Sarabande, Eurydice, Song of Solomon 3:1-4 - 2003

Your blogger with Karen and sons
more or less in 2003

As one ages into what passes for compositional maturity the example of the upstart from Bonn is difficult to avoid entirely. The ubiquitous notion of the three biographical periods (Early, Middle, and Late) of his output lurks behind the unwary memoirist, seducing them into divvying up their own putterments into neat piles, or distinguishing between 'working-out-ideas' pieces and 'putting-it-all-together' pieces (my favored self-adulatory delusion), or jumping enthusiastically into the cesspool of self-mythology to claim that one had planned it all from the start, each fresh piece lined up in a continuous revelatory spew of masterpieces, predestined and inevitable.

Of course that isn't how it seems while living it. Whatever ideas arrive do so much as any whim might - some stick and some don't. I work out a piece or a project because it interests me while I'm doing it. As past work piles up, habits of thinking reappear. Procedures that worked well in one piece might be tried again in another, their details shifted around to fit new circumstances. But the fact is that I have never had a grand plan beyond whatever the current projects happen to be. For instance I continued to be intrigued by the possibilities of working with mod-17 arithmetic applied over the mod-12 universe of traditional western pitch collections, but also indulged in regular mod-12 thinking, whether diatonically or with more esoteric reference sets, and in 2003 I composed pieces in each of those modes.

I had become acquainted with the local composer/trumpet player Jim Knodle through the Washington Composers' Forum, and for a while my oldest son was taking trumpet lessons from him. At some point he asked if I would like to write a piece for him (one of the very few instances in which anyone ever asked me to write something for them) and I obliged most gratefully with Sarabande, which is based on a mod-17, 17-tone row. He was participating that year in the Blind Youth Audio Project at Jack Straw Cultural Center, so we spent several hours there being the test piece while the engineers and students tried out various microphone placements to see how they affected the final sound. The recording we made there was quite fine, but we did go back later to make me one for keeps.

For my setting of Psalm 133 (also mod-17, 17-tone) I revisited the essentially two-voice texture of my recent Lamb of God, but expanded the range of the keyboard part and indulged quite freely in large vocal leaps and occasional extra voice sonorities. It's a bit of a bear to work up but kind of fun to play, and I hope also to sing, once you get there. Two other songs that year fall into the diatonic-adjacent mod-12 camp: a setting of Nahum Tate's Christmastide hymn While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night, and another of a few verses from Song of Solomon. Both of these are, I think, quite approachable and attractive.

In a somewhat more esoteric mod-12 vein is a clarinet duet called Eurydice, which features pitch sets that mirror each other between the parts, riffing on Cocteau's image of Orpheus (from the film "Orpheus") accidentally catching a glimpse of Eurydice in the rear-view mirror of the poet's automobile. The midi version is fine as far as it goes, but I'd love to hear it with real players.

In other news, I gave a recital in June, at University Temple United Methodist Church. On the program was my 17 Prepuntal Contraludes (1981), 5 Duets (2000) {clarinet duets arranged for piano}, and Slow Blues (1999); Preludes 17-24 of Lockrem Johnson (finishing up my first cycle of live performances of his 24 Preludes); and Ben's Soliloquy {also known as ("…what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious sonata…")}. 

Banned Rehearsal and Gradus settled into our new routine of alternating weeks. The biggest news being that late in 2003 we were joined by Steve Kennedy, whom I had met at Seattle Composers' Salon, and who just seemed to get us right off the starting block.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: 645-661 - 08:46:10
Peripheral (1 session with me and Pete Comley): 1:00:20

Total 2003: 09:46:30

Grand Total: 709:53:48

Scores:

