Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The, Toccata, Lamb of God - 2002

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In 2002 I made several experiments composing music based partly or wholly on mod-17 pitch-class procedures. Toccata is, I think, the loosest of the bunch. It is an arrangement for solo piano of my 1986 oboe piece Retrato de Euchababilla, made by adding additional lines and harmonies that I could convince myself were mod-17 derived, resulting in a kind of hybrid music, some mod-12 serial and some mod-17 something or other. However, I don't remember what it was about those mod-17 notes that made them so in my head. It is very much a toccata, in the sense that it lives and dies in the touch of the pianist, and less in the sense of toccatas as being music of quick notes and tricky fingering.

Lamb of God is a setting, in English, of the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass, for voice and piano. It is flat-footedly serial, based on a 17-tone row, but using that row as a melody and not as a means of integrating vertical structures with horizontal. Karen and I had been working up Stravinsky's The Owl and the Pussycat and the influence of its surface texture is obvious. I remember putting some time into designing the row, but the details of that design are hardly worth digging into.

Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The, or 

Work

Architecture

Unity

And

The, 

went through quite a process before it came out the other end as what it is now. The original image I had was of a music consisting of shards of sound that would be come upon suddenly, as in fog, unexpected and fearsome. I thought that I would compose a set of such shards for piano and then combine that with improvised percussion accompaniment. Banned Rehearsal made several valiant attempts, much of which yielded some interesting sessions, but none of which were really what I had in mind. At some point while I was working on it, Ben was in town and in conversation he suggested that, as a general rule, if one wanted something specific it was best to do it oneself, and if one wanted to work with others it might be better to ditch the conception and work with those others on an equal basis, which is what I eventually did. I recorded my piano score, which consisted of 17 shards, derived by mod-17 multiplicative transformations of a small pitch-class set, at Jack Straw Cultural Center, then recorded myself improvising along on percussion. The results were fine but there was a lingering dissatisfaction. The piano bits, brief as they are, form together a stronger piece than when combined with anything else. I performed it several times as a solo, leaving long spaces between bits. When I picked it up again recently to see what I could make of it now I ended up being most happy with not giving the breaks between any more special treatment than I would give the breaks between any other set of disjunct but related pieces, allowing the tonal and affectual distinctions to serve for both fog and fearsomeness. In aesthetic matters image always trumps fact.

your blogger on a hike

Two small compositions were completed that year: an interlude for four French Horns based on my hymn Depth of Mercy, written (and recorded!) for a horn quartet my uncle Jim Meyer (Karen's dad's brother) was in; and a variation for piano trio of Diabelli's much varied Waltz, written for an ensemble that the clarinetist Sean Osborn had put together (Quake). They performed it (quite well) along with a bunch of others, in the recital space at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle, possibly the most prestigious venue any of my music has been heard within, before or since.

2002 also saw a shift in Banned Rehearsal, as Aaron chose to take a sabbatical for a few years while those of us who were parents worked out the kinks of doing sessions with kids about. We eventually cut back to meeting every other week or so, chalking up a mere 17 sessions. On the alternate weeks Neal re-started a project that he had first assayed while in San Diego: Gradus for Fux, Tesla, and Milo the Wrestler. the short version of the idea was that he would teach himself to play piano one combination of keys at a time, starting with the lowest A-natural, followed by a session on the second A-natural up, followed by both together, thence to the third A-natural and onward into the abyss of virtual infinity. From the beginning I have been his listener, recordist, archivist, and commenter, and in those capacities Neal's project has been an important part of my own musical life ever since. That year alone saw 34 thirty-minute sessions. It would be many years before all the combinations of A-naturals would be exhausted.

