Went over to the music building at Seattle Pacific University to meet Wayne Lovegrove and practice for the upcoming concert at Tim Noah’s Thumbnail Theater in Snohomish. While we were waiting for the large classroom with the grand piano to become available, we discovered an anomaly in a practice room. SPU has a baby grand piano that’s painted white (“This is the Liberace room,” quipped Wayne) but unlike any other painted piano I’ve tried, it still sounds good.
Wayne and I had an e-mail correspondence going concerning the music we’re going to play. I’d sent him an MP3 of “…into all the world…”, a piece I’d written that implies a kind of world fusion. The piano part is basically the same melody, first played as parallel chords (in the manner of Debussy or Satie) and then four times in the style of the Javanese gamelan (with a gong-cycle played from the piano). It’s been mistaken for something by Lou Harrison, though I wasn’t trying to copy him exactly. I recorded it once about ten years ago in California, with Peter Valsamis and Tom Nunn improvising percussion parts.
I've been listening to "Into All The World" repeatedly to develop a feel for what kind of guitar part would fit. It's such a simple, self-contained melody that subsists on it's own lack of ornamentation that I'm not sure any conventional guitar part or improv won't detract from it. The percussion parts on the recording fit precisely because they're not melodic. I'll try to play actual guitar against the track today and let you know how it goes. Perhaps something with some delay effects?
Wayne wrote that a couple of days ago, but then, yesterday (before the practice):
I think I've found a very nice way to fit a guitar part to "Into All The World", so this is just a note to give you an opportunity to keep that tune in your mind for our meeting tonight. The guitar part is textural, rhythmic, and somewhat percussive (filling the roles of the percussion and gently melodic mallet work on the recording), so it allows the simple piano melody to remain clear while providing a quite rich accompaniment that both contrasts with and complements the piano part. Hopefully!
So I was looking forward to the practice, and I was not disappointed. The guitar part he’d added was beautiful; rippling waves of sound against the piano’s gamelan sounds. However, when we played some other pieces, it seemed to me to be the least interesting of them – mainly because the others were phenomenal. I tried adding a part to Wayne’s piece “Here and There”. I’d never heard it before, but found that it lent itself easily to improvising over; I added a hammer dulcimer part at the beginning, moved over to the piano for a faster part in the middle (against Wayne’s rapid flurries of notes at that point) and then, at the end, an epiphany: another melody can be played contrapuntally against the de capo of Wayne’s guitar part. I improvised it this first time (or actually first two times; I tried to record the result but found that I’d left the recorder on “pause” for the first time through – stupid, stupid!). I’ll probably try to come up with a composed melody for the concert.
We also tried “Oceanic Music”. This is one of my pieces, but it’s really more of a concept than a composition. The “crywire”, a piano modification of my own invention, is not entirely controllable – so any performance with it (including “Oceanic Music”) must be improvised. No matter. I’ve recorded it twice before, once with my own hammer dulcimer over the top (available on my CD “Music from Thousand Oaks”), and once, in a much more atonal/experimental version, with Tom Nunn playing a homemade bowed-percussion instrument called the “space plate” (on my CD “Duets and Trios”, not currently available). I like both of those versions, despite their completely opposite aesthetics; in Wayne’s rendering, the piece will take on its beautiful third form. He added sparse sprinklings of guitar (reminiscent of Ralph Towner) in a strange and resonant low tuning, and gentle percussion from the body of the instrument.
So it looks like we’re going to do “Here and There”, “Oceanic Music” (the first time I’ll have played the latter in concert) along with two solo pieces by Wayne. Also on the program: Two solo piano pieces by Keith Eisenbrey (including his “economical panneumiad” called N), a solo piano piece by Neal Meyer, one of the StormSound pieces (with me on piano), and a set of improvisations (by Keith, Neal, and myself) over prerecorded “compositions” that Keith and I are working on specifically for this concert. In the latter set I’ll be playing the hammer dulcimer, the rondolin, the slab-gongs (maybe) and probably some other miscellaneous and odd contraptions.
