The Decade of Chaos Part 1: 1991-1994

Karen and me dressed as earth children for Halloween

At the end of March, 1991, Karen and I welcomed our first baby into the family, and composition activity slowed down considerably. We had very cleverly announced the impending event to our mothers (and my dad) while we were visiting with my folks toward the end of the previous Summer, by mentioning that we had tickets to an opera in April and that we would be needing a babysitter that evening. General astonishment and celebration ensued. We let the news filter out to our choir while, during a rehearsal of some crowd noise, Karen said "I will be over my pregnancy in [some number of] months" rather than "salt light" or whatever else was written in the score.

As our activities with the choir, and with choral music in general, were becoming a large part of our lives, I tried once again to see if I could write effective music for choir. fourpartsongs (1992) is a setting of a hymn by Charles Wesley that appeared, sans tune, in the 1989 United Methodist Hymnal. I set each of the four stanzas separately (four part-songs) for SATB (four-part songs). As compositions go they are solid and, I think, singable, but difficult. They are diatonic, a few degrees skewed off of tonal practice, and don't shy away from what I regard as tasteful tone-painting. Later, I recast one of them - O Love, how cheering is thy ray - as a solo for Karen to sing, and even later re-set the entire text, with new music, as a hymn.

wave for the camera

1993 saw the first of what became many recitals that I gave at our church. The main impetus was to present A Cat's Life, with narration provided by Ellen Dessler, a drama student at the University of Washington. The program also included Elaine Barkin's Brandeis, and Benjamin Boretz's Partita, Liebeslied, and ("...what I could hear, trying to crawl out from between the lines of your last ferocious Sonata..."). 

That year I also composed a big concert piece, originally for organ: "...finish then thy new creation...". The title is from another Charles Wesley text. Looking back at it now I was struggling with how to feel my way through a large-scale piece without any way to think clearly about where I was going and what I was carrying along. It is not a bad practice as such, but the result in this case is rather woolly. A few years later I arranged it for string orchestra, and it was performed in that form by a community orchestra on Vashon Island, under the baton of my former composition teacher Dell Wade.

More successful was Nocturnes or Discourses, a procedurally structured improvisation project realized with the kind assistance of sound engineer Tom Stiles. Tom had access to the big piano in Brechemin Auditorium at the UW, so, late one evening we set it up with a microphone. Tom was recording digitally, and this was my first experience working with that innovation. First I sat silently for a span of time (5 minutes? 9 minutes? - something that divided 45 evenly so that the finished thing would fit on a 45' cassette side). Then Tom would play that recording back to me through headphones while I improvised to it, as though I were reading it as a score. Then we took that recording and repeated the process  until we had enough sessions to overlay the recordings so that each improvisation would be paired with its "score". In 2006/2007 I was able, thanks to the acquisition of a multi-track digital recording device to redo this on my own, using two separate pianos - or perhaps on each piano separately - and then combining them. 

your blogger and his boss

Doomsome Otherings (a non-Latinate translation of "Canonic Variations") is a set of five variations (inclusive of the 'theme') for viola and piano prompted by a possible mis-construal of a movement from one of Prokofiev's piano concerti. What I thought I had heard in that movement was the intrusion of one variation's figurations into another variation's flow. I thought it would make an interesting form if I were to do that systematically. I wrote a 'theme' of 50 measures that uses a homogenous figuration scheme for the first 30 bars, then switches to the figuration scheme of the variation two slots later (music like variation two into the 'theme', of three into one,  four into two, 'theme' into three, and of one into four) for the next ten bars, switching back to the music like that of the first 30 bars for the last 10. I also had a scheme for determining the pitch material of each bar that ran, as I recall, somewhat independently of the figuration scheme. It involved several layers of overlapping sequences of pentachords, but details of that determination have faded from memory. I still like the piece, though the piano part is beyond me and it seems to have a vanishing effect on violists, so I stopped shopping it around lest I lose any more violist friends.

