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.

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 from 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