The concert, billed as “An Evening of Ambient and Experimental Music”, will be on Thursday, October 14th, 7:30 PM, at Tim Noah’s Thumbnail Theater, 1211 4th Street, Snohomish, WA 98290. $10.00 admission. It will run about two hours, including the intermission.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Sunday, September 26, 2010
First “New Music in the Library” Concert: Broadview Public Library, September 26th, 2010
Waaaa!! Nobody showed up for this "open mike"! No other musicians, no audience. Also, the advertisement had been inexplicably removed from the library bulletin board some time during the week (none of the librarians knew who had taken it down). As a “new music” artist, this is the type of apathy I expect from record producers and radio stations – but I’ve never seen it in musicians or (non-)audiences. Probably the short notice (and disappearing ad) scuttled it. I’ll have to see what happens with the next two of these concerts (I may have to sign up for Twitter before then).
The day was not a total loss musically. I managed to play a twenty-minute solo improvisation, on hammer dulcimer with prerecorded electronics (a variant of one of the StormSound pieces). I used some of George Crumb’s piano techniques on the dulcimer, though the piece is generally in a sparse style reminiscent of Gust Burns' "silent" music. I recorded it; it is not a professional recording by any means, but I’ll offer it free for anyone who wants to hear it. Write to me at eskribby@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy.
The day was not a total loss musically. I managed to play a twenty-minute solo improvisation, on hammer dulcimer with prerecorded electronics (a variant of one of the StormSound pieces). I used some of George Crumb’s piano techniques on the dulcimer, though the piece is generally in a sparse style reminiscent of Gust Burns' "silent" music. I recorded it; it is not a professional recording by any means, but I’ll offer it free for anyone who wants to hear it. Write to me at eskribby@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy.
Concert Review: Foday Musa Suso, Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, 9/24/2010
Foday Musa Suso with the kora; a picture from his website.
I described the Steve Peters installation at Jack Straw as a “profoundly meditative soundspace”; this was another. Kora music is relaxing, delicate, sweet, and gently rocking. It has a way, as one audience member sated after the concert, of “being good for listening for long periods of time, and you don’t care about time.”
The kora is somewhere between a harp and a lute. That is, the 21 strings are arranged like those of a double harp (one set for each hand), but they’re attached to a long neck and large gourd resonator – giving the appearance of a giant lute (the Renaissance theorbo comes to mind). The strings are wound around the neck by means of leather thongs; the tuning (which is approximate; more intuitive than mathematical) is done by sliding these thongs up and down a millimeter or two.
This much I knew. This was, however, my first chance to hear an entire concert on this beautiful instrument (the only other time I’d heard it “live” was a short set at an open mike in California).
When I walked into the performance space, I was greeted by the quiet sounds of an old Brian Eno and John Hassell CD, vaguely African in its ambience. Random bits of audience conversation drifted by: “I met the girl he’s dating…” “I just thought I’d come by to wish you a happy birthday…” “I think that zoo is the saddest one I’ve seen; the tiger is emaciated and the birds are all losing their feathers because they’re nervous…” The stage was set with a chair, a mike, a stand for the kora, and some electronic equipment, all on a hand-woven African rug that had stripes of brown, beige and tan triangle-within-triangle patterns vaguely reminiscent of Navajo weaving.
Steve Peters introduced Mr Suso, who then came on stage with his wildly decorated kora (the back of the instrument, which faced the audience, had a bull’s-eye star within star pattern in red, white, black, yellow, and green, with Mr. Suso’s website address in bold letters spelled out around the outside: www.FMSuso.com). He started to play. The pattern on the instrument was much “louder” than the music, but its rhythmic patterning was quite appropriate.
