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)

John Rahn, Charts, and AKU Part 1 - 1980 1981

AKU (1981) 

In the Fall of 1980 the University of Washington Department of Systematic Musicology acquired a Synclavier, which they housed in a small room on one of the lower floors of the School of Music, somewhere down below Brechemin Auditorium. I had just started studying with John Rahn and he had just completed and shared a piece of his that featured sounds synthesized thereon. Through his good offices I was allowed quite a lot of time with it during Winter Quarter, but in preparation I had to write a piece for it, which occupied my time through Winter break.

The Synclavier could play back eight lines simultaneously, and allowed eight instruments to be played during any single output file. These instruments could be designed with digital controls for various parameters, such as timbre and envelope. One of its features was that, unlike analog synthesizers of the day, once a setting was set it didn't drift, and could be adjusted in some detail. Specifics escape me, but I'm sure the specs can be found on-line.

your blogger, circa 1980

I figured that I would try to use its full potential, so I wrote a piece with eight instruments. Some of the instruments played more than one note at a time, so I had to do some fancy charting to be certain that no more than eight sounds were occurring at any one time. I started with an ordered set of eight numbers (I forget the order, but my criteria were similar to those used in KCBOL) and designed eight instruments in increasing complexity of timbre (wholly subjective) - the simplest being a sine wave, and with eight different envelope lengths. Each instrument was allowed a certain number of notes to play during its active time, and the amount of active time each instrument had was proportioned with eight distinct durations. The amount of time between the end of each duration and the end of the piece was divvied out among the eight instruments using the same ordered set of numbers. I probably also gave each instrument a unique size of total range. There may have been even more to it than that, but whew! I filled in the notes from various sources, among them some lines from the 25th Goldberg Variation, and a tune from my Habitabit. Charting this all out, as I say, took a lot of my time that December. I had pages all over my bed trying to get it all together when my brother came in to inform me that John Lennon had been shot and killed.

Each line had to be sequenced individually, by hand, in real time. In order to be sure each line was entered accurately (the rhythms are thorny) I had to scale the tempo down for most of the lines. this might involve sitting around for 20 or 30 minutes waiting for the part to begin. My friend Christopher Mehrens bravely volunteered to assist in this tedium and probably played some of the lines.

Once it was completed I had a floppy disk with the data and a reel-to-reel tape of the finished piece. I promptly had the folks at the Listening Library dub a copy to cassette so that I could listen at home. It is fortunate I did so, as later events proved, but that is a story for another day. I shared the piece at our weekly seminar late the next Spring. It kept getting put off because, as it seems, a good portion of the composition faculty at the time were not especially eager to listen to a 30 minute synthesizer piece, and I gathered some of them were not pleased with the direction I was heading. A few of them hung around to hear the whole thing. For all I know mine was among the first synthesized musics ever made by a student there, and possibly the first electronic music promulgated by an undergrad under their auspices. It was all pretty new at the time and it was a significantly stuffier department then than it is currently.

The title, in a tip of my hat to the Listening Library, consists of three index letters seen on a drawer of one of their card catalogs: A-KU. At the time I quipped that it stood for "Aaron Keyt, Undertaker". Many years later my wife picked "Aku" as the name of a volcanic mountain that plays a significant part in her Daughter of Magic "Deep River" fantasy series.

Recordings:

February 26, 1981 (from cassette dub of master tape)

Keith Eisenbrey · Aku 810226