your blogger failing to home improve

During this time Ben had asked me whether, based on my flimsy knowledge of formal logic notation, I would help proof-read and prepare computer engraved files of the formal definitions in "Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought", which he was preparing for publication by OpenSpace. While re-reading it I started to wonder what tonal music, as generated analogously to the "Outline of a Tonal-Syntactic System" contained in Part V of Meta-Variations, would sound like if it were 'stretched' so that all the generating intervals were made larger. I quickly settled on a 17-tone "octave" (or "modular interval") as being an interesting choice for the modular partitioning (an octave plus a perfect fourth rather than a perfect octave) because that would make the second partitioning interval (analogous to the 7 semitone "Fifth") an interval of 9 semitones (a major 6th), and the third partitioning (analogous to the 3 and 4 semitone intervals of minor and major thirds) intervals of 4 and 5 semitones respectively. I was also amused that my root position "major" triad would be "C F A", punning on a tonal root position "F A C", and that my "minor" triad would be "C E A", punning on the tonal minor triad of "A C E". We love puns so there it was. My 1994 setting of Psalm 130 ("Out of the depths...") was my first go at it and I was intrigued by the results, using just the most basic of tonal functions: "tonic", "dominant", and "subdominant" harmonies, and possibly a secondary dominant or two. The expanded octave and variability of sounding pitches across the registers opened up a world for me in which I could compose unique harmonic paths using fairly simple pitch functions. I have been following up on ramifications of this speculation ever since and consequently my subsequent oeuvres is peppered liberally with "mod-17" pieces of one kind or another.

Banned Rehearsal continued doing regular sessions, mostly just Karen, Aaron and me, later joined by our toddler, but toward the end of 1994 Neal and Anna were back in town with their little one so things began to get busy indeed. We had been holding our sessions in the spare bedroom, but soon our toddler would need that room. There happened to be a two-car garage on the lot, but the configuration made it nigh impossible to get a second car into it, so with the assistance of my dad we framed half of it in for a studio. The Tintinabulary has been collecting instruments ever since.

Banned Playout (1991):
Numbered: (243-279) 29:03:17
Total 1991:29:03:17

Banned Playout (1992)
Numbered: (280-315) 28:14:01
Total 1992: 28:14:01

Banned Playout (1993)
Numbered: (316-347) 26:02:49
Total 1993: 26:02:49

Banned Playout (1994)
Numbered: (348-379) 24:54:42
Sectionals: 2 Sessions: 1:32:42
Total 1994: 26:27:24

Grand Total: 480:47:31

Scores:
Doomsome Otherings
Psalm 130

Recordings:
Psalm 130 (1994)

Nocturnes or Discourses (1993)

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

Living Among Others Part 1: Red Hook, Fall 1982 - Spring 1983

your blogger in his field

The School of Music at Bard, together with its various hangers-on, such as me, consisted of a small population scattered around a largely rural environment. Sessions of musical improvisation, being an essential part of the curriculum then at Bard, were also an integral part of us all just hanging out together. Between July of 1982 and June of 1983 I count dubs of 18 such sessions involving diverse groupings of Ben, Jill, Dan, Sarah Johnson (see below), Aaron Keyt (visiting from Princeton), and others, but that certainly wasn't all we did. Dan and I would often find ourselves in Jill's and Nancy's apartment, up several steep and narrow flights of stairs, tucked under the roof of "The Oaks", a large house located, more or less, between Red Hook to the East and Barrytown down by the Hudson River. Now my mom was not a bad cook (her pies were top-notch), but Jill and Nancy were resourceful and imaginative, and loved to cook for others. It was really with them that I first had an inkling of what cooking could be. The fare was largely vegetarian, since none of us had much money to buy meat. Some time that I year I also became acquainted with Sarah Johnson, an undergraduate with a lively mind and an engaging conversationalist who lived down by the river in the same boarding house (rumored to have once been a brothel) as Charles Stein.

Jill Borner and Bruce Huber

For amusement various subsets of us would be off to the movies, in Rhinebeck or across the bridge in Kingston, or to breakfast at one of several nearby diners, and once even as far down south as Poughkeepsie to see a concert. Jill was kind enough to invite me to her family's Thanksgiving dinner in West Hurley, which was exactly what one would expect of a mid-20th Century small-town family gathering: the menfolk watched football and the women cooked. The pies were to die for. Since I was visiting from what must have seemed to be Mars, I'm sure they thought I had an accent.