Mr. Suso played ten pieces. Eight of them were his own compositions. Rather than just playing the kora “straight”, he used electronics: fuzz pedals, reverb, and loops; he also played the strings with many different plucking techniques (all with his thumbs!) and tapped on the body of the instrument (or on the “handles”) to produce a drum-like sound. Many of the compositions (both his own pieces and the traditional ones) consist mostly of repeated patterns that the performer improvises over – a thicker texture could be achieved by looping. There was no discernable difference in “style” between the traditional pieces and the new compositions (with one exception, see below…). Both were modal, and began with a melodic introduction, set up an ostinato based on some fragments of the introduction (with more, related, melodic material above) and went into an extended coda that dropped the repeated pattern but in some cases seemed almost to start up a new pattern before ending. There was a complex relationship between the repeated accompaniment and the melodic fragments above: sometimes the phrases echoed one another, sometimes they harmonized; more than once they were in a two-against-three rhythm. Some faulty electronics detracted from the first few songs (there was distortion where it wasn’t wanted) but this was fixed and the rest of the concert went smoothly.
The piece called "Spring Waterfall" was the one notable exception in “style". Here, there was no fragmented introduction, and the repeated “loop” was clearly based on minimalist arpeggios, varied in rhythm, in the manner of Philip Glass (who is a personal friend of Mr. Suso’s, and collaborator for music). This was similar to the piece “Morning Light” on Mr. Suso’s CD “The Dream Time”, but the rest of the composition was structured much like the others.
My description makes the music sound monotonous. It was not. The change-within-repetition was a strength of the music, and it made one listen closer: for nuances, for details, for minute changes in timbre and rhythm and color. In that close listening, one could escape into another world, a world where time was suspended, at least for the duration of the concert. By the end, the audience was thoroughly entranced by the gentle rhythm (if the finger-snapping scattered here and there is any indication) and the evening closed magically.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
"New Music in the Library" Concert Updates
This series of concerts will be called (for now) “New Music in the Library”. If the series continues, there will eventually be other types of New Music featured, but these first three are for free improvisation. Basically they’re open mikes, though without the mike – so as one audience member at the Eye Music concert last Friday said, they’re “open mikelesses”. If you do free improvisation, bring your instrument. We’ll do duets or trios (probably put together on the spot), with 10-15 minutes per group (depending on how many are there).
Here are the details:
Saturday, September 25th, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Broadview Public Library
12755 Greenwood Ave. N, Seattle, WA
Saturday, October 23rd, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Broadview Public Library
12755 Greenwood Ave. N, Seattle, WA
Wednesday, October 27th, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM
Lynnwood Public Library
19200 44th Ave W, Lynnwood, WA
And again, here are the “rules” (sorry, there have to be some rules, even in free improvisation)
1. The concert will be in the meeting room to the side of the library foyer, and the library will be open – so the music must be of a quiet nature (not loud enough to disturb people using the main part of the library).
2. Get there early to set up. We will take a break about halfway through, but don’t want too many musicians setting up during the break (and none trying to set up while others are playing!).
3. There is no piano or sound system.
4. There will be some traffic noise from outside, so pieces that interact with the sound environment are good.
5. The concerts are free and open to all. They are not paid gigs.
6. The meeting rooms hold about 25 audience members plus musicians (that’s a pretty rough estimate; we might be able to have a few more).
So that’s that. See you there!
Here are the details:
Saturday, September 25th, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Broadview Public Library
12755 Greenwood Ave. N, Seattle, WA
Saturday, October 23rd, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Broadview Public Library
12755 Greenwood Ave. N, Seattle, WA
Wednesday, October 27th, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM
Lynnwood Public Library
19200 44th Ave W, Lynnwood, WA
And again, here are the “rules” (sorry, there have to be some rules, even in free improvisation)
1. The concert will be in the meeting room to the side of the library foyer, and the library will be open – so the music must be of a quiet nature (not loud enough to disturb people using the main part of the library).
