Delusions of Grandeur Part Two 1977-1979

Prelude for Clarinet and Piano (1977)

3 Kelly Songs (1978)

Concerto for Piano, Flute, and Strings (1978)

2 Poems (1978)

Variations on a Theme by Brahms (1978)

Symphony (1979)

3 brothers: Paul (L) and Glen (R), your blogger seated

I wrote Prelude for Clarinet and Piano in the spring of 1977 for my brother Paul, who was at Washington State University studying clarinet. It features a three-note melodic motif (E, F, D) that I drove relentlessly (using various transpositions, transformations, permutations, and prolongations) into the ground. In 1979 he performed it on his Senior Recital and I have been told that a copy of the score resides quietly in the WSU music library. I was unable to be there, but have a recording.

In my first year at the University of Washington I met Ken Jaffe, a fellow student who commuted to school with me on the same bus. He was a counter-tenor with perfect pitch, and I wrote him three short songs on verses by Walt Kelly: "One Small Score for Two Brown Eyes," "For Lewis Carroll and the Children," and "A Summer Song to a Winter Tune." Ken and I performed them at a Student Composer Concert at the UW in May of 1979. I computer-engraved the first two of them, but apparently not the third. The complete score is probably buried deep in a drawer somewhere. Permission to use the texts was neither sought nor granted.

beard o' wisp

In order to be a famous composer pianist I needed a to compose a Piano Concerto. I was struggling considerably at the time with what is popularly known as "finding one's voice." From this end the problem is mostly one of shedding all the dreamy ideas about what kind of composer one aspires to be, but at the time it seemed mostly a question of how to put one note after another so that it sounded like music. After at least one major revision this was performed in November of 1979, featuring my friend Dean Williamson on piano, Ellen Berkowitz on flute, with the Thalia Chamber Symphony, under my baton. Much of it is rather murky, some of it is rhythmic and fun. Each soloist gets a cadenza.

2 Poems consist of an Elegy and an Epigraph for solo cello. A fellow student was kind enough to perform them at one of our weekly composer's seminars. There is a slow one and a fast one.

Each variation of my Brahms Variations focuses on a different orchestral group - strings, brass, winds, like that. The University of Washington Orchestra read through this once, doing a better job than it deserved. The Theme is a Sarabande for piano that Brahms ended up re-tooling as part of an early chamber piece - one of the piano trios if I am not, though I often am, mistaken.

with mountains and hat

I was determined to write a symphony when I was 19. I had read that Shostakovich had done so, and possibly others. Mustn't fall behind! I managed to finish the score the day before I turned 20. It has some moments, notably a fugal bit that could have gone somewhere, and a french horn tune that needed more work. There is a grand design but it hardly matters. A couple of years later the Seattle Symphony provided six of us composition students with a rehearsal and a concert of our pieces, conducted by Michel Singher. It was my senior year and I was fortunate to be included. A local television station, looking for a human interest story, sent a camera crew and reporter to interview one of us. Due to the timing of their visit (during rehearsals) I happened to be the one they interviewed, though not, as I recall, the one they had hoped to. This is the only time I have appeared on television. I surreptitiously recorded the concert, hauling a full size cassette deck up to the balcony in a suitcase. Very sneaky.

Music in School 1965-1977

your blogger on Mt. Pilchuck ca. 1976

I started playing drums in 5th Grade, under the tutelage of "Red" Eickhoff, the band teacher at Phantom Lake Elementary School. I could read music and knew how to practice so I moved quickly up the ranks, or "chairs" as they were called. And since I knew how to watch the director I was tasked with playing bass drum, starring as the eponymous "Mr. Boom Boom" in an early concert. I must have started private drum lessons at about that time. My mom was a musician and that is what one did. I remember a series of private drum teachers (whose names are forgotten) who had little studios in the back caverns of various local music stores, teaching rudiments and sticking technique - and eventually "drum set." Soon I was taking on younger students of my own. At some point I started taking orchestral percussion lessons from an older peer, Cameron MacIntosh. He introduced me to the mysteries of mallets, and that there are many ways to strike a triangle and operate a tambourine.