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night

Eurydice

Psalm 133

Sarabande

Song of Solomon 3:1-4

Recordings

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night

Eurydice

Psalm 133

Sarabande

Song of Solomon 3:1-4

Slow Blues, Entracte, Depth of Mercy - 1999

your blogger

Since early in my composing life I had been intrigued by the idea of inventing a tonal system of my own, as Scriabin was rumored to have done with his system "based on fourths". My problem was that what that might mean, technically, was not clear to me. The first constructive step I took toward an eventual solution was to start working with mod-17 structures overlain on the familiar mod-12 pitch universe. I had a breakthrough in this regard with Slow Blues, for solo piano. Several tracks of thought converged therein, of which the most crucial was the realization that a tonal system could reveal itself under transformations - particularly, for my purposes, the "M-transforms" or "Multiplicative Operations". In mod-12 arithmetic (arithmetic on a clock face, for instance, with a "0" in the place of "12") these transforms reveal symmetries inherent to the number 12, i.e. while M1 transforms a set into itself, M2 converts a chromatic scale of 12 notes into a whole-tone scale of 6, M3 into a minor-third scale of 4 notes, M5 into a Major-third scale of 3 notes, etc. But because 17 is prime, under mod-17 (like a clock face with 17 hours: 0 - 16) each transform yields a unique ordering of the same size - a two-note set yields a two-note set, a six-note set yields a six-note set, etc. - except M0 of course, which flat-lines no matter what your modulus. In addition, a whole slew of relations within derived pitch sets remains intact, mutatis mutandis. It should also be noted that notes 17 semi-tones apart are not always the "same" acoustic note - C-natural is the "same" pitch class as F-natural an octave and a fourth above it - which tilts acoustic pitch-geometry in what I have found to be an interesting way.

Karen Eisenbrey

I had also been thinking about what I would now call the stanzaic  structures of American demotic music such as the blues, and wanted to see what framing a composition within such an harmonic rhythm as, for instance, a basic "I I I I / IV IV I I / V V I I" 12-bar blues, might allow for metrical cross-relations among like-situated segments of music.

Putting this all together, the opening 12 bars of Slow Blues (echoed in the closing 12 bars) is based on an "M0-transform", a single mod-17 pitch class represented acoustically as D-natural below middle C (for I), A-natural 17 semi-tones below that (for IV), and G-natural 17 semi-tones above the D (for V), in a punning inversion of the usual tonic-dominant-subdominant relationship among those three notes. The next 12-bar stanza was M1, using both "minor" and "Major" versions of the triads freely; the next was M2, etc. all the way back around to M16 and M0 at the end. Beyond that my method was to compose each stanza under a new figuration regime, as in a classical theme and variations, which schema remains one of my go-to favorites. 

Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer

What gratified me most was how well it all seems to hang together through all the pitch shenanigans. I have performed it and recorded it several times over the years, both as a solo piece and as a trio with improvised accompaniment by Neal Kosály-Meyer on cornet and Karen Eisenbrey on drums. A solo performance of it served, in November of 1999, as my introduction to the Washington Composers' Forum. I was active in the group until 2010, much of that time serving as Treasurer.

Entracte is, so far, my only piece for piano 4-hands. The original idea was that it could be paired with another composer's 4-hand piece of the same size, so that the parts could be cross-matched with each other. A few years later Gavin Borchert came through and we performed all the versions during a joint recital at Polestar Music Gallery (the precursor to Gallery 1412). Musically, its material is salvaged from The Abyss (1998).

Aaron Keyt at the piano, with Karen and Neal

Depth of Mercy is my first attempt at writing a hymn. The melody is broadly diatonic and is matched squarely with the syllables of its text, which is by Charles Wesley. The accompaniment is heavy on open harmonies, so as not to alarm a congregation. Karen sang it for a service at United Churches in Olympia, where her dad was serving as an assistant pastor. I recall one congregant telling me afterwards that it sounded like Hovhaness, a remark that puzzled me at the time. I don't deny a certain surface similarity of affect, but I imagine now that Hovhaness was one of the few living composers that they may have had some experience of.

Banned Rehearsal wound up the century, and began the next, with a somewhat inebriated two-hour session that straddled midnight. 

Banned Playout:

Numbered: (518-555):  27:10:08
Peripherals: (one session): 00:20:06

Total 1999: 27:31:04

Grand Total: 642:29:26

Scores:

Slow Blues
Entracte
Depth of Mercy

Recordings:

Slow Blues

 

Entracte

 

Depth of Mercy

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: 371:04:22

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)

Seeds, Sonatina - 1987

Karen at the Barrytown Post Office

Seeds is a set of six tiny scores that arose out of my frequent, if no longer quite daily, epistolary discipline, which continued for a while after Karen and I were married. Each is dedicated to a specific person, whose name is in the title. Being seeds, I wasn't thinking of them as finished pieces as such, but rather as raw ideas to be put to whatever purpose the dedicatee might think of. For instance, the one I labelled "for Keith" became the opening figure of my Sonata in Two Movements of 1988. Years later, as I was transcribing my old scores into engraving software, I took them up as something to perform. I played them at an early Seattle Composers' Salon, when it was being held at SoundBridge on the lower floor of Benaroya Hall, and, during the same epoch, at University Temple United Methodist Church, (March 17, 2007).

