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

Playing with Others (part 2) 1977 - 1981

 Choral Set (1981)

Your blogger in 1981, drinking ire

At the University I was occasionally pulled into other ensembles. I sang in a chamber chorus for a graduate student's choral music recital (fun!), pounded piano for a singer who was learning a fellow composition student's single-character opera (The Tell Tale Heart), and played piano in various UW Contemporary Group concerts. I tried unsuccessfully to learn Bizet's two-piano "Jeux d'enfant" with Christopher Mehrens for a class with Neal O'Doan, and finally signed up for the University Singers, as an easy ensemble credit. This led to my career on the opera stage, as illustrious as it was lengthy. The University was staging Dvořák's "Rusalka" and I was tagged for the chorus. I fit the bill perfectly: sack of meat, sang tenor (more or less). I was then bumped up to the "next level" chorus, where I remember singing in the first-tenor section in performances of Berlioz's "Requiem", Haydn's "Lord Nelson Mass", Beethoven's underrated "Mass in C Major", Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast" and Orff's "Carmina Burana". I even tried my hand at writing music for choir and organ. "Choral Set" (1981) consists of an Introit, an Anthem, a Prayer Response and an Extroit, none of them successful.

Aaron Keyt in the early 80s

I would also, when asked, play fellow students' piano compositions. We may have already become acquainted and started hanging out together by then, but it is in this context, in 1980, that I first worked with Aaron Keyt, who had started in the program a few years after me. I played his composition "Seven Piece Match Set" for the weekly seminar and for the Young Composers' Concert that November. We have been collaborating steadily ever since. Much more later.

Neal Meyer, with hair grown back

In my last quarter, Spring of 1981, I took part in the UW Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble under the guidance of Stuart Dempster. I was excited to join this group after hearing them perform the Spring before and realizing, much to my surprise, that I could follow what they were doing. It wasn't that hard. I could do that! It was in this group that I first worked with Neal Meyer (now Neal Kosály-Meyer). Of course I had seen him around the music building - he was hard to miss, a bearded young man with a shaved head (not a common look back then) lugging a synthesizer around in a big blue case. I would have been dumbfounded had you told me that in a few years I would marry his sister. Again, much more later.

KCBOL - 1980

 KCBOL

During one of our lessons Ken showed or described to me a single-panel cartoon in which five parking meters, each a different height, stood in a row in order of size but for one, which one had a sign hanging from it: "out of order". I believe that the subject of our discussion was the perceived relative specificity of orderings of notes and other structures in music. The image has stuck with me, but at the time it became a structural motif for "KCBOL: A Minimal Extravaganza For Two Pianists". 

I wrote five piano pieces, each of different heft, from the smallest with just two notes, to the largest with over 200 notes. I asked a fellow student, Andrew Buchman, to assist in the performance. The stage was set with a piano in the middle, and a small table and chair in the bend, facing the audience. We entered, wearing matching tee-shirts with "KCBOL" blazoned upon them. I took my seat at the piano and Andrew at the table. The "program notes" and script are the graphics herein. The last diagram is how the blocks would look to the audience, in the same "mis-ordering" as the letters in the word BLOCK in "KCBOL". I also used that ordering, and possibly variations of it, for many of the internal figures and melodic contours throughout.

Of particular interest to me, later, were the largest "K" piece and the smallest "B". At a background level, the pitch material of K explores the notes making up a minor seventh chord (B, D, F-sharp, A) in ways that were similar to the procedure used in my later Intermezzos 1, 2, 3, and 4, (1981-1982) and is also a "one note at-a-time piece as Intermezzos 1 and 2 almost are. B, with its two notes, is echoed later in the fifth of my 5 Movements (1983), which also consists of 2 notes.

Performances

March 4, 1981 - Meany Studio Theater, University of Washington, Seattle - Andrew Buchman, Keith Eisenbrey

Recordings

March 4, 1981 - Andrew Buchman, Keith Eisenbrey

June 29, 2009 - Keith Eisenbrey

July 29, 2009 - Keith Eisenbrey

Keith Eisenbrey · KCBOL (090729) 801230

blogposts

July 5, 2017

"As cockamamie as the scheme was, there are many features of this 1980 piano piece that continue to be of use to me. As originally conceived there is a theater bit that goes with it, involving stacking alphabet blocks and ringing finger cymbals (which idea came back as whacking an oil drum at the beginning of Five Movements as performed at Bard in 1984). The original performers were Andrew Buchman and me. The midmost movement of the five is a two-note piece for piano four-hands."