2. Get there early to set up. We will take a break about halfway through, but don’t want too many musicians setting up during the break (and none trying to set up while others are playing!).
3. There is no piano or sound system.
4. There will be some traffic noise from outside, so pieces that interact with the sound environment are good.
5. The concerts are free and open to all. They are not paid gigs.
6. The meeting rooms hold about 25 audience members plus musicians (that’s a pretty rough estimate; we might be able to have a few more).
So that’s that. See you there!
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Concert Review: Eye Music, Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, 9/17/2010
The Stage Set-Up: piano (lid closed), moon-lute, guitar, kaen, wad of aluminum foil, sticks, plastic cups, Celtic harp (prepared), Indian harmonium, another guitar, Tibetan bells, another kaen, wooden slats on a table, wok, more sticks, wires, flute, plastic bottle, lnaw, sax, stones, pie plates, light bulb, book in French, European harmonium, wooden toys, whiskey bottle (glass), auto horn, seashells, cello, more stones, slabs of ice frozen onto a string and suspended above a metal mixing bowl with a mike attached.
The Band:
(photograph by Rachael Lanzillotta, from the Eye Music website http://www.ribexibalba.com/eyemusic/)
The Music:
1. “Shuffle” by Alison Knowles
Shuffle around the performance space
Shoooop shooop shuffle (hush) drink from a thermos shoooop
2. “Drip Music” by George Brecht
Amplified water drips drip drop drip drip splat!
Amplified ice melting (almost melodic)
Dripping water from eyedroppers, cups, syringes, watering can, folded up wet towel, into plastic tub, wok, wad of crinkled foil
…too long (getting bored)… (snoring sound from closing window)
kerplunk splash drip drip plink plunk
3. “Instruction” by George Brecht
(Turn down the audience lights)
Bring old radio (1950’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, walk away
Another player walks up, bows, gingerly touches (investigates) radio, turns it on briefly (two bursts of static), bows, walks away
Retrieve radio and stand
4. “Piece for any number of vocalists” by Alison Knowles
(To the audience) “Hum any song that resonates in your entire body.”
He conducted us humming. (The first song that occurred to me was the guitar riff from “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas.)
5. “Newspaper Event” by Alison Knowles
(audience still humming)
Players read newspapers in various European languages (Italian, English, German, French)…conducted for volume & intensity.
“Money saving tips!” “Story about acid attack is…” “Louder! Louder!”
6. “Instruction” by George Brecht
Bring old radio (1960’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, walk away
Another player walks up, bows, gingerly touches (investigates) radio, turns it on briefly (burst of static), walks away with radio
Retrieve stand
7. “C/T Trace” by Robert Watts
Try to catch plastic coin pouch with plastic monkey toy. It falls onto a music stand when not caught.
8. “For La Monte Young” by Emmett Williams
(Still trying to catch coin pouch)
“Excuse me, is La Monte Young in the audience?”
(to one audience member) “Are you La Monte Young?”
(answer) “I used to be.”
(reply) “Congradulations!”
9. “Piano Piece for David Tudor #2” by La Monte Young
Inspect the sides of the piano keyboard keep looking at lid
(ice continues to drip)
thump thump rattle creak !
Move piano from side to side clunk stomp on the floor !
Blow dust off of the piano lid (again) one note! Another (let ring)!
Look inside piano
(During the intermission I asked what the instructions actually were. The pianist said that he was supposed to close the piano lid without making any sound whatsoever. Any other sounds may be made during this process.)
10. “Boundary Music” by Mieko Shiami
All musicians (seven) on stage. (Strong perfume drifts by.)
Flute overtones. Quiet. Cello strum. Quiet. Bowed Celtic harp. Quiet. Sounds blend into a barely-perfectible drone. Rattle seed pod. Deep reverberations (electronic?) – fade in and out. Shake long hair to make sound(!)
Snap! Harmonic drones. Crack. All stop, look around.