Nancy Chase, at The Oaks

At some point that Winter I decided I was finished being a tee-totaller and I relied on Jill and Nancy to decide what my first alcoholic beverage ought to be. They decided on a Guinness, and so it was off to a dark bar in Rhinebeck, tended by an acquaintance of theirs, wherein I valiantly sipped through about half before giving up and letting Nancy finish it. Bruce's local band, "The Trolls", put out a single that year, and that counts as the first 45" vinyl record I ever owned. The cover was hand decorated by Jill, and Nancy was one of the "Oobah" singers on the flip side. They were also the first rock band I ever saw at a dive bar, of which there were two such establishments close to the college. One was known colloquially as "down the road" and the other wasn't. It was also by virtue of a mixtape that a friend of Nancy's had made for her (known forever after as Nancy's Mix) that I first became acquainted with any 80s bands at all - REM, Bow Wow Wow, Flipper, The Dictators, U2, et cetera.

For Spring Break Dan invited us to stay at his family's beach-house in Ship's Bottom, New Jersey, on the shore between Asbury Park to the north and Atlantic City to the south. I promptly burned myself to a crisp, but had a wonderful time. Memorable was a flash flirtation with an adorable redhead emerging from the waves, a side-trip to a nearby wild-life preserve (Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge?) to dance with the birds and sand (but sans redhead, who seems to have vanished as suddenly as she had appeared), and collecting sculpturally broken seashells with Sarah. I'm afraid Dan's family, some of whom were also there, were somewhat puzzled and possibly alarmed to find Dan hanging with a bunch of what must have appeared to be latter-day hippies. I had grown my hair out and would occasionally garner passing cat-calls, the most common being "Hey Charlie Manson!" The whole thing mystified me.

Red Hook, Malabar - September 1982-June 1983

My neighbor across the street

Six Intermezzi

I stayed in the Red Hook barn into the middle of December. Campus was a mile or so off. I kept myself busy by providing music for dance classes (ugh), auditing classes, teaching a few piano students, observing life in the cow pasture across the road, and generally setting myself up to stay for an unspecified duration. The barn's only source of heat was a wood stove down the hall, and when the owner left us tenants over Thanksgiving weekend with no wood for the fire I'd had enough of that nonsense. Ben came to the rescue and offered to rent me the apartment in the basement of his house, which had its own bathroom and central heating. I moved in at the end of January, having spent Christmas and the bulk of that month as a guest of Alison and her family in Malabar, Florida. I lived in Ben's basement until moving back to Washington in 1984.

Your blogger, long ago in a galaxy far away

The first two Intermezzi were written that Fall, the third in Malabar, and the last three over the course of the next few months. The first is an exploration of the interval between A-natural and E-natural, in its guises as Perfect Fourths and Fifths, both filling in the gaps between them and extending the registers in play step by step, all in a one-note-at-a-time texture, save for a few instances of two-notes-at-a-time, in a slow tempo with only two durations in play - short and long, indicated by quarter and whole notes.

Alison Watkins

Intermezzo 2 is similar, but instead of starting with one interval it begins with a sequence of three pitches, G-natural, E-flat, and C-natural, in ascending order, so that I was working with the two flavors of sixths and also the larger span of an octave plus a fourth (17 semitones). It was not the first time that "17" had come up in my compositions, but is the first time it did so as a generative element, internal to the music as it goes along. Each of these were presented in small recitals at Bard, sharing the stage, if memory serves, with Dan Sedia and Jill Borner.

The third was written while visiting Alison in Florida, and is based on a similar idea but with a two-notes-at-a-time texture, in sevenths and ninths, and the fourth like that but with sixths. Intermezzo 5 is a text drawn mostly from my correspondence with Alison and a dream journal I kept at the time, edited down and re-arranged so that it flowed to my ear. To the extent it has an explicit subject matter it is the same as that of the other Intermezzi: the beginnings of an exploration of thinking about thinking about music. Intermezzo 6 is one of my few 12-tone works, with nothing particularly esoteric about my use of the procedure, other than making it sound like an extended riff on 4-3 suspensions. It mixed one-note and two-note textures freely.