your blogger with Karen and Jill

Sonatina, or Lenztanzen as I was styling it at the time, was written principally for clavichord, and uses one of the few "extended techniques" I have found myself desirous of perpetrating. At one point the music descends to a low D-natural , which is held with one hand and then thumped with the other, transmitting that thump through the key and tangent directly to the strings, producing a satisfying pitched impulse to the held note. It consists of two or three episodes or movements, depending on how one parses it, the first being of a stern and dramatic character in dialogue with obsessive sequences of four-note figures. The stern bit lent itself to transformation under multiplication by 5 ("M5" or "4ths Transform"), as under that transformation the intervals of the material twist around each other in interesting ways, effecting a clearly audible but homogenous shift in the tonal feel. A decade and more later I was to discover how useful these "M transforms" could be under arithmetic based on cycles of 17 digits (mod 17) rather than 12 (mod 12). The next part is more oratorical, and the musics of the various episodes are then set in dialog to finish it up. I'm still quite fond of it, and it also works well on a nicely resonant piano, though my extended technique can't be duplicated, as there is no direct contact between key and string after it first struck, as there is on clavichord.

at Brook House

Banned Rehearsal and its related activities continued throughout the year. When Aaron was in town between terms we would get together for sessions, otherwise relying on Telepaths to hold us together. Karen and I would also make tapes pretty regularly, under the rubric "Assembly Rechoired", often with guests who were curious about what we meant by free improvisation. For our anniversary in October we travelled back to Bard College and environs so that I could introduce Karen to my friends there. She had already met Ben when he came out West on the occasion of Neal's and my "Jim and Ben" show the previous Spring. Dan, Penny, Jill, and Chuck were still around, and several others. We spent the week tooling around the countryside and making tapes with whoever felt like hanging with us. It was during that visit that we became acquainted with Tildy Bayar, a stalwart of the News of Music and Open Space communities. For our first anniversary dinner we went to 4 Brothers pizza, in Rhinebeck, if memory serves.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: (105, 107, 109-117, 119-127*): 16:35:35
Telepaths: (13 sessions): 10:18:46
Sectionals: (5 sessions): 03:55:49
Assembly Rechoireds (12-40): 22:52:43
Peripherals: (6 sessions): 04:42:13

Total 1987: 58:25:06

Grand Total: 236:37:55

*105 and 107 were from telepaths that I didn't mix together until 1987, and 118 was from a telepath that wasn't mixed until 1988.

scores: 

Seeds

Sonatina

recordings:

Seeds

Sonatina

Cantus, Retrato de Euchababilla, Wedding Suite, House Prayers - 1986

Karen near Bickleton, WA

1986 was a busy year. Karen and I became officially engaged on April 5, on the strength of a loss leader diamond ring from a mall jeweler. She moved up to Seattle, staying first with Neal and Anna, then renting an apartment in the basement of a friend's house about a mile East of my half-house. She got a job at an insurance company downtown. Neal and Anna got married in May, just before Anna was to depart for San Diego for her graduate work. Neal followed later in June after he'd finished up the quarter at the UW. Karen and I got married on October 11, at 6th Avenue Baptist Church in Tacoma, honeymooning at my family's cabin on Whidbey Island. The nurses who had been living in the big house in my front yard conveniently moved out that September and Karen and I moved in. A couple of weeks after we got hitched we acquired our first brace of kittens - Anarchy and Amnehitabel.

On January 9, Banned Rehearsal put on our third public concert, again at Brechemin, consisting of nearly the same trio of activities we had done for our second show: Hunting and Gathering, Trance Butchered Knight, and The Singing (this time with Ukuleles), adding to that a segment of Sudden Songs. I also participated in three performances at the University of Washington that Spring: A joint recital with Neal of music by Ben Boretz and J. K. Randall*, and attempts at John Cage's Imaginary Landscape #4** and György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique***. 

