The Decade of Chaos Part 1: 1991-1994

Karen and me dressed as earth children for Halloween

At the end of March, 1991, Karen and I welcomed our first baby into the family, and composition activity slowed down considerably. We had very cleverly announced the impending event to our mothers (and my dad) while we were visiting with my folks toward the end of the previous Summer, by mentioning that we had tickets to an opera in April and that we would be needing a babysitter that evening. General astonishment and celebration ensued. We let the news filter out to our choir while, during a rehearsal of some crowd noise, Karen said "I will be over my pregnancy in [some number of] months" rather than "salt light" or whatever else was written in the score.

As our activities with the choir, and with choral music in general, were becoming a large part of our lives, I tried once again to see if I could write effective music for choir. fourpartsongs (1992) is a setting of a hymn by Charles Wesley that appeared, sans tune, in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal. I set each of the four stanzas separately (four part-songs) for SATB (four-part songs). As compositions go they are solid and, I think, singable, but difficult. They are diatonic, a few degrees skewed off of tonal practice, and don't shy away from what I regard as tasteful tone-painting. Later, I recast one of them - O Love, how cheering is thy ray - as a solo for Karen to sing, and even later re-set the entire text, with new music, as a hymn.

wave for the camera

1993 saw the first of what became many recitals that I gave at our church. The main impetus was to present A Cat's Life, with narration provided by Ellen Dessler, a drama student at the University of Washington. The program also included Elaine Barkin's Brandeis, and Benjamin Boretz's Partita, Liebeslied, and ("...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious Sonata..."). 

That year I also composed a big concert piece, originally for organ: "...finish then thy new creation...". The title is from another Charles Wesley text. Looking back at it now I was struggling with how to feel my way through a large-scale piece without any way to think clearly about where I was going and what I was carrying along. It is not a bad practice as such, but the result in this case is rather woolly. A few years later I arranged it for string orchestra, and it was performed in that form by a community orchestra on Vashon Island, under the baton of my former composition teacher Dell Wade.

More successful was Nocturnes or Discourses, a procedurally structured improvisation project realized with the kind assistance of sound engineer Tom Stiles. Tom had access to the big piano in Brechemin Auditorium at the UW, so, late one evening we set it up with a microphone. Tom was recording digitally, and this was my first experience working with that innovation. First I sat silently for a span of time (5 minutes? 9 minutes? - something that divided 45 evenly so that the finished thing would fit on a 45' cassette side). Then Tom would play that recording back to me through headphones while I improvised to it, as though I were reading it as a score. Then we took that recording and repeated the process  until we had enough sessions to overlay the recordings so that each improvisation would be paired with its "score". In 2006/2007 I was able, thanks to the acquisition of a multi-track digital recording device to redo this on my own, using two separate pianos - or perhaps on each piano separately - and then combining them. 

your blogger and his boss

Doomsome Otherings (a non-Latinate translation of "Canonic Variations") is a set of five variations (inclusive of the 'theme') for viola and piano prompted by a possible mis-construal of a movement from one of Prokofiev's piano concerti. What I thought I had heard in that movement was the intrusion of one variation's figurations into another variation's flow. I thought it would make an interesting form if I were to do that systematically. I wrote a 'theme' of 50 measures that uses a homogenous figuration scheme for the first 30 bars, then switches to the figuration scheme of the variation two slots later (music like variation two into the 'theme', of three into one,  four into two, 'theme' into three, and of one into four) for the next ten bars, switching back to the music like that of the first 30 bars for the last 10. I also had a scheme for determining the pitch material of each bar that ran, as I recall, somewhat independently of the figuration scheme. It involved several layers of overlapping sequences of pentachords, but details of that determination have faded from memory. I still like the piece, though the piano part is beyond me and it seems to have a vanishing effect on violists, so I stopped shopping it around lest I lose any more violist friends.

your blogger failing to home improve

During this time Ben had asked me whether, based on my flimsy knowledge of formal logic notation, I would help proof-read and prepare computer engraved files of the formal definitions in "Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought", which he was preparing for publication by OpenSpace. While re-reading it I started to wonder what tonal music, as generated analogously to the "Outline of a Tonal-Syntactic System" contained in Part V of Meta-Variations, would sound like if it were 'stretched' so that all the generating intervals were made larger. I quickly settled on a 17-tone "octave" (or "modular interval") as being an interesting choice for the modular partitioning (an octave plus a perfect fourth rather than a perfect octave) because that would make the second partitioning interval (analogous to the 7 semitone "Fifth") an interval of 9 semitones (a major 6th), and the third partitioning (analogous to the 3 and 4 semitone intervals of minor and major thirds) intervals of 4 and 5 semitones respectively. I was also amused that my root position "major" triad would be "C F A", punning on a tonal root position "F A C", and that my "minor" triad would be "C E A", punning on the tonal minor triad of "A C E". We love puns so there it was. My 1994 setting of Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths...") was my first go at it and I was intrigued by the results, using just the most basic of tonal functions: "tonic", "dominant", and "subdominant" harmonies, and possibly a secondary dominant or two. The expanded octave and variability of sounding pitches across the registers opened up a world for me in which I could compose unique harmonic paths using fairly simple pitch functions. I have been following up on ramifications of this speculation ever since and consequently my subsequent oeuvres is peppered liberally with "mod-17" pieces of one kind or another.