Ken Benshoof - 1980

Sonata for Violin and Piano "Bryd one Brere" (1980)

Habitabit (1980)

Sonata 1980 (1980)

From Fall of 1977 to Spring of 1980 at the University of Washington I studied composition with Ken Benshoof. These compositions are among the last ones I worked on with him. I was pretty headstrong, and it would be another several years before much of what he tried to teach me had any effect. He gave me some advice about playing piano that I still find valuable every day. "Tell the whole story every time." He was a kind and thoughtful teacher and I am deeply grateful, both for the support he gave me at the time, and for the many wonderful conversations we have had over the years since.

your blogger ca. 1980, with what passes for a smile

I was taken by the early 14th English Century melody "Bryd one Brere" when it came up in a class on medieval music, and used it as a starting point for the showy Sonata for Violin and Piano "Bryd one Brere". I was attempting to write an idiomatic virtuoso violin part so I tried some splashy effects, such as left hand pizzicatos and multi-string glissandos. The piano part features a bunch of hand and arm clusters. My heroic violinist, Aloysia Friedmann (since gone on to great things) rose to the occasion magnificently. It's no great piece by a stretch but it's fun and makes me smile.

One of the many benefits of a large school of music is that one gets to know some phenomenal young musicians, such as Aloysia. At some point I also got to know Sue Walsh, a coloratura soprano with perfect pitch who was up for something different. Habitabit is a setting, in the Vulgate Latin, of the Peacable Kingdom passage from Isaiah ("The wolf shall dwell with the lamb . . ."). In an attempt to throw a bunch of wolves and lambs together in a pile I used, among other things, a strident ostinato bass rhythm, quotation (a Schubert dance), and called for extensive improvisation both from the pianist and the singer. It was an honest attempt, but something of a train wreck in the end. Its best moment is a long stretch repeating a loud juicily dissonant chord over and over with the dampers up. Sue sang wonderfully.

your blogger drinking ire

Sonata (1980) is a bit of a freak flag fly piece. It quotes (I was really into quoting) Nielsen's "Fifth Symphony", Cole Porter's "Let's Misbehave", and the "Dies Irae"; throws in a some twelve-tone-ish passages, loads of vigorous clusters and graphically notated clouds of scattered notes; and imitates a little music box that's winding down. Each of these features interrupts the others frequently, and are themselves interrupted by variously measured silent moments. The most interesting idea though was to use two different ways of measuring time - by breath (notated with brackets) and by meter (notated the usual way). Each different time system interrupts the other system. There are long stretches of nearly nothing happening except for a minor third tremolo. When I played it the next spring on the student composers' concert somebody, apparently, had had enough and walked out. I must admit I was rather pleased.

Performances:

Sonata for Violin and Piano "Bryd one Brere"

May 15, 1980 Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington School of Music, Seattle

Aloysia Friedmann, violin; Keith Eisenbrey, piano

also 

June 13, 1980 home recording 

Habitabit

November 24, 1980 Studio Theater, Meany Hall, University of Washington, Seattle

Sue Walsh, soprano; Keith Eisenbrey, piano

Sonata 1980

May 13, 1981 Studio Theater, Meany Hall, University of Washington, Seattle

February 7, 2004 Music at the Edge of Space, University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

May 14, 2009 home recording

Keith Eisenbrey · Sonata 1980 (090514) 800511

June 6, 2009 Preludes in Seattle Part 3, Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Blog Posts:

February 13, 2011 - Sonata 1980 - Keith Eisenbrey (the recording of February 7, 2004 - no further comment)

March 1, 2011 - Sonata 1980 (the recording of June 6, 2009)

My live performance of June 6, 2009. The various species of pauses and interruptions are more clearly distinguished here than in my other performances, and I managed to refrain from rushing as much as I usually do. The Chapel piano sounds good.

June 7, 2011 - Sonata for violin and piano "Bryd one Brere"

Aloysia was a classmate of mine at the UW back in mumbletymumble, and she graciously agreed to play this little violin & piano piece. She has since gone on to great things and a wonderful career, as we all knew she would. The title comes from a 13th century English song that had come up as an example in a music history class. At the time my compositional method was to throw as many techniques as I could think of at the page and see which ones stuck. Use of quotations was one of them. The result in this case is kind of rollicking and showy. Aloysia negotiates my occasionally violinistic writing with pizazz. I do my best to keep up.

June 19, 2011 - Sonata for violin and piano "Bryd one Brere" (the recording of May 15, 1980 - no further comment)

July 14, 2011 - Sonata 1980 (the recording of May 13, 1981)

My live recording from May of 1981, at the Meany Studio Theater. The tape deteriorated some before I could rip it, but you can still hear the door opening for the guy who walked out on me.