I gave two recitals at my church that year. The first was in February. I played: Preludes 1-8, by Lockrem Johnson; Untitled (Slow Waltz), by Gavin Borchert; Diapsalmata, Ruth 1:16-17 (Song for Yvonne and David), Psalm 22:9-10, and Jeremiah 17:5-8, by me, the latter three with Karen singing; The Owl and the Pussycat by Stravinsky (again with Karen); Liebeslied and O, by Benjamin Boretz; and "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." by me to finish it up. The second recital was in October, at which I played: Preludes 9-16 by Lockrem Johnson; A Cat's Life (with Neal providing the narration), and Three Strathspeys, both by me; ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") by Benjamin Boretz; and Toccata, by me.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: 627-644 - 12:00:19
Peripheral (2 sessions with me and Pete Comley): 1:00:58

Total 2002: 2:05:24

Grand Total: 700:07:18

Scores:

Toccata
Lamb of God
Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The
Interlude on Depth of Mercy

Recordings:

Toccata

Lamb of God

Work/Architecture/Unity/And/The

"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose.", Ms. Found in a Bottle - 2001

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Lingering in my piano bench since 1982 was the original reel-to-reel master tape of my synclavier piece AKU. Some artifacts had crept in to the cassette copy the listening library folks made for me at the UW, and I was certain that if I could, someday, find a working reel-to-reel tape deck and the equipment to transfer the track to digital I would finally have a record of the piece in all its pristine glory. And so, when I learned that my friend and occasional Banned Rehearsal collaborator Pete Comley had all those parts I asked if he would be willing to help me out, which of course, being as interested in hearing an old synclavier piece as I was, he did. He was living just a few hundred yards away at the time, so one day in May I walked my tape over to his apartment. He threaded the tape and prepared the DAT for recording, and set it all going. It is difficult to describe the combination of dismay and delight that followed as it became clear what time's ravages had worked upon my master tape, transforming what remained into a magnificently tortured parody of what it had been 20 years prior - a sound unattainable by any other means. A few months later I took that file (on DAT) to Jack Straw Cultural Center and dubbed into it a recording of my more recent text piece Confessions of a Polyphonist, calling the result Ms. Found in a Bottle after the tale by Poe. 

I also completed several new compositions that year: Lauda Anima and How Firm a Foundation, for organ; The Farthest Shore, for flute trio; a setting of Jeremiah 17:5-8, for voice and piano; and "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." for solo piano. Marcus Oldham performed Lauda Anima magnificently on the big organ at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral. Much to my regret the event was not recorded (at least to my knowledge) so it lives only in my memory. Both of these short organ works live perfectly well on piano as well. I don't recall the exact incitement for my flute trio, but I have a vague recollection that it was involved with some sort of call for scores sponsored by the Washington Composers' Forum. I have never heard it played on real flutes, but Sarah Bassingthwaighte had a group of her students (nine of them, if I remember correctly what she told me) perform it while they were touring in Russia. Somewhere I have a copy of the program, complete with my name transliterated into Cyrillic. Fortunately the robot flutes of midi get the idea of it across pretty well. The Jeremiah setting was intended for Karen to sing at church. At the time Karen's dad was an associate pastor at a church in Olympia, so for a few years, most summers, I would write something we could play for them.

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And in December I completed the first large-scale piano piece I had done since Slow Blues: "Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose." The first ideas I sketched were for violin and piano, but it took on a life of its own and the violin thoughts were left behind. It follows a similar tonal scheme to Slow Blues - the notes used in each figuration-segment are derived from successive (mod-17 multiplicative) transformations of a set of pitch classes. I allowed myself considerably more freedom in composing the relative hefts of each segment, so that the piece as a whole moves along much like a set of preludes, or variations on a theme, performed without any breaks between them. I played it at a Seattle Composers' Salon (probably early in 2002), the video of which performance may have played a role in securing grant funding for that long-running project of Tom Baker's. 

All in all it was quite a productive year for me, and though I didn't give any recitals I was trying to be an active participant in the Salon, then being held at a Mennonite church a few miles north of my house, in a space that used to be a movie theater. And of course Banned Rehearsal carried on as best we could, adding 30 or so sessions, and adding just over 20 hours of recorded sound to the corpus.

Banned Playout

Numbered:(596-626) 20:05:30
Assembly Rechoired: (one session) 00:06:37
Peripheral: (three sessions) 00:08:48

Total 2001:  20:20:55

Grand Total: 698:01:54

Scores:

Lauda Anima
The Farthest Shore
Jeremiah 17:5-8
How Firm a Foundation
"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."

Recordings:

Lauda Anima

The Farthest Shore

Ms. Found in a Bottle

Jeremiah 17:5-8

How Firm a Foundation

"Mrs. Ramsay rose. Lily rose."