Your blogger, Jill Borner, and Dan Sedia

I made performance scores for each of them, but also large-format scores with giant notes on hand-drawn staves, a few notes per page. That for Intermezzo 1 was scribed carefully with ruler and stencils, but for the rest I used a big black magic marker. I'm pretty sure these are all now in the big pine box coffin that lives under my piano. All six were presented at Bard with Intermezzo 5 consisting of Jill Borner's taped reading, overlaid with a recording of some crickets to mask the tape hiss, divided into four segments interspersed between the piano solos - inter-intermezzic, as it were.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 2

Alison in Woodstock

That summer I shared some of what I had been up to recently in various configurations of ad hoc seminars. For Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes I put together a talk in which I tried to explain some of its technical specs. Another time I shared a tape of my big Synclavier piece AKU, which Ben thought would benefit from some reverb, so Bruce Huber brought a guitar amp to a stone chapel, left over from Bards' days as a seminary, and we recorded the sound of it as it was thus blasted into reverberant space. We even managed a performance of Book of Windows, with me playing the piano part on Ben's Crumar, Bruces' electric guitar standing in for the saxophone, and Jill Borner reciting the text. Elaine Barkin was there that evening and I have reported her response in a previous post.

New York City

I found that Alison Watkins, who was there to work on her poetry with Robert Kelly, had a similar sense of humor and general level of articulateness and we hung out quite a lot. It was in her company that I visited the local sites, such as Woodstock across the Hudson River, which had a nice bookstore, and a sort of permanent outdoor craft market, presumably populated by some of the festival visitors who never went home. We also took a train down to the city for a couple of days, visiting museums, going up to the observation deck at the World Trade Center, and finding more bookstores. I discovered that my usefulness to Alison was in lugging books, but I did grab a few for myself at The Strand - a nice edition of Chaucer and a 1939 cloth-bound edition of Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives" from The Modern Library. That may also have been where I snagged my copy of "Morte d'Arthur".

I can't recall that I did much composing that summer; the experience itself was so overwhelming that it was almost all I could do to soak some of it in. I did get together with Ben at his house for a couple of improvisation session/composition lessons, and joined as best I could in sessions with others. I may have started working on what became Intermezzo I, which arose as a way for me to compose myself into an understanding of what I thought Ben was on about with his concept of 'Partitioning'  in  "Meta-Variations", but I also remember making some egregiously false starts on at least one huge project, trying to outdo myself in Book of Windows-type chart-heavy structures.

My home, Fall 1982 (not New York City)

By the end of the summer I decided that I wanted to hang around Bard between the summer sessions. I was, at the time, in a hurry to get my degree so that I could continue my journey toward doctoral fame and fortune. Three years was just too long to spend on a Masters. I worked out a plan with the school wherein I would replace one summer with a residency over the rest of the academic year. Finding housing was a bit of an issue but I did finally secure a room on the ground floor of a barn in nearby Red Hook that had been converted to a living space and workshop for the owner's furniture refinishing business; and Ben rented one of his older cars to me so I had a way to get around. So I gave back my return ticket and prepared to winter over.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 1

My acceptance letter

Jet lag due to the three-hour time difference between the West and East coasts was never an issue for me. I have always been a morning person, waking at about 6 and fading around 9 or 10. The program's schedule did not presume wakefulness until after 9 AM and regularly extended toward midnight and beyond, so I simply didn't adjust and meshed with prevailing trends.

The studio space I was provided consisted of a key and use of Brook House, a sizable cottage out in the woods with a piano it it where I could practice in the mornings. The offices of Perspectives of New Music were in the basement. Official activity commenced with softball in the late morning. It was never a game as such but consisted of shagging fly balls for each other. I wrote home soon after arriving to ask for my mitt. Later I would assert, with some underlying truth, that I had received my master's degree in hitting and catching. 

The afternoons and evenings were taken up by seminars, often featuring a visit from a local-ish composer or other artist. It was in this context that I met, among others and over the course of two summers, Milton Babbitt, Elaine Barkin, Arthur Berger, Warren Burt, Morton Feldman, and John Zorn. I'm sure J. K. Randall also visited that first summer, but I must have been in an odd head-space at the time and kept my distance. 