July 24, 2011 - Sonata 1980 (the recording of May 14, 2009)

My recent studio recording.

December 30, 2012 - Habitabit

My 1980 Latin setting of the Peacable Kingdom passage from Isaiah. I was a student at the UW at the time and composed by hurling conceptual ideas at score paper to see what they would do. In this case I used quotations (a Schubert Waltz, I think), abrupt jump cuts between disparate textures, and directed improvisation, among other things. The whole thing ends up pretty much a mess, but my intrepid and phenomenally pitch-perfect soprano soldiered on admirably.

Fitting Room - 1979

Diapsalmata (1979)

Sonata 1979 (1979)

That year I was spending long hours in the library, both reading through scores and listening to recent and unfamiliar music. Among other items that caught my attention were the print book of scores and manuscript pages collected by John Cage called "Scores" and a multi-episode (and pretty darned complete) recorded survey of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen through the early 70s. I found each of these to be fascinating, puzzling, and intellectually jolting. In response I spent the rest of my undergraduate career trying different modern music garments on for size.

blogger fishing sans hook

Diapsalmata, or Diapsalmata - 11 Preludes for Piano, consists of 11 short pieces, each focused on a different pitch class: G, C, D, F, A, B-flat, [], E-flat, B, A-flat, F-sharp, C-sharp. There was, I recall, a 12th prelude on E to fit in the blank spot, but either I skipped over it or didn't like it much and threw it out. New Music Features used include: proportionate notation of rhythm [I, VI, IX, X]; graphic gestural notation [III, VI, IX, X]; extreme registral displacement (or narrow out-of-center registral limitation) [I, II, III, IV, V, VII, VIII, XI]; and quotation of other music [XI], that other music being a little melody I liked (still do) from Scriabin's Fantaisie in A minor, W. 18, for two pianos (1892-1893). It is gratifying to me that it still holds together pretty well, and some of the detail is lovely - particularly the low register two-voice chorale of VIII.

I recollect that grumbling was heard among the faculty when I presented this at our weekly department seminar - though it would be tempting to make more of the grumbling than was actual, and I'm sure at the time I succumbed. I don't know whether Ken Benshoof, my teacher then, liked it or not, but we had some supportive conversations about it. I performed it in November of that year at the Winter Composers' Spotlight, and then the next May for the Brechemin Scholarship Auditions. Neal O'Doan, with whom I was studying piano, informed me that I had "scared" some of the piano faculty with my full arm fortissimo clusters. I admit the idea of being a teapot enfant terrible was heady, but probably more heady than was warranted for the size of the teapot.

Sonata 1979 was originally just Sonata, then the graphic Sonata - not as a title, but to distinguish it from the Sonata I wrote in 1980. I figured numbering them was weird, especially going back and renaming the first one First Sonata. In 2004 when I preformed both on the same recital I decided on my current naming scheme. I notice that IMSLP imposes their own numbering system, which is fine. The score eschews staff lines. The first part consists of proportionately notated stemless notes and pedal marks, relative durations being indicated by slurs. The second part is in graphic notation - squiggles and trills - followed by a short quasi-reprise of the first part. No precise pitches are indicated. The big accents on page 9 were originally intended to indicate "kick the pedal frame" but it could be any big noise. There are a couple of spots where a pedal release is marked fortississimo, which I have performed by sliding my foot off the pedal so it slams back up with a bang.

Ken grumbled some at this, not because it was graphically notated, but because he felt that it didn't engage that part of me that was getting quite good at composing how pitches might hang together. He was right, but I'm still fond of the idea of it, dragging it out of obscurity for recitals in 2004 and 2007. Prior to that time I had recorded a version in 1980 (Sonata, Sonata, Sonata) that dubs several performances on top of each other using a forgotten method that maximizes the cumulative loss of sound fidelity; and in May of 1986 Neal Kosály-Meyer and I used up the last 20 minutes or so of a cassette tape trading off performances (Readings of a Sonata). 

