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| at Mt. Rainier National Park |
N is a composed-out idea concerning Neal's
Gradus project. On
one level it is a list of all the notes on the piano, one at a time, each
played once, starting in the middle, and progressing chromatically in pairs of
tones matching those ascending to those descending. The rhythm and dynamics
are designed to group certain pitch-class sets together, making it simpler to
hear their cyclic repetitions as the piece goes along. It is, in that sense, a
form of musical analysis by composition. Ken Benshoof remarked to me that the
effect of its directness as a structure was to immediately let listeners off
the hook from any need to figure out what was going on, since that was so
blatantly obvious that no figuring was required.
If a composition could be made out of an analysis of a domain, then one could
regard an analysis as a composition. One common tool of musical analysis is
the grouping of related notes together in order to show how those groups work
with each other. I had been thinking about Scriabin's penultimate Prelude, Op.
74 #4, and came to think of it as being based on a certain group of four notes
(0,3,4,7), such as (C, E-flat, E, G), which could be thought of as a major and
minor triad sharing their outer members. What if, my thought went, I were to
play the prelude but leave out all the notes that weren't those four? and what
would each of the twelve transpositions of that set sound like? Using midi I
was able to accomplish this without too much fuss, resulting in Extracts, the
first set of which is just each of those transpositions one after the other.
The next step was to see what combinations of two such sets sounded like
together. Since there are twelve transposition relationships, and each such
bi-tetrachordal combination has twelve unique transpositions there are 144
total possibilities. My 12 Extracts are those 144 pieces divided into
twelve groups. I finished the first set of them in 2009.
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| at Yellowstone |
But the bulk of my composing energies were bent toward my
Music as a Film project.
Zither Film is, as the title suggests,
based on a recording of me strumming three zithers: an autoharp that used to
live in a box under my parents bed, a german concert zither that found me from
the estate of a woman from our church, and an old handmade zither with heavy
strings and a profoundly cracked soundboard that was given to me by a harpist.
As with
Lids Film I kept most of the preliminary tracks intact, so that
in my mind the project includes more than just the finished item. A related
endeavor was a multimedia piece that had several iterations:
Improvising a Framework for Composition so as to Compose My Thoughts About
Improvisation. Using various portions of the preliminary tracks from
Lids Film, a
recitation of the (re-ordered) list of tempo indications used in Scriabin's
Sonatas, a recording I had made in 1984 of the Sealth High School Band
performing our national anthem at Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, and a
text I wrote for the occasion. For the first performance, at Seattle
Composers' Salon, I finished up by pouring 200 ping-pong balls down the back
of the stage onto the Chapel's wooden floor. Huge success! Another performance
was my part of
Chapel Event (a collaborative concert with Neal and
Aaron) that involved dancers Sheri Brown and Lin Lucas. And lastly I set a
version of it to a video taken out the side window of our car as we drove home
from West Seattle one morning.
As an afterthought to the Music as a Film project I put together a
sound collage based on an early text-to-speech rendition of the headers of a
bunch of spam emails I had collected advertising various sexual products. I
called it Torch Song. I also continued writing hymns, completing four:
Day is Dying in the West (text by Mary Ann Lathbury);
Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me (text by Charles Wesley);
Jesus, My Saviour (also by Charles Wesley); and
Who Would True Valour See (text by John Bunyan).
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| at Dot, WA |
Although 2008 saw no recitals I did join with Neal and Aaron in the
above-mentioned
Chapel Event in the fall. In addition to my piece Aaron
presented
Wake, an electronic work; and Neal performed an hour-long
rendition of three rungs from
Gradus, all of which was pulled together
by the astonishing Butoh performances of Sheri Brown and Lin Lucas. In June of
2009 I gave my first solo recital at The Chapel Performance Space:
Preludes in Seattle Part 3, featuring
Preludes 9-12 from the
sets of Lockrem Johnson, Greg Short, and Ken Benshoof; as well as number 9-12
of Ken's
Patti's Parlour Pieces; my
Intermezzo V,
Sonata 1980, and I; Elaine Barkin's
Brandeis: Four Short Pieces for Piano; and J. K. Randall's
some old troubador songs recollected from around 1200 on the piano with
interludes. And of course Banned Rehearsal and Gradus carried on regularly.
In 2008 our family took to the road once again, touring Grand Teton,
Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks. In 2009, as the economic crisis
lingered, we mostly stuck close to home, though we did visit Mt. Rainier
National Park at least once. It was at about this time that my work
responsibilities moved into the commercial segment of the title insurance
industry, which was fascinating and kind of fun, but which, eventually, got the better of my stress level.
Banned Playout:
2008:
Numbered: 731-749 09:13:34
Total 2008: 09:13:34
2009:
Numbered 750-769 10:14:06
Assembly Rechoired (one session) 00:30:03
Peripheral
(two sessions) 00:20:14
Total 2009: 11:04:23
Grand Total: 759:14:34
Scores:
N
Day is Dying in the West
Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me
Jesus, My Saviour
Who Would True Valour See
Recordings:
Day is Dying in the West
Jesu, Thy Boundless Love to Me
Jesus, My Saviour
Who Would True Valour See
Zither Film
Improvising a Framework for Composition so as to Compose My Thoughts About
Improvisation
Torch Song
