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)