 |
| We purchase a new horseless carriage |
I had been working on Benjamin Boretz's solo piano piece
O for a
recital and my interest was piqued by its closing gesture - a rising figure in
regularly diminishing intervals: 11 semitones, 10, 9, up to its final single
semitone A-sharp, B-natural - how its dissonance hovers quietly in the piano's
upper registers. I was thinking how like a shimmer of partials it was, such as
might have been produced by notes lower down. The next step was to ask which
lower notes would generate the partials (overtones) represented by those two
high notes. Once calculated I schemed out an arpeggio-like figure that
descended from each such high note then climbed back up. Starting with Ben's
final semitone I inverted his series of intervals (sort of) continuing to
climb the keyboard while expanding, and then re-contracting, the intervals,
each of which intervals was repeated, dampers lifted, a prime number of times,
separated by my descending/ascending arpeggios, finishing up on the 17 times
repeated A-sharp+B-natural an octave up from Ben's final. This was the first
piece I played at The Chapel Performance Space, which had been recently opened
by Non Sequitur in a former home for "wayward girls" in the Wallingford
neighborhood of Seattle. Somebody from a now defunct daily paper was there to
review the concert and thought my piece was an example of "outdated
minimalism". I guess I aimed over his head.
I find myself quite happy, for the most part, to compose for solo keyboard,
but occasionally I have an idea that requires expanded forces. Such was the
origin of Woe My Road Is Spoken, a set of quasi-variations for string
quartet. The title is from Allen Ginsberg's poem Pull My Daisy. The
spark was a hocket-like figure outlining a set of pitches that trade places
among four instruments of like but not identical sounds - the very stuff of
string quartet writing. There is a system for generating the pitch material
for the next succeeding variation from the pitches that end their respective
preceding variation, but aside from that it is freely composed, and even quite
agreeably melodic in places. I spent considerable time getting the midi
version to sound passable, but would dearly love to hear a quartet of real
instruments give it a go. What I don't remember is whether it uses any mod-17
transformations or not. My vague hunch is that it does.
Pavan, a piece for violin and piano, got its name from the heading I
gave the first sketch page: "PA VN" - abbreviations of "piano" and "violin" -
happily close to "Pavan" which, as a character of dance, seemed to fit the
material pretty well. As with
Woe My Road Is Spoken I don't recall any
of its transformational details, other than that they were carefully worked
out. One aspect of its articulatory surface that pleases me especially was the
idea to have the violin play in two different modes for different segments:
"with vibrato" and "without vibrato", or, as I put it in the score "like
playing violin" and "like playing fiddle".
In my listening at that time I had come across a traditional song that stuck
firmly in my ear and imagination: Old Bangum, an epic tale of valor in
just a few quatrains, featuring some finely wrought nonsense syllables in
crucial spots of each verse. The best way to rid myself of the earworm was to
compose the heck out of it, the result being something like an opera, for solo
piano and voice(s) in which the song itself plays the part of the character on
stage. When Karen and I performed it we both sang the part of the song, so
that (given my untrained voice) it wouldn't come across as an art song.
Compositionally I am pleased with the care I took in the selection of pitches
that accompany each successive stanza as it is sung. They are selected from
the pitches found in the tune, with no two such selected sets being identical.
The music between the stanzas is freely composed.
 |
| Your blogger at Mt. Rainier |
I also began tinkering around with a method of slicing and re-assembling sound
files to create rhythmic and pitch textures out of them. I was inspired partly
by the work of film-maker Stan Brakhage, especially his remarkable
Mothlight,
in which moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass were assembled, frame
by frame, and by having noticed, while editing sound files, that even where
some track or other was substandard in some way or other (noisy, muddy, boomy,
etc.) that a tiny blip of it was often quite interesting as a sound. My idea,
which I thought of as Music as a Film, was to assemble those tiny blips as
frames and see what I could come up with. I found a software solution that
allowed me to easily produce a quantity of tiny blips, with control over the
durations of each blip and of the increment between the blips. The rest of the
process was one of successively overdubbing and re-slicing the files. The first
such experiment, using a segment of a Banned Rehearsal file, was
Consider the
Birds. The title came from Karen, who thought it sounded like birds bickering.