your blogger
emerging from the South Pacific

What with all the excitements I wasn't composing much, but I did manage another recorder quintet, Cantus, for the Fehrwood Ensemble (performed at a local recorder society concert on May 1); a piece for solo oboe, Retrato de Euchababilla; a set of pieces for our wedding; and two house prayers on Karen's texts (my wedding present to her). These two short unison songs, one for meals and one for bedtime, quickly gained status as my most frequently performed pieces. Retrato was written at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, where my Mom, Dad, older brother, and I traveled in early May to see Halley's Comet (comet badge achieved!). While there we lawn bowled, saw several different versions of rugby and football, did some sight-seeing (the ocean, a boat trip on the Macquarie River, drives in the countryside, and one quick touring day in Sydney before heading back home). We also managed to snag tickets to see Crocodile Dundee, which was a Star Wars level hit in Australia at the time. Having now seen it in theaters both in Australia and in the states, I can attest that it is two entirely different films, one as seen by Australians (our guy gets the blond American babe), and one as seen by us Yanks (man from mars visits the Big Apple).

In March I began to keep a journal of my listening activities, which journal, as of this writing, fills 20 notebooks of various formats, and eventually spread to include, as its public face, my blog "Now Music In New Albion".

seeing what they had done to our getaway car

And Banned Rehearsal forged valiantly ahead. In the weeks before Neal followed Anna to San Diego we pushed ourselves to complete our 100th session, accomplished in Bickleton on July 14. The tape of our wedding became Banned Rehearsal #104 (best dressed session ever) and of course includes the music I had written for the ceremony (a Prelude, a Procession, and a Postlude; and two songs). The Postlude was completed in a bit of a hurry, and I fully admit to padding it out with completely unnecessary repeats, thinking that people would be in the process of leaving the sanctuary and not be listening very carefully. My newly invested mother-in-law, apparently decided that the guests should listen to the whole thing, stolidy stuck to her seat, and since by tradition the parents of the bride are the first to leave, the multitudes were blessed with lots of notes I had not thought that anybody would be listening to. One of many little jokes that Marilyn played on me. 

*program

Boretz: Liebeslied (me)
Randall: Greek Nickel #1 (Neal)
Boretz: (...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious Sonata...) (me)
Randall: Greek Nickel #2 (Neal)
Randall: from my diary (a Meditation on Rossignol) (Neal)
Randall: "...such words as it were vain to close..." (Neal)
Boretz: ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...")

**Neal put this piece together, and he and I were in charge of the "first radio", which had the most to do of the twelve. We were using boom boxes. Unfortunately the batteries had fallen out of the one we were using while backstage, so when the conductor cued us all we could do was shrug.

***from my blog post of July 23, 2011:

Poème Symphonique - Ligeti - University of Washington Contemporary Group

best dressed Banned Rehearsal ever

This performance was spearheaded by Neal Meyer back in the mid-eighties. I'm guessing Fall of '84 or sometime in 1985 {NB 1986}. We found ourselves unable to locate the requisite 100 metronomes, or to convince 100 music students to loan them to us, but we were able to locate 10. So Neal and I spent at least one long day making 9 tapes of 10 metronomes each for playback on boomboxes that we could place around the audience. I think this was in one of the lecture spaces at Kane Hall. Neal wanted each metronome to be set at a different tempo, and he wanted the piece to end naturally, with all the metronomes simply winding down on their own. The challenge of course is that each wind-up metronome is unique as to how many winds it takes to generate 10 minutes of ticking at a specified tempo. But Neal had carefully worked it all out and had all 10 metronomes set up backstage ready to go when another performer picked one of the metronomes up and, winding it helpfully a few times, asked "So Neal, have you figured out how many winds each one of these needs?" There was not time to let that metronome run itself out to be wound back up before the show, so on we went with one wild card. It turned out to be one that was set at a pretty slow tempo (and Neal was loath to reset it) so 10 or 12 minutes after the ticking began everything started to thin out, finally leaving the one metronome slowly ticking all by itself. This went on for 10 minutes or more, generating a certain amount of audience anxiety and a few walkouts, before someone walked on stage and put the last metronome out of its tickery.

our new housemates

It is still one of my favorite UWCG fiasco stories. Unfortunately the recordist didn't include the long single ticker coda, but the sound is oceanic and lovely, each boombox source layering itself softly like eternally breaking waves.