Presentations by the various MFAers were frequent events. Everyone gathered together to discuss what was being shared. It was interesting to me that there was apparently some friction as to the general vibe and purpose of these events, in the sense that there was some notion afloat that critiquing (in the sense of judging worth and professional merit) was expected and valuable. This attitude, which occasionally got rather acidic, was quite familiar to me from the weekly UW Composer's lab, but the usefulness of this approach to the community was in question, especially from Ben. This may have been my first exposure to a different way of looking at what we as community members were to each other - not competitors but collaborators. It rang a bell in my head.

Kingston Bridge

Late evenings often ended with a bunch of us getting something to eat at one of the several pizza places or diners in nearby Red Hook, Rhinebeck, or across the river in Kingston. This would often include some of my fellow music students - Jill Borner, Bruce Huber, Dan Sedia, Ben presiding. We were joined regularly by Charles Stein, whose exact relationship to the program was never clear to me, but who was nevertheless always ferociously interesting. Some of the students from the other disciplines would also join us, notably the poet David Abel, and occasionally one of Ben's guests - thus my claim to have had pizza with Milton Babbitt. Many a Greek Salad (it was cheap) and late-night omelette (breakfast any time) was devoured amid lively and wide-ranging conversation.

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York June 1982

Late in June of 1982 I caught an overnight flight to JFK, and at six the next morning found myself outside the terminal waiting for a shuttle to travel 100 miles up the Hudson River to Rhinebeck. The sky had no discernible color and it felt like it was 90° out with 90% humidity. I wondered how anyone managed to eat in such an oppressive climate. Once arrived in Rhinebeck I had been instructed to find a phonebooth, from which I was to call a cab to take me to Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson. This accomplished I was duly installed in a dormitory room in one of several wooden structures perched on pilings on the sides of a ravine. It had a lovely shaded view into the forest's mid-canopy, and was rumored to have originated as some former undergraduate's senior project in architecture.

Installed blogger - June 1982

That afternoon a get-together had been arranged at the home of Leon Botstein, the College President. It was there that I finally met Benjamin Boretz in person. He asked me if I had heard the Clash. I had not (though I had heard of them). I probably met some of my fellow music students as well, many of whom became good friends and collaborators - Jill Borner, Bruce Huber, and Dan Sedia among them. I was also introduced there to the poet and classicist Charles Stein, who extended his hand in greeting with a hearty string of glossolalic gibberish. Strangely, it made me feel, for the first time, out there on the far side of the continent, quite at home.

That evening I was hanging out in the open stairwell of the dorm building and met another fellow student, the poet Alison Watkins, who proceeded to haul me along with another returning student to a late snack at a long since forgotten establishment in Rhinebeck. They were amused by the fact that I was apparently a dead-ringer for a composition student from the summer before, right down to my leather satchel. They must have thought I was a replacement acquired by the school at central casting. 

The house over the ravine

That night there was a massive Catskills thunderstorm, such as has resounded down through literature by way of Washington Irving. The next morning I was enjoying the cooler air on the balcony outside the dormitory kitchen chatting with another music student who had just arrived form Korea. He asked me, somewhat hesitatingly, if I thought that "this house" was safe. I immediately answered in the negative and we thus found ourselves culturally simpatico. Welcome to New York.

After and Before 1981-1982

Book of Windows

Seven Strays

After graduation from the UW in the Spring of 1981, and before my pilgrimage to the East coast in June 1982, I worked part-time selling men's jeans at a department store at Northgate Mall, a job I got thanks to church connections. At the end of Summer I got a full-time job in the mail room at the home office of a cookware sales company in Bellevue.

your blogger in 1981 at home with a beanbag frog

I wrote several short solo piano pieces, none of them ever intended to be included in a set of anything, just quick sketches made when I happened to have a figurational idea I felt like working out. I bundled these together many years later as Seven Strays. I've performed a few of them on occasion, and even transcribed one of them for bell-choir the year I was directing one at our church in the late 80s. Being quasi-tonal for the most part, they can be made to seem intelligible and even attractive to those that might not go for the crazier stuff.