At Tillicum the band teacher was William Wicker, a jack-of-all-reeds who would regale us with stories of playing for the circus when they would come to town. I don't remember whether I started also playing in the orchestra right away in 7th Grade but it is likely. Marsha (sp?) McElvain was the instructor. One year we entered a student orchestra contest in Gresham, OR, and walked away with 1st Place in our division, beating out our feared cross-town rivals at Odle Junior High, who had won the year before. The trophy we brought back was easily 3 times the size of any of the trophies (all sports) in the case. Miss McElvain was quite pleased.

drawing by Paul Eisenbrey, 1977

At Sammamish High School I was in band (Gary Walker, director) for perhaps a year, perhaps just one semester, opting quickly for orchestra as being more amenable to my personality and schedule - we had been required to play in Pep Band for the first football game, at which I caught walking pneumonia and was out for three weeks. The orchestra and the ensembles were led by Norm Poulshock, who gave me several wonderful opportunities to show off in public (spooky xylophone solos and the like) - and even let me take the school's marimba home one summer to practice. There was a music theory class in those more enlightened times, led by Jack Halm (who also ran the choral program). It was as an assignment in his class that I wrote "Prelude for String Quartet." With my dad's help I even convinced the powers that be to count this music theory class as an "Occupational Ed" credit.

Columbia River

Among my peers during those years I remember Kathleen Ebneter (a guitarist, singer, and huge Sandy Denny fan who tried to introduce me to folk music, and who later went into Astronomy), the remarkably talented violist Karie Prescott (whom I escorted to see Götterdämerung when Seattle Opera first produced it - talk about your first dates!), the cellist sisters Anne and Meg Brennand, (all of whom are, I believe, still active professionally), cellist Larry Chu (went into medicine), my piano duet partner Dean Williamson (from whom I quickly learned that I was not the greatest pianist since sliced bread and who is now an esteemed Opera Director), my good friend in the Thalia percussion section Julia Calhoun (sadly lost track of), and a host of others. At various local piano competitions I was often placed in the same pool of contestants as Christopher Mehrens. For some reason my piano teacher seemed to think we were rivals for something, but when he appeared in my first theory class at the University of Washington we ended up hanging around together quite a lot, He provided invaluable assistance during the realization of my big synclavier work "AKU."

your blogger on Mt. Adams, 1977

Delusions of Grandeur Part One 1975-1977

String Quartet #1 (1976)

Music for Orchestra (1977)

Variations, Fugue, and Dance (1977)

String Quartet #2 (1977)

Chamber Suite (1977)

blogger without hat

I became aware of Scriabin at about the same time I started composing. These are some factoids I found intriguing that might be more or less true:
1. He was about my (then) age when he started writing music,
2. he was 19 when he composed his first Symphony,
3. he was a brilliant pianist (better than Rachmaninoff per the rumors) known for subtle use of the damper pedal, and
4. he invented a completely new harmony "based on 4ths."  Oh, and
5. there was something about sex that was never quite explained.
A heady mix for a young nerd. I figured if I was going to keep up I had best get started.

I started by trying to invent a new harmonic system. 4ths had been used so I decided tritones were my ticket to fame and glory. My first string quartet uses bunches of them in parallel double stops. What I discovered is that I had no understanding of how a harmonic system might be constructed in the first place. Looking back at it now, it is ambitious, showy, energetic, and quite good practice at writing notes in an open score format.

For my next trick I tried a big orchestra piece. Music for Orchestra is scored for piccolo, flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 french horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, xylophone, chimes (tubular bells), snare drum, timpani, and the usual army of strings. It has some ideas pasted onto a set of orchestral builds. It starts and ends with chimes and long held string unisons.

blogger with hat

For Variations, Fugue, and Dance, saving only the timpani, I traded all the spare percussion for a 3rd french horn. This time all those ideas are thrown into a more tightly held set of structures. This is
1. my first set of variations,
2. my first fugue, and
3. my first dance.
Humble beginnings indeed. Many moments are cribbed from Shostakovich. This score actually got a read-through at orchestra camp that summer. My co-campers were brave and I thank them.