11. “South no. 3 (Malika)” by Takehisa Kosugi
ssssssssssssssssss (groan) owwwww (squeal) ooohhhhhhh (sing) thhhhhh
s! ow! oo! (frown) thp! ssssssouuuth
soouuuth southhhh (slobber) thhhhhhh sssss (dry howl) thhhhp!
s ow oo south s – ow – oo – th サー アオー ウー thー
12. “Constellation no. 4” by Dick Higgins
Conduct. One loud, brief, explosion/squawk from all instruments.
13. “Flute Solo” by George Brecht
Show flute to audience, take flute apart, put flute back together, bow.
14. “Instruction” by George Brecht
Hurry! Run! Bring old radio (1970’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, run away
Another player stomps up, prepares to karate chop radio, hurriedly switches radio on and off (kkhhh!) instead
Stomp! Stomp! (Ice in bowl echoes.) Walks away.
Retrieve radio and stand (stomp stomp).
15. “Organic Music” by Takehisa Kosugi
kaen
sax
2 kaens
breathy sound from sax
harmonicas
lnaw
comical/obscene sound from balloons
microtonal drone
blow across bottle whooooooo
16. “96” by Clifford Burke
Huge hand gestures with paint created a giant sheet of music; this was cut apart into 96 notebook-paper sized cards. These were distributed among the players (and three were put on a music stand facing the audience).
pluck scrape flute flutter crescendo chaos glissando scatter regroup hummm whistle whoosh fwump! clatter feedback whine plucked cello cadenza mwooom mwooom mwooom (electronic) white noise at end
Rearranged, unarranged, disarranged
In the style (more or less) or Anthony Braxton
17. “Looking North” by Christian Wolff
Drone (airplane? No!) Irregular drumming, plucking on Celtic harp. Harmoniums and Tibetan bells create beautiful drone. Stops. Electric bass sounds, then flute cadenza (Japanese mode). Silence. Faster electronic thumps (rhythmic) – mournful cello. Microtonal.
(After the concert I asked the flautist if the flute cadenza had in fact been based on a Japanese mode. She said yes and showed me a small Japanese flute.
“It looks nothing like a shakuhachi,” I commented.
“It’s easier to play,” she replied.
“That’s good!” And I recounted my brief encounter with the shakuhachi, some twenty years ago. The first time I tried it, I got it to hum a nice sustained note. Any time after that, I couldn’t get it to make any sound at all.)
18. “Sticks” by Christian Wolff
blow on sticks (fftt) clatter (rolling sticks in hand) clunk of sticks together
drop sticks on floor rub sticks on floor tie sticks together, untie
wooden slabs with resonators (like marimba)
drop sticks on guitar strings and cello strings
break sticks (snap!) Bow across ends of stick (keeeeee!) TLACK!
rub sticks together, use floor as resonator
19. “Play” by Christian Wolff
Short plucks, scrapes, becomes longer drone. Rubbing strings of Celtic harp with Popsicle stick produces static-like schchchchssschch!
Drone becomes dissonant, tense. One player blows up a balloon. He continues to blow it up. And he continues to blow it up. Chord is now unbearably tense! Will he pop the balloon!?
No. He lets it go, flying aimlessly into the air. Music stops.
(This piece seemed to comment on the several meanings of the verb “to play”: play an instrument, play a game, play with toys, play with someone’s expectations; and perhaps the entire piece could be thought of as performing an [abstract] play.)
20. “Stones” by Christian Wolff
Rub stones together on moon lute, and on floor
Stone wind chimes
Drop stones on floor
Roll round stone (like grapefruit) around on floor
Bow stones (high squeals and squeaks) – birdlike, avian
(Third bowed stone made no sound)
Metrical clicks, marimba-like tones.
So that was the concert, actually more of what used to be called a “happening”. Most of these were performance pieces based on text scores (i.e. instructions) rather than written “music” in the usual sense, and all except the Clifford Burke piece dated from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. (The Clifford Burke piece was written by the performer of the saxophone, and was receiving its first concert performance.)
