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| Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer, early 1985 |
I wrote
Pastorale for The Fehrwood Ensemble, an amateur recorder group
my Mom was part of. I was intrigued by the ultra-precise intonation of the
recorder's straight tone, but felt it was wasted on simply being in tune. In
order to force the issue I filled the piece with long held tones and asked the
players to tail off the ends so that the pitch would sag. Being amateurs, they
were remarkably game for such shenanigans. Structurally the piece consists of
the gradual emergence of a melody out of a bed of long foghorn-like tones. It
was performed at Brechemin Auditorium at the UW in January of 1985.
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| Aaron Keyt, Anna, Neal, and your blogger, early 1985 |
The title of my solo piano piece
Create Desolation and Call It Peace is
a quote of graffiti I had seen near the UW campus, which was, as I understood,
a translation from Tacitus - a complaint against Roman occupation. I think of
it as a long, slow, funeral oration. I was also (and remain) interested in
structural repetition, such as permeated European concert music well into the
19th Century, especially the effect at the hinges, where what was heard the
first time through as an old thing repeated is upon continuation heard as a
new development entirely. Both Pastorale and Create Desolation open with
directly repeated passages.
 |
| Banned Rehearsal, early 1985 |
Banned Rehearsal continued apace. By the end of the year we had 19 numbered
sessions, one of which (#5) fails to exist {we were up at Whidbey Island in July and
were hoping to record on a boombox while we trudged to our knees out in the Holmes Harbor mudflats, but the batteries had died}, and two of which are dubbed together
from Telepaths; three named but unnumbered tapes (our procedure was still in
flux); added one new member (Anna K, who appeared first as a guest on Telepath
#2 Bickleton, and then as a member on Banned Rehearsal 18 on December 16) and
included six additional guests. We performed with dancer Julie Ludwig at The
Studio Theater in Meany Hall, at the UW, by playing back pre-recorded sounds
on boom-boxes as part of her dance "Images From A Day". On top of all that we
were preparing for our first self-produced live event that next January, part
of which involved us doing whatever it was we had found ourselves doing, and
part of which involved performances of various of our recent compositions.
 |
| Banned Rehearsal, early 1985 |
As side projects and one-offs I also recorded an hour and a half of a mid
October high-school football game. My Dad was an administrator at Sealth High
School at the time, so I was able to sneak in to Memorial Stadium with him. I
had also started monkeying around with overdubbing on the cheap, using
multiple cassette tape decks, one of which I had had altered so that there was
a button on the back to turn off the "erase" head. Oddly, it's that deck (a
mid 1970s Sanyo) that still works - perhaps the oldest chunk of functional
electronic hardware in the house. One particularly successful project was to
overdub Banned Telepath #2 Bellevue on top of itself 2, 4, 8, and 16 times,
resulting in a cruddy flange of detuned recorder tones and clothes-hanger
gongs. Less aurally successful was the Banned's idea to dub all the numbered
sides of Banned Rehearsal together into one grand Banned Thology. The first
attempt resulted in four "Mixers" each being four sides piled together, and
one "Thology" being the four mixers in a single heap. Four hours of murk.
1984 Banned Playout:
Numbered (1-4, 6-19): 16:30:05
Unnumbered: 01:55:41
Telepaths:
03:09:58
Sectionals: 00:47:33
Images from a Day: 00:21:40
1984
Thology: 03:55:12
Total: 26:40:09
Links:
Pastorale:
Create Desolation and Call It Peace:
https://imslp.org/wiki/Create_Desolation_and_Call_It_Peace_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)
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