a din going. At some point I started playing Trance
Butchered Knight on the Funmaker, and when that was done, and as the playback
tapes winked out one by one, we started to sing long tones, eventually fading
to a finish.
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| Karen at the Greenwood Half House |
Another highlight of the first full Banned Year was our visit to The Loft, a
residential facility for middle-school boys who had run afoul of one thing or
another. We distributed toy noisemakers in a gym, pushed record and reveled in
the ensuing mayhem. It was during this year that Neal put together a performance of John Cage's Music for Piano in the Studio Theater at Meany Hall, with four pianos, four pianists (Lise Mann, Neal, Aaron, and me), four headlamps, a chance-operationally generated lighting scheme (hence the headlamps), and a chance-operationally generated schedule of which piano each of us would be playing at any one time. I might add that this schedule quite often had more than one of us playing scores on the same piano at the same time. It ended up being quite a bit of fun.
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| Anna and Neal at the Half House |
In the Fall, Aaron decamped for Law School, leaving Neal, Anna, and I to carry
on. I finished building the clavichord that September, recording an
improvisation on it before I had even brought it up to the correct octave. Fun
with overdubbing continued apace, the major project being to stack the first
32 sides of Banned Rehearsal together in successive pairs: 16 Banned Couples
(two sides each); 8 Banned Mixers (4 sides each); 4 Banned Seminars (8 sides
each); Two Banned Thologies (16 sides each); and the Banned Day (all 32
sides). Many decades later I re-mixed this project digitally, as the original
process had no good way to adjust balances, and the loss of fidelity attendant
on successive overdubs made for awfully murky listening.
When I left Bard I had brought back a list of my friends' addresses, and as a
discipline I would write one letter every day. If someone wrote back I moved
their name to the top of the list. Karen was still living in Tacoma after she
graduated from University of Puget Sound, and she would often be up visiting
with Neal and Anna. Once we had a Banned Rehearsal Session while she was
visiting and she noticed my list. Being rather forward, she added her name. My
first letter to her, penned and spoken out loud during a Banned Sectional (a
session with just two of the original members) started with the words "This is
a test. This is not a test." It was printed several years later in News of
Music as "Keith's First Epistle to The Tacoman". She kept writing back, and
soon became my most loyal correspondent. It was probably a foregone
conclusion, but Neal and Anna (well, mostly Anna) did their best to set us up
now and then, leaving us to ourselves while they went to get ice cream, and
once inviting us along with them to hear Jonathan Richman. On December 22,
after weeks of fog, and during a day that involved two trips to to pick up
Aaron at SeaTac (one attempt of which was successful and some of which was
recorded to become Banned Rehearsal 59) two trips to Karen's apartment in
Tacoma, a dinner with Aaron's family, an Advent service at Neal & Anna's
apartment on Brooklyn Avenue, and some mistletoe, we divulged to each other
our mutual smittenhood and have been a couple ever since.
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| Banned Rehearsal out on the sidewalk |
1985 Banned Playout:
Numbered: (20-61): 35:40:29
Unnumbered: 00:17:19
Telepaths: (3-5):
06:55:10
Sectionals: 20:04:29
Building the Banned Day:
24:35:49
Total 1985: 87:33:16
Grand Total 1984-1985: 113:13:25
Links:
Lacrymosa
https://imslp.org/wiki/Lacrymosa_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)
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