After the concert I noticed the Celtic harp player using an e-bow to produce drones from his instrument. “Just yesterday, a clerk at Guitar Center in Lynnwood told me that that was impossible!” I told him, truthfully. “He said the sound made by an e-bow on an acoustic instrument is too quiet to be heard.”
He shrugged, “It works on any instrument that has the right kind of strings.”
A few minutes later I got to talking to another audience member about some other experimental music concerts I’d seen, including the one with the contrabass clarinet and electronics at the gallery on Capital Hill.
“When was that?” He asked.
“About a month ago.”
“…Contrabass clarinet and electronics?”
“Yup.”
“That was me.” He was Paul Hoskin, whom I’d seen with Jesse Kudler, Gust Burns, Chandan Narayan, and others (see my August 28th posting).
My overview of the whole thing: fun music, though most of it probably wouldn’t work in recorded form – hence the name of the band, “Eye Music”. One has to see it to hear it. (Of course, the name also comes from the fact that they do "graphic scores" more than traditionally notated music.)
The Band:
(photograph by Rachael Lanzillotta, from the Eye Music website http://www.ribexibalba.com/eyemusic/)
The Music:
1. “Shuffle” by Alison Knowles
Shuffle around the performance space
Shoooop shooop shuffle (hush) drink from a thermos shoooop
2. “Drip Music” by George Brecht
Amplified water drips drip drop drip drip splat!
Amplified ice melting (almost melodic)
Dripping water from eyedroppers, cups, syringes, watering can, folded up wet towel, into plastic tub, wok, wad of crinkled foil
…too long (getting bored)… (snoring sound from closing window)
kerplunk splash drip drip plink plunk
3. “Instruction” by George Brecht
(Turn down the audience lights)
Bring old radio (1950’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, walk away
Another player walks up, bows, gingerly touches (investigates) radio, turns it on briefly (two bursts of static), bows, walks away
Retrieve radio and stand
4. “Piece for any number of vocalists” by Alison Knowles
(To the audience) “Hum any song that resonates in your entire body.”
He conducted us humming. (The first song that occurred to me was the guitar riff from “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas.)
5. “Newspaper Event” by Alison Knowles
(audience still humming)
Players read newspapers in various European languages (Italian, English, German, French)…conducted for volume & intensity.
“Money saving tips!” “Story about acid attack is…” “Louder! Louder!”
6. “Instruction” by George Brecht
Bring old radio (1960’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, walk away
Another player walks up, bows, gingerly touches (investigates) radio, turns it on briefly (burst of static), walks away with radio
Retrieve stand
7. “C/T Trace” by Robert Watts
Try to catch plastic coin pouch with plastic monkey toy. It falls onto a music stand when not caught.
8. “For La Monte Young” by Emmett Williams
(Still trying to catch coin pouch)
“Excuse me, is La Monte Young in the audience?”
(to one audience member) “Are you La Monte Young?”
(answer) “I used to be.”
(reply) “Congradulations!”
9. “Piano Piece for David Tudor #2” by La Monte Young
Inspect the sides of the piano keyboard keep looking at lid
(ice continues to drip)
thump thump rattle creak !
Move piano from side to side clunk stomp on the floor !
Blow dust off of the piano lid (again) one note! Another (let ring)!
Look inside piano
(During the intermission I asked what the instructions actually were. The pianist said that he was supposed to close the piano lid without making any sound whatsoever. Any other sounds may be made during this process.)
10. “Boundary Music” by Mieko Shiami
All musicians (seven) on stage. (Strong perfume drifts by.)
Flute overtones. Quiet. Cello strum. Quiet. Bowed Celtic harp. Quiet. Sounds blend into a barely-perfectible drone. Rattle seed pod. Deep reverberations (electronic?) – fade in and out. Shake long hair to make sound(!)
