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

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 in 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.