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| your blogger in Vantage, WA |
My sabbatical came to a close in 2015, in that I began working on my Etudes
again, but the only completed written-down piece of that year was a hymn I
wrote as a farewell to our long-time church organist and music director David
DiFiore:
Awake, awake to love and work, to a text by Geoffrey A.
Studderi-Kennedy. I continued on my
Sabbatical Improvisations, which
morphed into duets and trios produced with overdubbing. I also made three new
improvised songs -
Troll Rocket,
Wishes Last, and
Repentance Blues - combining the processes and techniques I had used
for the
Summer Songs (1985), their rehashment as
Winter Mix (2003), and copious overdubbing. The acquisition of a
portable recording device led to quite a few field recordings, in which I
recorded sounds that interested me around the house, bird sounds in likely
locations, and various walks in parks. Banned Rehearsal and Gradus continued
as before, Banned Rehearsal reaching recorded session 900 by the end of the
year, incorporating 16 sets of Telepaths to pull in Aaron's contributions
while he was living in Massachusetts and Alaska. Also of note that year was a
project that grew out of a conversation I had with Karen about one of the
books she was writing, my
Tambourine X-tet - essentially a collective
(or overdubbed) improvisation on as many tambourines as could be wrangled
together. I made one overdubbed version on four different tambourines (
Tambourine Quartet), and Banned Rehearsal performed it to some acclaim at a Seattle Composers'
Salon as
Tambourine Quintet, not bad for a thought that was complete
upon its instant.
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| Neal and your blogger |
But in 2016 I completed the next two parts of the Etudes, comprising the
portion I eventually called
Commentary. Each of these parts (and of all
but one of the remaining parts finished later) was based on a single form of
the basic tone-row, and so, in spite of their greater size and complexity,
corresponds in that respect to a single piece from among the eight pieces of
the
Preface. The first of these new parts, called
Second Thoughts, is a set of shortish hunks of music that subjects the
row form to multiplicative operations upon its order, that is, one is based on
every other note, another on every third note, etc. Since the row itself has a
prime number of notes in it this always generates a new row of the same size
(except every "zero-th" note, which just repeats the same note seventeen
times, and which I didn't use). There was more to it than that, but it is
still possible to hear the effect of the chromatic scale aspect of the
original row as it works its way through the generated row forms.
As I originally conceived it, each of the constituent hunks of music could be
played solo or in canon as a duo, and the whole could be crammed together into
an omnibus package for multiple pianos. Midi made this realization quite
practical, but for my own performance purposes I have only presented them as
individual pieces.
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| your blogger in Lincoln Park, Seattle |
The next part,
Corollaries, treats its tone-row form as an interval
row. For instance, the integer 2 of the row form, when treated as a
mod-17 pitch class, would be the D-natural above middle C, and pitches in
multiples of 17 above and below that, but it would be the interval of 2
semitones when treated as an interval-class. There are four pieces in this
part,
Up's Up is uses the interval row (and its two linked
"transpositions") ascending, starting at the bottom and going up, flipping
back to the bottom when the keyboard runs out. In
Down's Down the row's
intervals descend, starting at the top and going down.
Down's Up uses
the inversion of the row's intervals starting at the bottom and
Up's Down is the inversion of the row's intervals starting at the top.
Clever, eh? I made various recordings of these, and later, while working on
another part I revised them in order to be more consistent in how I treated
flipping from the bottom to the top of the keyboard.
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| program for Stillness, Concentrate |
In 2016 I also made an initial foray into thinking about hymnody in ways other
than simply writing hymns. Using a multi-track digital recorder, I recorded
myself singing and improvising upon four hymns that had been with me for as
long as music had:
Jesus Love Me, This Little Light of Mine, Kum Ba Yah, and
We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, a project I called
Autoheterophony, and which Karen quipped sounded like a "choir o'
angles".
Banned Rehearsal made 25 main sequence sessions in 2016, incorporating 12
Telepaths. I gave one recital in April of that year, called
Stillness, Concentrate, at which I performed J. K. Randall's
"...such words as it were vain to close...", and my recent compositions
Another, J, and Welcome to my planet. I come in peace.
Banned Playout:
2015:
Numbered 877-900 12:15:22
Telepaths 27-42 10:53:20
Total 2015: 23:08:42
2016:
Numbered 901-925 12:47:17
Telepaths 43-52 7:10:20
Total 2016: 19:57:37
Grand Total: 878:23:14
Scores:
Études d'exécution imminent
Awake, awake to love and work
Recordings:
Études d'exécution imminent (Commentary)
Second Thoughts Omnibus
Tambourine Quartet
Autoheterophony