Snap! Harmonic drones. Crack. All stop, look around.
11. “South no. 3 (Malika)” by Takehisa Kosugi
ssssssssssssssssss (groan) owwwww (squeal) ooohhhhhhh (sing) thhhhhh
s! ow! oo! (frown) thp! ssssssouuuth
soouuuth southhhh (slobber) thhhhhhh sssss (dry howl) thhhhp!
s ow oo south s – ow – oo – th サー アオー ウー thー
12. “Constellation no. 4” by Dick Higgins
Conduct. One loud, brief, explosion/squawk from all instruments.
13. “Flute Solo” by George Brecht
Show flute to audience, take flute apart, put flute back together, bow.
14. “Instruction” by George Brecht
Hurry! Run! Bring old radio (1970’s) on a stand, place in front of stage, run away
Another player stomps up, prepares to karate chop radio, hurriedly switches radio on and off (kkhhh!) instead
Stomp! Stomp! (Ice in bowl echoes.) Walks away.
Retrieve radio and stand (stomp stomp).
15. “Organic Music” by Takehisa Kosugi
kaen
sax
2 kaens
breathy sound from sax
harmonicas
lnaw
comical/obscene sound from balloons
microtonal drone
blow across bottle whooooooo
16. “96” by Clifford Burke
Huge hand gestures with paint created a giant sheet of music; this was cut apart into 96 notebook-paper sized cards. These were distributed among the players (and three were put on a music stand facing the audience).
pluck scrape flute flutter crescendo chaos glissando scatter regroup hummm whistle whoosh fwump! clatter feedback whine plucked cello cadenza mwooom mwooom mwooom (electronic) white noise at end
Rearranged, unarranged, disarranged
In the style (more or less) or Anthony Braxton
17. “Looking North” by Christian Wolff
Drone (airplane? No!) Irregular drumming, plucking on Celtic harp. Harmoniums and Tibetan bells create beautiful drone. Stops. Electric bass sounds, then flute cadenza (Japanese mode). Silence. Faster electronic thumps (rhythmic) – mournful cello. Microtonal.
(After the concert I asked the flautist if the flute cadenza had in fact been based on a Japanese mode. She said yes and showed me a small Japanese flute.
“It looks nothing like a shakuhachi,” I commented.
“It’s easier to play,” she replied.
“That’s good!” And I recounted my brief encounter with the shakuhachi, some twenty years ago. The first time I tried it, I got it to hum a nice sustained note. Any time after that, I couldn’t get it to make any sound at all.)
18. “Sticks” by Christian Wolff
blow on sticks (fftt) clatter (rolling sticks in hand) clunk of sticks together
drop sticks on floor rub sticks on floor tie sticks together, untie
wooden slabs with resonators (like marimba)
drop sticks on guitar strings and cello strings
break sticks (snap!) Bow across ends of stick (keeeeee!) TLACK!
rub sticks together, use floor as resonator
19. “Play” by Christian Wolff
Short plucks, scrapes, becomes longer drone. Rubbing strings of Celtic harp with Popsicle stick produces static-like schchchchssschch!
Drone becomes dissonant, tense. One player blows up a balloon. He continues to blow it up. And he continues to blow it up. Chord is now unbearably tense! Will he pop the balloon!?
No. He lets it go, flying aimlessly into the air. Music stops.
(This piece seemed to comment on the several meanings of the verb “to play”: play an instrument, play a game, play with toys, play with someone’s expectations; and perhaps the entire piece could be thought of as performing an [abstract] play.)
20. “Stones” by Christian Wolff
Rub stones together on moon lute, and on floor
Stone wind chimes
Drop stones on floor
Roll round stone (like grapefruit) around on floor
Bow stones (high squeals and squeaks) – birdlike, avian
(Third bowed stone made no sound)
Metrical clicks, marimba-like tones.
