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Karen at the Barrytown Post Office
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Seeds is a set of six tiny scores that arose out of my frequent, if no
longer quite daily, epistolary discipline, which continued for a while after
Karen and I were married. Each is dedicated to a specific person, whose name
is in the title. Being seeds, I wasn't thinking of them as finished pieces as
such, but rather as raw ideas to be put to whatever purpose the dedicatee
might think of. For instance, the one I labelled "for Keith" became the
opening figure of my Sonata in Two Movements of 1988. Years later, as I was
transcribing my old scores into engraving software, I took them up as
something to perform. I played them at an early Seattle Composers' Salon, when
it was being held at SoundBridge on the lower floor of Benaroya Hall, and,
during the same epoch, at University Temple United Methodist Church, (March
17, 2007).
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| your blogger with Karen and Jill |
Sonatina, or
Lenztanzen as I was styling it at the time, was
written principally for clavichord, and uses one of the few "extended
techniques" I have found myself desirous of perpetrating. At one point the
music descends to a low D-natural , which is held with one hand and then
thumped with the other, transmitting that thump through the key and tangent
directly to the strings, producing a satisfying pitched impulse to the held
note. It consists of two or three episodes or movements, depending on how one
parses it, the first being of a stern and dramatic character in dialogue with
obsessive sequences of four-note figures. The stern bit lent itself to
transformation under multiplication by 5 ("M5" or "4ths Transform"), as under
that transformation the intervals of the material twist around each other in
interesting ways, effecting a clearly audible but homogenous shift in the
tonal feel. A decade and more later I was to discover how useful these "M
transforms" could be under arithmetic based on cycles of 17 digits (mod 17)
rather than 12 (mod 12). The next part is more oratorical, and the musics of
the various episodes are then set in dialog to finish it up. I'm still quite
fond of it, and it also works well on a nicely resonant piano, though my
extended technique can't be duplicated, as there is no direct contact between
key and string after it first struck, as there is on clavichord.
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| at Brook House |
Banned Rehearsal and its related activities continued throughout the year.
When Aaron was in town between terms we would get together for sessions,
otherwise relying on Telepaths to hold us together. Karen and I would also
make tapes pretty regularly, under the rubric "Assembly Rechoired", often with
guests who were curious about what we meant by free improvisation. For our
anniversary in October we travelled back to Bard College and environs so that
I could introduce Karen to my friends there. She had already met Ben when he
came out West on the occasion of Neal's and my "Jim and Ben" show the
previous Spring. Dan, Penny, Jill, and Chuck were still around, and several
others. We spent the week tooling around the countryside and making tapes with
whoever felt like hanging with us. It was during that visit that we became
acquainted with Tildy Bayar, a stalwart of the News of Music and Open Space
communities. For our first anniversary dinner we went to 4 Brothers pizza, in
Rhinebeck, if memory serves.
Banned Playout:
Numbered: (105, 107, 109-117, 119-127*): 16:35:35
Telepaths: (13
sessions): 10:18:46
Sectionals: (5 sessions): 03:55:49
Assembly
Rechoireds (12-40): 22:52:43
Peripherals: (6 sessions): 04:42:13
Total 1987: 58:25:06
Grand Total: 236:37:55
*105 and 107 were from telepaths that I didn't mix together until 1987, and
118 was from a telepath that wasn't mixed until 1988.
scores:
Seeds
Sonatina
recordings:
Seeds
Sonatina
