Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts - July-August 1982 Part 1

My acceptance letter

Jet lag due to the three-hour time difference between the West and East coasts was never an issue for me. I have always been a morning person, waking at about 6 and fading around 9 or 10. The program's schedule did not presume wakefulness until after 9 AM and regularly extended toward midnight and beyond, so I simply didn't adjust and meshed with prevailing trends.

The studio space I was provided consisted of a key and use of Brook House, a sizable cottage out in the woods with a piano it it where I could practice in the mornings. The offices of Perspectives of New Music were in the basement. Official activity commenced with softball in the late morning. It was never a game as such but consisted of shagging fly balls for each other. I wrote home soon after arriving to ask for my mitt. Later I would assert, with some underlying truth, that I had received my master's degree in hitting and catching. 

The afternoons and evenings were taken up by seminars, often featuring a visit from a local-ish composer or other artist. It was in this context that I met, among others and over the course of two summers, Milton Babbitt, Elaine Barkin, Arthur Berger, Warren Burt, Morton Feldman, and John Zorn. I'm sure J. K. Randall also visited that first summer, but I must have been in an odd head-space at the time and kept my distance. 

Presentations by the various MFAers were frequent events. Everyone gathered together to discuss what was being shared. It was interesting to me that there was apparently some friction as to the general vibe and purpose of these events, in the sense that there was some notion afloat that critiquing (in the sense of judging worth and professional merit) was expected and valuable. This attitude, which occasionally got rather acidic, was quite familiar to me from the weekly UW Composer's lab, but the usefulness of this approach to the community was in question, especially from Ben. This may have been my first exposure to a different way of looking at what we as community members were to each other - not competitors but collaborators. It rang a bell in my head.

Kingston Bridge

Late evenings often ended with a bunch of us getting something to eat at one of the several pizza places or diners in nearby Red Hook, Rhinebeck, or across the river in Kingston. This would often include some of my fellow music students - Jill Borner, Bruce Huber, Dan Sedia, Ben presiding. We were joined regularly by Charles Stein, whose exact relationship to the program was never clear to me, but who was nevertheless always ferociously interesting. Some of the students from the other disciplines would also join us, notably the poet David Abel, and occasionally one of Ben's guests - thus my claim to have had pizza with Milton Babbitt. Many a Greek Salad (it was cheap) and late-night omelette (breakfast any time) was devoured amid lively and wide-ranging conversation.

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 form 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

From Stuart Dempster to Dave's Basement 1981-1982

your blogger with employment worthy haircut ca. 1981

During my last quarter at the UW I was a member of the University of Washington Contemporary Group Improvisation Ensemble, led that quarter by Seattle's legendary musical provacateur Stuart Dempster. I had been improvising on my own for years by then as part of my piano studies and later on of my compositional process, so I was comfortable with the concept, but this was my first experience doing so in a group setting. The focus was, crucially, on listening to each other, and less crucially for my later practice, listening for the endings of things so as to make satisfying pieces of music.

This was also my first opportunity to work together with Neal Meyer, who was also a member. We met in a large rehearsal space in the upper somewheres of Meany Hall and took advantage of the various percussion instruments and pianos in residence there. At the end of the year we played several such pieces as part of Neal's piano recital: Manhasset, Music With or Without 12 Chairs, Undifferentiated Functions, and Ein Hundenleben. After the term was over a group of us put together a free-range show at The Seattle Concert Theater, a former church building in the Denny Regrade, long since demolished. Several of us played solos, including my Seventeen Prepuntal Contraludes, and members of the Improv Ensemble did a couple of improvisations: Son of Manhasset and Well I Just Might Do That, in the latter of which Neal blew shaving cream into my ear through a PVC didgeridoo. Thanks. 

Aaron Keyt with others in Dave's Basement 1981

A few remnants of this crew, Dave Jones, Neal, Aaron Keyt, and me, would meet over the next months at various locations around town, centered on the basement of the house where Dave was living a few miles North of campus and not far from where I now live, to improvise together, often beginning with a warm-up activity courtesy of Pauline Oliveros' Teach Yourself To Fly. It was during this time that we became less fastidious about finding endings for things, though we still revolved loosely around the idea of making pieces. Most of the sounds from those days, though recorded at the time, have vanished, but what is left, notably our 3 Act opera Eliza, peripherating upon Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slapstick, is convincing evidence that the greater culture won't miss any of it much at all. 

your blogger displaying his unmistakable fashion sense

It was during this time that Aaron, Neal, and I began in earnest what has become now a lifetime of lobbing ideas back and forth, becoming as close to a band of brothers as can be got - including, eventually, in a literal sense, when, in 1986 I married Neal's kid sister Karen, who, as chance would have it, had been there at Neal's recital and thus in the same room I was in for the first time. Her first glimpse of me was of a long-haired dude coming out of the piano closet at Brechemin with a gavel in his hand. Meet weird. We were not introduced.

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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