Banned Rehearsal continued doing regular sessions, mostly just Karen, Aaron and me, later joined by our toddler, but toward the end of 1994 Neal and Anna were back in town with their little one so things began to get busy indeed. We had been holding our sessions in the spare bedroom, but soon our toddler would need that room. There happened to be a two-car garage on the lot, but the configuration made it nigh impossible to get a second car into it, so with the assistance of my dad we framed half of it in for a studio. The Tintinabulary has been collecting instruments ever since.

Banned Playout (1991):
Numbered: (243-279) 29:03:17
Total 1991:29:03:17

Banned Playout (1992)
Numbered: (280-315) 28:14:01
Total 1992: 28:14:01

Banned Playout (1993)
Numbered: (316-347) 26:02:49
Total 1993: 26:02:49

Banned Playout (1994)
Numbered: (348-379) 24:54:42
Sectionals: 2 Sessions: 1:32:42
Total 1994: 26:27:24

Grand Total: 480:47:31

Scores:
Doomsome Otherings
Psalm 130

Recordings:
Psalm 130 (1994)

Nocturnes or Discourses (1993)

A Cat's Life, Ruth 1:16-17, Psalm 23 (meditation, responses) - 1989-1990

drawing
by Karen Eisenbrey

These years found me working on the idea of telling a story in music, the upshot of which was A Cat's Life, a little opera for solo piano (and narrator (optional)). I wrote the narration myself, developing the story as I composed the music. I loaded the score up with what would later be called "Easter Eggs": There are three "Act"s (anagram of "cat") played "attacca". The music is openly diatonic, though I wasn't thinking in "keys" as much as shifting stances among segments of material. In addition to the narration I made use of a bunch of tricks of the trade, including something like leitmotives or idées fixe, (including one "secret" leitmotive that is labelled in the score but never mentioned by the narrator), and egregious tone painting (twittering birds, a forest sunrise, a ferocious tiger). I was under some hope that some better pianist than I would pick it up and give it a whirl, but so far I have had no takers. The keyboard writing is flashy and fun, and includes a rather wicked double fugue in the second act ("The Great Task"), the first subject of which spans multiple octaves. It was among the last pieces that I made a fair copy of by hand (in pencil), getting up early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to work on it while the house was quiet. It was probably about the last time I payed much attention to television, which I would turn on low to keep me company. I vaguely recall some early morning interview shows, fishing adventures, and Thomas the Tank Engine. After the score was completed Karen drew some cute cat drawings in it,  which I managed to carry forward into the digitally engraved score. I've trotted it out in public three times over the years, but it takes me longer and longer to relearn the notes, and the last time was pretty spot-on anyway, and fabulously narratived by a high-school actor, Olivia Sterne, who also let me make a recording of the narration so that I could assemble a "studio" version of the whole.

Anarchy

My setting of Ruth 1:16-17 ("Song for Yvonne and David") was written for Karen's sister's wedding, and is the first piece of vocal music of mine that works well and that sounds like me. I figured it would be inappropriate to the occasion to flaunt what intellectual pretension I have, so I tried my best to make it approachable: tuneful and without blatant dissonance. There is a tempo change at a structural point in the text, and I was quite pleased with my solution. The music needed to broaden so I switched from quarters and eighths to halves and quarters, but marked it "faster". The result, to my ear, sounds less like the deployment of a drag-chute than like suddenly breaking out into open country and clear sky.

Amnehitabel

Although the score is brief, my treatment of Psalm 23, the quintessential Judeo-Christian centering meditation, there is much ado in it. I wanted to treat the text plainly, as a deliberately and clearly spoken object, read aloud, one verse at a time. Each verse is printed whole on its own page while on each facing page are two fragments of music (I was thinking clavichord, but guitar could also be an interesting choice). The first fragment of each pair is the same throughout, while the second of each is unique. One way to interpret it, which is pretty much how I eventually realized it, was to alternate/intersperse the reading of each verse with an improvised trajectory from the first music fragment to or through the second. I may have recorded the clavichord part shortly after completing the score, but didn't get around to putting it together with the text for several years, taking advantage of a visit by Neal to record his voice speaking. Much later, after I became more adept at digital editing, I was able to realize a version I am pleased with.

your blogger, as Skeeter for Halloween

In April of 1989 we bought a house in the Maple Leaf neighborhood of Seattle. It seemed like a financial stretch for us at the time, but home prices were rising fast so we jumped. We may have been the last people in Seattle to be able to buy a house for under $80,000. Our interest rate was 11%. Karen and I took a two-week vacation that September. The first week was spent in Palo Alto, to be at, and in, Karen's sister's wedding (at which Karen sang my setting of the Ruth text) and the second week was spent visiting Neal & Anna in San Diego. We probably made some tapes, but the big news was that, while we were there, they learned they were to expect a baby that spring. In other Banned Rehearsal news, Aaron was back in town, more or less to stay, and in consequence of both those happy events and the loss of spare time and energy ensuing upon the arrival of a new baby, the Telepath project fell by the wayside, not to be revived for many years. The Seattle contingent made a Telepath for Banned Rehearsal 200, but alas, it was never consummated by a corresponding San Diego session, and so #200 remains undone to this day.

Banned Playout (1989):

Numbered: (160-199): 27:38:54

Telepaths: (3 sessions): 02:22:09

Assembly Rechoired (43): 00:47:16

Peripherals: (1 session): 00:20:30

Total 1989: 30:30:49

Grand Total: 338:08:46

Banned Playout (1990):

Numbered: (201-224): 33:54:30

Total 1990: 

Grand Total: 371:03:16

scores:

A Cat's Life

Ruth 1:16-17

Psalm 23 (meditation, responses)

recordings:

A Cat's Life

Ruth 1:16-17

Psalm 23 (meditation, responses)