Banned Playout:

Numbered: (62-104, 106, and 108): 38:28:32
Unnumbered: (8 sessions): 5:46:36
Telepaths: (8 sessions): 6:18:16
Sectionals: (6 sessions): 4:44:00
Assembly Rechoireds (sessions with just Karen, me, and guests): (11 sessions): 8:06:29
Peripherals: (5 sessions): 1:34:31

Total 1986: 64:58:24

Grand Total: 178:12:49

Lacrymosa, Summer Songs - 1985

On January 18, 1985, Banned Rehearsal produced a concert at Brechemin Auditorium, at the University of Washington. The first half consisted of compositions: Aaron's "Pastorale for Helena" and "Pastorale for Keith", performed by me; Neal's "1/3 Poem x N" and "Pastorale: The Color of Water", performed by Neal; and my "Pastorale", performed by The Fehrwood Ensemble. The second half was an extended improvisation affectionately labeled "The Fishcritic" (Banned Rehearsal 23). Stu Dempster, bless his heart, had made attendance at our show a requirement for one of his general music classes, so we actually had folks in attendance outside of family, the performers, and a few friends with nothing better to do. We even got copies of their written responses. A highlight that doesn't show up in the auditory record was the use of an overhead projector to display the shadow of a glass fish-shaped plate across much of the stage. Some of us went out for pizza afterward in a group that included Neal's sister Karen. Legend has it that this was the occasion at which she was set straight as to which of us was Keith and which was Aaron. The tell was that it was the Keith fellow who was moving to a new place the next day.

And so I did, having rented a little "mother-in-law" house in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle, The Greenwood Half House on NE 89th St, most of a block west of Aurora Ave, set behind a larger house occupied, at the time, by two nurses. It had one bedroom, a living room, a bathroom (tub only no shower), and a small kitchen. It was heated by a gas furnace that stood in the middle of the living room. For awhile the only keyboard instrument I had in the house was the Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite. 

So I wrote a piece for it. Back then I was calling it "Trance Butchered Knight" since I thought it sounded like a take-off of Transfigured Night, or at least swam in the same ocean. Having later made attempts to suppress my snarkiness I renamed it "Lacrymosa", largely because it is somewhat weepy, befitting its Expressionist background, and the title could be sung to its dominating figurations. It worked well on the Sprite, milking its crude swell-pedal effect to good effect. The pitchwork isn't too shabby and it works well on piano as well. 

Aaron's Sudden Song "Bickelton Burger" got me thinking along similar lines: sit down with an instrument and an idea for text and a tape recorder, and let 'er rip. During that summer I recorded a bunch of them and called the group "Summer Songs". The sudden song project persisted in Banned Rehearsal, and may have encouraged Neal in hopes that we would soon go electric and become a rock band. For my part, I have never had any desire to walk that path.

Our second produced show "A Short and Simple Concert" (Banned Rehearsal 43) was held in Brechemin on July 13, 1985. We began with an activity Neal had developed called "Hunting and Gathering" that involved multiple play-back decks and multiple recording devices. Each of us, on a schedule, would start recording while we circled the performance space. We would then put the cassette tape in a playback machine, rewind to start and punch Play. After a short while we had quite a din going. At some point I started playing Trance Butchered Knight on the Funmaker, and when that was done, and as the playback tapes winked out one by one, we started to sing long tones, eventually fading to a finish.

Karen at the Greenwood Half House

Another highlight of the first full Banned Year was our visit to The Loft, a residential facility for middle-school boys who had run afoul of one thing or another. We distributed toy noisemakers in a gym, pushed record and reveled in the ensuing mayhem. It was during this year that Neal put together a performance of John Cage's Music for Piano in the Studio Theater at Meany Hall, with four pianos, four pianists (Lise Mann, Neal, Aaron, and me), four headlamps, a chance-operationally generated lighting scheme (hence the headlamps), and a chance-operationally generated schedule of which piano each of us would be playing at any one time. I might add that this schedule quite often had more than one of us playing scores on the same piano at the same time. It ended up being quite a bit of fun.

Anna and Neal at the Half House

In the Fall, Aaron decamped for Law School, leaving Neal, Anna, and I to carry on. I finished building the clavichord that September, recording an improvisation on it before I had even brought it up to the correct octave. Fun with overdubbing continued apace, the major project being to stack the first 32 sides of Banned Rehearsal together in successive pairs: 16 Banned Couples (two sides each); 8 Banned Mixers (4 sides each); 4 Banned Seminars (8 sides each); Two Banned Thologies (16 sides each); and the Banned Day (all 32 sides). Many decades later I re-mixed this project digitally, as the original process had no good way to adjust balances, and the loss of fidelity attendant on successive overdubs made for awfully murky listening.