But most of my individual creative time was spent on a massive score-making project called Book of Windows. It involves a lengthy list of words derived from various sources, all arranged carefully using a system focusing on syllable count, line count, and a global multiplex acrostic in which the first letters of several equal subdivisions of line groups form sequences of words that are like unto lines within the greater text. In the final such subdivision, which divides the whole into three parts, the first letter of each respective segment spells the word ART. Very clever.

your blogger spinning vinyl and inking Book of Windows

In the final score the text unfolds on the left of each set of facing pages, and on the right-facing pages two sequences of notes spool out. The most extensive of these is written for piano and consists of carefully charted quantities of notes, lengths of passages as measured in quarter notes, vertical density, and number of times each segment is to be repeated. The other sequence of notes is a line of single pitches, intended for saxophone. I developed intricate charts to determine all sorts of aspects of how it would fit together. I added inscriptions (Gertrude Stein and Wilhelm Müller) and a preface to get it going, and finished it up with a chorale for the instruments.

I didn't want to specify how a performance of it might be accomplished, but it was given a table-read just before I left for Bard, with me on piano, Aaron reading the text, and my brother Paul playing clarinet. I think Neal was turning pages and helping to keep track of the whole mess. In 2005 I realized a midi-enabled version that clocks in at about 32 minutes. It was performed in public, for the one and only time, in a common space outside the cafeteria at Bard that Summer, with me playing Crumar, the inimitable Jill Borner reciting, and Bruce Huber transforming the sax part on electric guitar. As luck would have it another member of what has become my virtual colloquium of senior colleagues, Elaine Barkin, was visiting for a few days and suffered through the whole two-plus-hour ordeal. At the end, or so I was told, she pointed to my date-and-place mark in the score "Bellevue, 1982" and silently inquired of Ben whether I was really from the mental hospital. Ben, of course, just nodded in affirmation. "Bellevue, yes".

your blogger (in glasses), Neal Meyer (in t-shirt),
and Aaron Keyt (in jeans)

In the end it constitutes my one and only extensive experimentation with that oh-so-chic American stylistic juggernaut, Minimalism. When I was done I figured that I could thenceforward ignore the whole movement, having written something far more repetitive and ugly than anyone else would ever care to. Considering it now I can't think it's Minimalist in any essential way and isn't particularly brilliant as commentary either. Its worth, within my personal creative history, is as a compositional exercise in working with algorithmically derived structures.

Seven Strays - recorded February 10 and 11, 2010

Keith Eisenbrey · Seven Strays (100210 & 11) 1983

Book of Windows - digital version realized March 20, 2005

Keith Eisenbrey · Book of Windows 050320

John Rahn to the Rescue 1981

I was 22 and had been living at home while at school, commuting by bus across Lake Washington to the UW, following a more or less self-prescribed path to fulfill my firm ambition and expectation to finish my undergraduate work, get a masters and a doctorate, and finally to become a famous and renowned professor of composition somewhere. It was that somewhere that I had never thought through, and the slowly dawning realization that I would soon need to apply, and to go, to elsewhere for graduate studies was, I admit now, terrifying. I sent out a few feelers, but had no clear idea where out there would be a good fit and that might be willing to consider taking me on.

John, knowing how fascinated I had become by the various works of Benjamin Boretz that he had shared with me - both in our lessons (the score of ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset...") was open on the piano in his office) and in theory seminars, notably Language ,as a music and Meta-Variations: Studies in the foundations of musical thought - suggested that I write to Ben for advice. Had Ben been teaching at a school that had a graduate program that would have been an obvious choice, but that was not the case as far as we knew. So I sent off a "Hi there, I feel like an increasingly square pig in a narrowing round hole, and am at a loss as to my next step" letter. I didn't know this until later, but John also wrote him a short note of introduction, for which, and for his timely encouragement, support, and tireless opening of intellectual doors, I am ever grateful. I also found out even many more years later that I was one of only two students who had ever written Ben a letter. Try it kids!