Orchestra music has a lot of notes, hand inking big scores was time consuming, and making all those copies was expensive. I think I even copied out all the parts. Oof, back to quartets. If SQ #1 was all marcato aggression and cool impressionism, SQ #2 does a splashy cannonball into expressionistic teen angst. Some of the melodic ideas were derived from names of people - though rather than matching letter names in the name to the letter names of the notes I mapped each letter to its place within a 26 semi-tone pitch span, then spelled the name in pitches. I had heard of Schoenberg's tone rows by that time and probably inflicted some operations on my tunes. I finished this piece while working with Ken Benshoof at the University of Washington, though I think it was pretty much complete by then. It was the first piece of mine performed at the UW, in what was then the Studio Theater, downstairs at Meany Hall.

blogger on the beach

For the Summer of 1977 Dell Wade was putting together a chamber concert - he was always putting something together - and my assignment was to write a piece for it. Chamber Suite is for wind quintet and string quartet plus double bass. I didn't know what Suites were made of so I looked at several. Well, maybe I looked at one. There is a Prelude, an Allemande, a Courante, a Sarabande, an Air, and a Gigue. It must have been one of Bach's that I looked at. I didn't have any experience of what those sorts of dances were, so I stuck close to the model. The Air is the only one that isn't similar at all to what an Air is in Bach. This piece worked pretty well in performance, in the sense that it clearly sounds like music, the orchestration works reasonably well (nothing fancy), it doesn't overstay its welcome (much), and it doesn't get all weepy.

First Compositions 1973 - 1976

Percussion Trio (1973?)

The Dresden Overture (1973?)

**

Prelude for String Quartet (1974 or 1975)

Two Interruptions (1975-6)

Your blogger in a tie

In junior high, being able to read both rhythms and pitches, I was tagged to play percussion in the school orchestra. A fellow percussionist and I composed a short percussion trio for a district ensemble contest. We each threw in stuff that we wanted to do and strung them together so that there was a start of it and an end of it. We were probably the only group that wrote our own material, and I remember the adjudicator was impressed. Well, perhaps more intrigued that we had done it than impressed with the result. It is possible, but I doubt the score survives. My first attempt at writing a masterpiece resulted in a painfully earnest effusion for solo piano, inspired by Slaughterhouse Five, called The Dresden Overture. It featured lots of loud D minor chords. I'm pretty sure the score is gone and no recordings were made.

In both junior high and high school I got to know some excellent young string players. I also became acquainted with different chamber ensembles, simultaneously drinking deep drafts of the relative prestige the various configurations were accorded in our culture. String quartets seemed to be top of the heap, so I wrote a movement in E minor. I was playing lots of preludes (Chopin and Scriabin) so that's what I called it. My string writing isn't particularly gracious, though I got some excellent feedback on that from some of my peers who were game to read through it. On the plus side it's based on actual musical ideas - a melody, an accompanimental figuration, and a sequence or two. This was the piece I showed Dell Wade when we first met. I probably still have the original hand written score somewhere, and a printout of a score made with software long since unloadable. In 1985 I made a recording on a Wurlitzer Funmaker Sprite electronic organ that I had purchased for Banned Rehearsal in 1984 ($200!). There may be some overdubbing involved. The cheesy cruddy sound does the piece no disfavors.

I was dinking around on the piano one day when I chanced upon an impressive sounding but simple to produce figuration (a modified Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater pattern) that I worked into a blatant set of answering phrases in 7/16 time. In orchestra we had recently performed a piece by Alan Hovhannes that had a "senza misura" bit in it, so I strung together some juicy dissonant chords for a middle part, and marked it grandly "senza misura". Then I repeated the 7/16 phrases to bring it home. Thus was born Interruption, later Interruption #1.