Performances:

Diapsalmata

November 28, 1979 - Student Composers Spotlight - Meany Studio Theater, University of Washington, Seattle

May 1, 1980 - Brechemin Auditions - Brechemin Auditorium, University of Washington School of Music, Seattle

February 23, 2002 - Continuity in Small Things - University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

March 17, 2007 - Preludes in Seattle, Part 2 - University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

also: 

February 7, 2007 - home recording

Sonata 1979

February 7, 2004 - Music at the Edge of Space - University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

October 13, 2007 - Sopranos - University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle

also: 

June 14, 1980 - Sonata, Sonata, Sonata (several performances overdubbed) 

May 20, 1986 - Readings of a Sonata - Neal Kosály-Meyer and I trade performances until the tape runs out

Keith Eisenbrey · Readings of a Sonata (860520)

April 20 and 27, 2007 - home recordings

Blog Post (from Playlist of June 16, 2018):

June 7, 2018

Readings of a Sonata - Keith Eisenbrey, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Neal and I dink around with another old score of mine, Sonata 1979
We trade off readings to use up unused tape footage
We accomplish 3 full readings and the first part of a fourth

It's a graphic score so all the notes and rhythms are different, to varying degrees

sounds great, in that cruddy way we had, all the way

3 Strathspeys 1979

3 Strathspeys (1979)

3 Strathspeys were the first solo piano pieces I had composed since 2 Interruptions in 1976. I thought perhaps a set of dances, being short, would be a useful exercise. Something to work on while I came up with something to work on. I asked my friend Kathleen Ebneter if there were any kinds of folk dances that I could use that weren't already amply represented in the classical literature. She suggested strathspeys, and offered the information that they featured a "Scottish Snap," and that a typical rhythmic figure might be "short long | long short | long short | short long." Accurate or not, that was enough information to get me going. 

Note: if "short long" is one type (A), and  "long short" is another type (B), the formal type of the rhythm is ABBA (I had not heard of them). And if "short" is a type (A), and "long" is another type (B), then the whole consists of: ABBA BAAB. Interesting.

Banned Rehearsal with ABBA, Hollow Earth Radio, 2019

The first of them is the most old-fashioned of the lot. Set in A B A form, the 'A' music sticks closely to the rhythmic figure, developing it quite cleverly both melodically and rhythmically. I am especially fond of the interjectionary figure at the end of the fourth bar, which became the seed of the material in the 'B' music. That first 'A' section is in its own little A B A form, with its 'B' music being more gentle, lyrical and contrapuntal. The greater 'B' music grumbles along in the bass register, keeping itself tightly within the rhythmic scheme. The final 'A' music sneaks in over the top of the grumbling and gradually replaces it, has one bar all to itself, then winks out. some left over grumbling finishes it up. Even now, this piece feels composed.

Your blogger with hat 1978

The second, also in A B A form, starts with fortissimo doubled minor 9ths, like an impatient shouty drum. A tune full of skips follows, like a parody of the tune in the first, accompanied by a blatantly square staccato eighth-note pattern in the left hand. The tune forces its way into the upper register until the shouty drum puts a stop to it. It tries again, with some flashy ornaments, and the left hand figure skips a note every bar so that the whole offsets itself from the tune, but with identical response from the shouty drum. The 'B' music starts in the lower register and is another square eighth-note figure with strong accents on 2, 3 and 4. The right hand comes in, after 4 bars, in a canon offset by an eighth-note. Pianistically, this ends up feeling like rubbing one's head and patting one's tummy at the same time. Fun! The 'A' music returns, but is quickly (and more quietly) drummed out, the canonic figure of 'B' is alluded to, then BANG from the drum and done.

Your blogger with cat 1979

In the third Strathspey I start to tinker with it. The first measure is the first measure of the first Strathspey. Pause. Then a measure with only the first and third beats present. Pause. Then a measure with just the 'snaps' - beats one and four. Pause. Then just the snaps, but on beat four and one. I go "ta da!" during the pause. then just the snap on beat four. Then just beats two and four. I go again "ta da!" I sweep it all away bottom to top and hammer in the root rhythm,  but stretched over four measures way up on the highest D-natural. Then, quietly, just the snaps on beats | one four | one. A wisp of "ta . . ." and out.

Performances:

Studio Theater, Meany Hall, University of Washington: 

Student Composer Spotlight February 27, 1980

University Temple United Methodist Church, Seattle: 

October 25, 2002 (A Cat's Life Returns) 

June 10, 2006 (Preludes in Seattle)

Blog Post (from Playlist of January 12, 2019):

January 5, 2019

Three Strathspeys (1979) - Keith Eisenbrey - Keith Eisenbrey [recorded live on June 10, 2006]

Something about these, my second-ever set of piano pieces, brought Rameau, whose keyboard music I have been sight-reading recently, to mind. Uncluttered textures, clear phrases, and most of all, exuberantly enjoyed sonorities in all the registers. The finals of the first two are a tad clever I suppose, but the third one holds its focus out to the bitter.

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.