When I left Bard I had brought back a list of my friends' addresses, and as a discipline I would write one letter every day. If someone wrote back I moved their name to the top of the list. Karen was still living in Tacoma after she graduated from University of Puget Sound, and she would often be up visiting with Neal and Anna. Once we had a Banned Rehearsal Session while she was visiting and she noticed my list. Being rather forward, she added her name. My first letter to her, penned and spoken out loud during a Banned Sectional (a session with just two of the original members) started with the words "This is a test. This is not a test." It was printed several years later in News of Music as "Keith's First Epistle to The Tacoman". She kept writing back, and soon became my most loyal correspondent. It was probably a foregone conclusion, but Neal and Anna (well, mostly Anna) did their best to set us up now and then, leaving us to ourselves while they went to get ice cream, and once inviting us along with them to hear Jonathan Richman. On December 22, after weeks of fog, and during a day that involved two trips to to pick up Aaron at SeaTac (one attempt of which was successful and some of which was recorded to become Banned Rehearsal 59) two trips to Karen's apartment in Tacoma, a dinner with Aaron's family, an Advent service at Neal & Anna's apartment on Brooklyn Avenue, and some mistletoe, we divulged to each other our mutual smittenhood and have been a couple ever since.

Banned Rehearsal out on the sidewalk

1985 Banned Playout:

Numbered: (20-61): 35:40:29
Unnumbered: 00:17:19
Telepaths: (3-5): 06:55:10
Sectionals: 20:04:29
Building the Banned Day: 24:35:49

Total 1985: 87:33:16

Grand Total 1984-1985: 113:13:25

Links:

Lacrymosa

https://imslp.org/wiki/Lacrymosa_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)  

Pastorale, Create Desolation and Call It Peace - Fall 1984

Anna K and Neal Kosály-Meyer, early 1985

I wrote Pastorale for The Fehrwood Ensemble, an amateur recorder group my Mom was part of. I was intrigued by the ultra-precise intonation of the recorder's straight tone, but felt it was wasted on simply being in tune. In order to force the issue I filled the piece with long held tones and asked the players to tail off the ends so that the pitch would sag. Being amateurs, they were remarkably game for such shenanigans. Structurally the piece consists of the gradual emergence of a melody out of a bed of long foghorn-like tones. It was performed at Brechemin Auditorium at the UW in January of 1985.

Aaron Keyt, Anna, Neal, and your blogger, early 1985

The title of my solo piano piece Create Desolation and Call It Peace is a quote of graffiti I had seen near the UW campus, which was, as I understood, a translation from Tacitus - a complaint against Roman occupation. I think of it as a long, slow, funeral oration. I was also (and remain) interested in structural repetition, such as permeated European concert music well into the 19th Century, especially the effect at the hinges, where what was heard the first time through as an old thing repeated is upon continuation heard as a new development entirely. Both Pastorale and Create Desolation open with directly repeated passages.

Banned Rehearsal, early 1985

Banned Rehearsal continued apace. By the end of the year we had 19 numbered sessions, one of which (#5) fails to exist {we were up at Whidbey Island in July and were hoping to record on a boombox while we trudged to our knees out in the Holmes Harbor mudflats, but the batteries had died}, and two of which are dubbed together from Telepaths; three named but unnumbered tapes (our procedure was still in flux); added one new member (Anna K, who appeared first as a guest on Telepath #2 Bickleton, and then as a member on Banned Rehearsal 18 on December 16) and included six additional guests. We performed with dancer Julie Ludwig at The Studio Theater in Meany Hall, at the UW, by playing back pre-recorded sounds on boom-boxes as part of her dance "Images From A Day". On top of all that we were preparing for our first self-produced live event that next January, part of which involved us doing whatever it was we had found ourselves doing, and part of which involved performances of various of our recent compositions.