Interruption #2 was my attempt to make lightning strike twice. This time the motor is a black note pentatonic figure in 5/8, set against a Ravel-ian melody in 2/4. The eighth note is equal between them, so that the meter lines up each 20 eighths. The tunes are pleasant and there are repeats, probably too many.

The Two Interruptions are the first of my pieces that I still rather enjoy. The focus is real, I'm starting to play with material in ways that I recognize as my own, the piano writing falls well under the hands, and I think the titles are great. I was quite pleased with myself. I played at least the first one for Lockrem Johnson when we met in the Spring of 1976. In going through my old papers I discover that the adjudicator who looked at my piece as part of the Washington State Music Teachers' Association Young Composer's Project was none of other than the late Bern Herbolsheimer, who wrote me a nice note. I played #1 in public several times back in the day, including as an encore at my Senior Recital. I picked them up again after many years to perform on a recital on November 5, 2011, at University Temple United Methodist Church, in Seattle. The score can be found here. 2 Interruptions

Greg Short, Dell Wade, Lockrem Johnson 1973 - 1977

Greg Short was the first composer I ever met in the flesh. He came to one of my piano lessons late in
1973 or early in 1974, a very tall young man with close-set eyes, a remarkable nervous intensity, and a large stash of scores. Mr. Smiley (I believe it was Mr. Smiley throughout our lessons, never "Vic" as it was later), probably through a local music teachers association, had met Greg, and somehow I was chosen to learn some of his simpler pieces as part of my program that year. "Knuckle Rag" was a fun and showy number featuring cluster chords hand slaps finger snaps leg slaps faceboard slaps and knocking. "Little Rose", "Rigadoon", and "The Fox", as easily as they fit into the student piece mode, are replete with Greg's deep knowledge of pianistic detail. In the spring of 1974, or perhaps the next year, I played some of them at a music teacher's association recital featuring Greg's and other local composers' music. I remember that one of those other composers was Lockrem Johnson, though I don't remember meeting him then. That meeting occurred through the auspices of Dell Wade.

Dell was composer in residence at the orchestra camp I attended, probably in the summer of 1975. He was, at that time, all of 19, but already hustling performances and collaborators. I shared some of my early pieces and ended up taking composition lessons with him. I learned about pens, inks, pencils, and staff paper, and picked up some nuts and bolts habits that are still with me today. I prefer, for example, sketching music on 12-stave 8.5X11 buff paper using #3 pencils. I don't know how much of his compositional personality rubbed off on me, though I'm sure there was a fair amount of style mimicry in my pieces from those years. At any rate, he taught me enough to make a favorable impression (I had a portfolio of music for various ensembles, orchestra, and some little piano pieces) on the composition faculty at the UW when I applied there in 1977.

In late 1976 or so Dell thought that I should enter one of my piano pieces in a statewide contest, but since he wasn't in the sponsoring teachers' association he brought me along to meet his teacher, Lockrem Johnson, who was. Lockrem listened while I played my piano piece (oh that Grotrian-Steinweg he had! magnificent!) and we looked at an orchestra piece I was working on. We listened to some music by others (it was through Dell and Lockrem that I learned about the astounding Swiss composer Frank Martin, and I remember a drop-the-needle game featuring one of Sullivan's concert overtures (Dell, if I recall, guessed it correctly, much to Lockrem's annoyance) and then he played a recording of his First Symphony while I read along in a copy of the manuscript score.

The fact that I was able to keep up, turning the pages at the right time, made an impression on him. He gave me a score of his 5th Sonata, and had suggestions about where I might want to study. He agreed to sponsor me in the contest (though he graciously called Vic Smiley for permission, since Vic could have done so also), and then called my parents, while I was still on the way home, to assure them that I really did have something going for me as a composer, and that it should be encouraged.

And, although he didn't want to take Dell's student from him, he felt that I would benefit from a more experienced mentor, offering to take me on the next year. Unfortunately, he passed away suddenly, far too young, before that could happen. At his memorial concert, at Cornish, I heard some of his 24 Preludes, and took some pains to acquire a full score from his cousin. I have performed the cycle all through once (8 at a time) and am hoping to finish the cycle again in a few years (4 at a time, in my recital series "Preludes in Seattle") along with those of Greg Short and of my first teacher at the University of Washington, Ken Benshoof.