One evening that Spring, much to my surprise and amazement, I got a call from Ben. This in and of itself was a total flabbergast to me, who hadn't a clue that a venerable figure such as Ben would condescend to pick up a phone to call a nobody, and to my great excitement it turned out that Bard College was starting an interdisciplinary MFA program to take place during Summer terms and he asked if would I like to apply and come out East in June. Neither I nor my family were in a financial position to accomplish that so suddenly but I thanked him profusely and applied for the next year. The application, as I recall, was little more than a single sheet to provide a name and address.

And so a year later, in June of 1982, a day or so after an end-of-school-year party held at the house Neal was sharing in Wallingford, wherein I was introduced to his kid sister Karen, who would become my spouse 5 years later, I was launched across the continent to who knew what out in the sticks 100 miles north of New York City, in a mysteriously foreign sounding Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, never having gotten a clear idea about how to fend for myself in any significant way, and never having been so far from anyone I knew. But all that will be story for a later chapter.

Thinking in Systems 1980 - 1981

Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes (1981)

During my last two years at the University I became interested in systems that had been devised in attempts to understand aspects of natural language and thinking. To that end I took a class in Linguistics, followed by, during the Summer Quarter, an advanced class in Chomskyan syntax (a rash move, but I survived); and a class in Formal Logic (aka predicate or boolean calculus) knowledge of which, much to my surprise and amusement many years later, earned me enough money to buy an electric guitar. This was all more or less concurrent with species counterpoint taught by Diane Thome and with John Rahn's theory seminars, which provided a broad outline of Shenkerian tonal thinking and the groundwork of a language for atonal theory as it was propounded in John's then brand-new textbook Basic Atonal Theory.

All of this helped me find a path, eventually, around the head space of poorly understood and increasingly opaque European 12-tone-ism (ala Stockhausen), avante-garde-ism,  minimalism, and the host of other ism-isms then floating around, toward a more open-ended and less stylistically charged basis of thinking about notes. I did try my hand at a more-or-less straightforward 12-tone piece, a piano trio. I liked the row I had invented - as I recall some slicing of it (every 5-notes?) generated the inversion or retrograde or something to that effect. The piece itself, however, was clearly a dud and no fun to work on so I gave it up midway.

Your blogger all cleaned up - 1981

But I did want to have something to show for my last undergrad quarter, so I retreated to solo piano. By that time I had become acquainted with Benjamin Boretz's ("...my chart shines high where the blue milks upset..."), (John had it open at the piano in his office, though I regret missing Keith Johnston's performance from around that time) which restricts itself to 10 pitch-classes. Based on that bare fact I composed a 10-note row and proceeded to treat that row as existing entirely within a 10 pitch-class (mod-10) universe, that is, one in which the missing notes didn't exist and didn't create any interval gaps in terms of how I was calculating row transformations. My gamut, so to speak, had bumps.

I wrote seventeen short pieces. For each one I used a 5-note segment of the row and coupled it with that segment's mod-10 rotational array. I made the row-segment one voice and the rest of the array a second voice and called it good. For some reason involving a long forgotten system of cycling through row segments, I ended up with seventeen of them - my happy number.

The result, Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes, was my parting shot at what had become a seemingly increasingly fraught weekly composers' seminar. Since the pieces came across as clever and attractive - recognizably musicy - the older members of the faculty were in hearty approval of the conservative direction I seemed to be headed. This allowed John the opportunity of claiming that it was actually the most sophisticated serial work any of his students had presented. I'm not sure of the truth of that remark, and suspect he simply couldn't resist the joke, but I did appreciate his support.

These pieces are fun and agreeable to play, and I have programmed them repeatedly over the years. They also exhibit significant pre-characteristics of the particular rabbit hole down which I have been plunging since the mid-90s: cyclic generation of pitch-sets as the basis for a set of pieces, and systematic use of non-standard mod-X arithmetic.

Recordings:

Recorded live at the Seattle Concert Theater, July 9, 1981:

Keith Eisenbrey · Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes (810709) 810609

Recorded live at University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle, June 21, 2003:

Keith Eisenbrey · Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes 810609 (030621)

Recorded at the Tintinabulary, Seattle, January 6, 2010:

Keith Eisenbrey · 17 Prepuntal Contraludes (100106) 810609

Recorded live at the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle,  February 24, 2018:

Keith Eisenbrey · Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes 810609 (180224)