The second was
Sputnik Love, also based on a Banned Rehearsal file. I thought
it sounded like satellites booping and beeping. For
Lids Film I recorded the
sounds of various bells and potlids and gongs to get a variety of pitches and
timbres. While assembling all the parts I realized that each of the
preliminary files was interesting to me on its own, so I kept most of them.
Two hymns rounded out my compositional activity that biennium:
Through All The World Below (to a traditional text) and
Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read on a text by Charles Wesley.
 |
| the new old piano |
Meanwhile, I gave three recitals. The first was on June 10, 2006, called
"Preludes in Seattle Part 1". I performed the respective first four preludes
of the sets of 24 written by Greg Short, Ken Benshoof, and Lockrem Johnson, as
well as the first four of Ken's other set of 24 -
Patti's Parlour Pieces. Also performed were my
3 Strathspeys (1979),
High and Inside (2006), and the electronic
version of the
Abyss (2005); Benjamin Boretz's
Liebeslied, and
O; Doug Palmer's
Another Sad Song Littering The Highway of Life; and I collaborated with
Tom Baker to perform his piece
On-Off. "Preludes in Seattle Part 2", on
March 17, 2007, brought Preludes 5-8 of Ken Benshoof, Greg Short, and Lockrem
Johnson; Pieces 5-8 of Ken's
Patti's Parlour Pieces; Marcus Oldham's
Fragments; my first attempt to re-compose (at his invitation) Ben
Boretz's
Liebeslied, under the title
Liebeslied (Amended); and
my
Intermezzo 3 (1983), Diapsalmata (1979), and Seeds (1987). The third
was on October 17, 2007. On it I performed Gavin Borchert's
Prelude and
Two-Part Invention; Lockrem Johnson's
Fifth Sonata and (with
soprano Lori Froggét) his song cycle
Songs In The Wind; Benjamin Boretz's
("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") my
Sonata 1979 (1979),
Intermezzo 4 (1983), and
Old Bangum (2007), with Karen joining my on the voice parts. This was
to be also the last recital I gave at University Temple United Methodist
Church, moving on to The Chapel Performance Space, which was to offer some
significant logistical simplicities.
 |
| Newberry National Volcanic Monument (Oregon) |
Banned Rehearsal continued its merry way, being mostly Karen, Neal and me,
occasionally joined by Steve; and Neal continued his Gradus project. It was
still all A-naturals, but by the last session of 2007 he was into rungs that
included the 7th of them (counting up from the bottom), and we were doubling
up the rungs - two 19-20 minute rungs per session. The last significant
musical event of these years was the replacement of the 1976 Yamaha studio
grand that my folks had bought for me with an 1890 Chickering grand. The
Yamaha had a habit of breaking strings on me, and I had, frankly, learned
about as much as I could from it. The Chickering had some clunks and
un-evenness, as might be expected, and I wouldn't say it was an easy piano to
play (its action was an older type, and was not particularly good at quickly
repeating notes) but it did help me rethink how I was playing - and it sounded
fabulous for the most part.
Our family had been going camping at Mt. Rainier for several years, but 2006
was the last of those trips. Instead we began doing longer road trips. In 2007
we drove south into Oregon to tour some volcanoes, stopping at Newberry
National Volcanic Monument, which is a fabulously strange place, Crater Lake
National Park, and finished up at Mt. Saint Helens National Volcanic Monument.
Banned Playout:
2006:
Numbered: 694-711 - 9:10:58
Assembly Rechoired: (one session)
00:31:09
Peripheral: (two sessions) - 00:41:37
Total 2006: 10:23:44
2007:
Numbered: 712-730 - 9:48:23
Total 2007: 9:48:23
Grand Total: 738:56:37
Scores:
High and Inside
Woe My Road Is Spoken
Pavan
Old Bangum
Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read
Through All The World Below
Recordings:
High and Inside
Woe My Road Is Spoken
Pavan
Old Bangum
Whether The Word Be Preached Or Read
Through All The World Below
Consider The Birds
Sputnik Love
Lids Film