Banned Rehearsal, early 1985

As side projects and one-offs I also recorded an hour and a half of a mid October high-school football game. My Dad was an administrator at Sealth High School at the time, so I was able to sneak in to Memorial Stadium with him. I had also started monkeying around with overdubbing on the cheap, using multiple cassette tape decks, one of which I had had altered so that there was a button on the back to turn off the "erase" head. Oddly, it's that deck (a mid 1970s Sanyo) that still works - perhaps the oldest chunk of functional electronic hardware in the house. One particularly successful project was to overdub Banned Telepath #2 Bellevue on top of itself 2, 4, 8, and 16 times, resulting in a cruddy flange of detuned recorder tones and clothes-hanger gongs. Less aurally successful was the Banned's idea to dub all the numbered sides of Banned Rehearsal together into one grand Banned Thology. The first attempt resulted in four "Mixers" each being four sides piled together, and one "Thology" being the four mixers in a single heap. Four hours of murk.

1984 Banned Playout:

Numbered (1-4, 6-19): 16:30:05
Unnumbered: 01:55:41
Telepaths: 03:09:58
Sectionals: 00:47:33
Images from a Day: 00:21:40
1984 Thology: 03:55:12

Total: 26:40:09

Links:

Pastorale:

Keith Eisenbrey · Pastorale 850118

Create Desolation and Call It Peace:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Create_Desolation_and_Call_It_Peace_(Eisenbrey%2C_Keith)

Return to Puget Sound - Summer 1984

your blogger working hard

Several things happened quickly upon my return to the Puget Sound area at the start of June 1984. I moved back into my parent's home and took a week off before seeking employment. One afternoon that week my brother Glen and I took his wooden rowing boat to the Arboretum and paddled around Foster Island. Coming around a bend we came upon a less than fully clad sunbather, who smiled charmingly as we tipped our hats and paddled on. Welcome home!

I figured that a relatively mindless office job would leave me free to do music the rest of the time. I went to an agency in downtown Bellevue, which sent me to interview as a typist at Ticor Title Insurance near the waterfront in Seattle. The supervisor mentioned that they were also looking for someone to fill a position as an "abstractor", which involved sorting through court filings for information relevant to the title industry and typing up abstracts in a species of typographical shorthand - "NWC" was "Northwest Corner", "NH SEQ NEQ" was 'North Half of the Southeast Quarter of the Northeast Quarter", etc. Short story made shorter, the super felt that if I could read music I could read legalese and I got the abstractor job. I worked for Ticor until the company was purchased by Chicago Title Insurance in 1991, and for Chicago until my retirement in 2021. I also picked up a coffee habit, largely by accident.

gluing down the sound board on the clavichord

On the musical front, I had met up again with Neal and Aaron and we decided it might be fun to try improvising on instruments we didn't know how to play for a few sessions. Unable to resist the pun once it arose we called ourselves Banned Rehearsal before we had even made our first tape, which occurred on June 24, the weekend after I started work.

I thought I might never be able to afford a place suitable for a piano so I decided to buy a build-your-own clavichord kit. I hadn't been at work long so my dad co-signed on a loan for $1600 and I was delivered of a box of boards, a full-sized schematic drawing, a thin book of instructions, and a sinking feeling that I had just wasted a wad of cash I didn't have yet. But thanks to my dad and some help from my brothers we got it finished a year later.

The Sprite

As the Banned Rehearsal project persisted odd little instruments began to amass. I commandeered my mom's guitar and autoharp, which had both been languishing unused for decades. On a whim I spent $200 on an old Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite - a little electric organ with chord buttons, drum rhythms that could all be played at once (great function!) and another button that dropped the pitch down almost, but not quite, a half step. This first appeared (if I am not mistaken) on Banned Rehearsal 10 of September 23, 1984, and quickly became a mainstay of our sound for years to come.

It was also during those first few months that we devised a way of having our (by then) weekly sessions even when we weren't all in town. We would each make a tape wherever we were (called Banned Telepaths) and would then mix them together later (using multiple cassette decks, two-in-one-out mixer cables, and a cheap Realistik mixing device. Truly low budget and low fi, but the method has served us well over the years through geographic displacements and the recent pandemic. This equipment also enabled us to create what we called the Stack-O-Decks so that we could play several sound sources at once into our session space (usually my bedroom) - another commonplace of our early sound. During one such telepath session Aaron picked up the guitar and came up with the first Sudden Song: Bickleton Burger.

It's rhythms, chords, and slide button

no pickles
no mustard
no ketchup
no buns
no meat 

it's a Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have 'em away
yes it's a Bickleton Burger
have 'em away 

no relish
no special sauce
no sesame seeds
no bacon
no cheese 

just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
Bickleton Burger
have it away
have it away

just a side-order of fries
on my Bickleton Burger
have it away