Playing With Others 1964 - 1977

I started singing in choirs at our church when I was 5. In the 5th Grade I took up drums and

8th Grade Nerd King

percussion so that I could join band and, later, orchestra at school. In my teens I joined the Thalia Youth Orchestra. Due to rehearsal conflicts (both choir and orchestra met on Thursday nights) I stopped singing in choirs until I got to college and discovered it was an easy ensemble credit.

Both Victor Smiley, my piano teacher, and JoAnne Deacon, my Mom's accompanist at The Lake Washington Singers, taught me early on that instrumentalists and singers need pianists, a potentially lucrative discovery. By the time I was in high school I was accompanying fellow students, sometimes going with them to their lessons. I was, thus, privileged to learn from a group of (possibly) unwitting auxiliary teachers and picked up on how string players think (it's all in the bowing) and how wind players think (breath control of course, much like singers). I remember particularly valuable lessons with a Seattle Symphony violinist, Mr. Sotor, and later, at the UW, with the violinist Dénes Zsigmondy and the flautist Felix Skowronek.

Frances Walton

In the Thalia organization, then under the leadership of Mikael Scheremetiew and Frances Walton, I played percussion in both their youth and also, later, their community orchestras, and attended their summer orchestra camp, where I first came into close contact with chamber music in some of its varied guises. It was also there that I was first allowed to wave a baton in front of an orchestra. Maestro Scheremetiew must have seen an aptitude, and his kind support led to my first official paying job: Junior Associate Conductor of the Youth Orchestras. I think I rehearsed and conducted one of the intermediate orchestras in an arrangement of some Couperin piece or other, and got to perform it in concert.

Looking back on it, all of my summer camps but one (a Junior High Church-sponsored hiking camp) were music related. I went to Choir Camp and Orchestra Camp, but never Band Camp. In contradistinction to how

that's me with the legs next to the teen with the midriff
Choir Camp, Penticton B.C.

summer camps are portrayed within Popular Culture, they did not last the entire summer, but were single week affairs. They were generally held at various church-owned camp sites on the Kitsap Peninsula, but I also remember one choir camp on Lake Coeur d'Alene in Idaho, and another on Lake Okanogan, in Penticton B.C., led by the well-known hymn writing duo (Richard K.) Avery and (Donald S.) Marsh (or perhaps just one of them, memory fails).

Piano Lessons 1965 - 1977

My first piano teacher - Mrs. Swint, if memory serves - was a violinist who taught piano on the side.

When it became clear that my interest in playing wasn't going away Mom  consulted with her accompanist, JoAnne Deacon, to find a more suitable teacher. I started with Victor Smiley when I was 7 and worked with him until I graduated from High School.

At our first lesson, or so I am told, I played some thing I had learned.

His response was "Dig That Crazy Rhythm."

I guess he dug me, though I did not know myself well enough at that time to know what digging myself, as myself, well enough to dig me, was, but no problem. We've all been there.

He told my parents that his greatest fear would be that I would get bored, so he loaded me up with a pile of music. Bach to Bernstein was his motto, and though I think he used Bernstein as a placeholder, the Bach part was no joke. Lots of it from the very beginning. Musicianship: Scales, arpeggios, finger exercises, theory, improvisation, and repertoire from Baroque (always it was Bach), Classical, Romantic, Modern, and Popular composers. Popular meant show tunes at first. Later on he tried mightily to teach me the rudiments of jazz, but I resisted just as mightily.

What I learned:

think vocally. (hidden message: music is thinking)

legato is about shifting weight.

the damper pedal has seven positions (an oversimplification of course, but it sets the feet to listening).

the greater part of all ornaments begin above principal note.

keep your pinkie curved.

(never in so many words, but:) keep it moving, take your time.

and in case you forgot: think vocally.