So that was the concert, actually more of what used to be called a “happening”. Most of these were performance pieces based on text scores (i.e. instructions) rather than written “music” in the usual sense, and all except the Clifford Burke piece dated from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. (The Clifford Burke piece was written by the performer of the saxophone, and was receiving its first concert performance.)
After the concert I noticed the Celtic harp player using an e-bow to produce drones from his instrument. “Just yesterday, a clerk at Guitar Center in Lynnwood told me that that was impossible!” I told him, truthfully. “He said the sound made by an e-bow on an acoustic instrument is too quiet to be heard.”
He shrugged, “It works on any instrument that has the right kind of strings.”
A few minutes later I got to talking to another audience member about some other experimental music concerts I’d seen, including the one with the contrabass clarinet and electronics at the gallery on Capital Hill.
“When was that?” He asked.
“About a month ago.”
“…Contrabass clarinet and electronics?”
“Yup.”
“That was me.” He was Paul Hoskin, whom I’d seen with Jesse Kudler, Gust Burns, Chandan Narayan, and others (see my August 28th posting).
My overview of the whole thing: fun music, though most of it probably wouldn’t work in recorded form – hence the name of the band, “Eye Music”. One has to see it to hear it. (Of course, the name also comes from the fact that they do "graphic scores" more than traditionally notated music.)
Two More Upcoming Concerts
Things have gone crazy in this music thing… Yesterday the Broadview Library (12755 Greenwood Ave. N, Seattle, WA) called me and said that they’d okayed two more “Avant-Garde in the Library” concerts:
Saturday, September 25th, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Saturday, October 23rd, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Their phone number is 206-684-7519.
These concerts will be like those at the Lynnwood Library – (see my previous posting) – and I’ve pretty much decided to run all three of them like an “open mikeless” as an audience member at the Eye Music concert on Friday said (see my next posting) – an open mike without a mike. If you do free improvisation, show up and bring an instrument. See the Lynnwood Library concert to see the procedure, etc.
Saturday, September 25th, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Saturday, October 23rd, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
Their phone number is 206-684-7519.
These concerts will be like those at the Lynnwood Library – (see my previous posting) – and I’ve pretty much decided to run all three of them like an “open mikeless” as an audience member at the Eye Music concert on Friday said (see my next posting) – an open mike without a mike. If you do free improvisation, show up and bring an instrument. See the Lynnwood Library concert to see the procedure, etc.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Two Upcoming Concerts – both in October
1. Thursday, October 14th, 7:30 PM in the Gold Room at Tim Noah’s Thumbnail Theater, 1211 4th Street, Snohomish, WA 98290. $10.00 admission. I’ll be joined by Keith Eisenbrey (piano), Neal Meyer (piano and guitar), and possibly Wayne Lovegrove (guitar). We’ll play some of the StormSound pieces (at least two of them), a couple of excerpts from “Discarded Poems”, some solo work, and possibly a new set of four electro-acoustic works made specifically for this concert by Keith and me. The slab-gongs will be set up, though I don’t know yet if we’ll be able to obliterate them again. …And I’ll be doing some free-improv on the hammer dulcimer and maybe give the rondolin another spin…
2. Calling Improvisers! (and people who want to come and listen)
The first of what might be a series of "Avant-Garde in the Library" concerts is scheduled for Wednesday, October 27th, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM at the Lynnwood Public Library, 19200 44th Ave W, Lynnwood. This is not a paid concert, but it will give improvisers a chance to play for some who might have never heard this music before. It's free and open to the public.
How the concert will be run: improvised sets, 10-15 minutes each, with duos or trios (depending on how many musicians show up). Some may get to play twice, again, depending on who's there.
NOTES:
1. The concert will be in the meeting room to the side of the library foyer. It holds about 25 audience members plus musicians.
2. There is no piano or sound system.
3. The music must be of a quiet nature (not loud enough to disturb people using the main part of the library).
4. There will be some traffic noise from outside, so pieces that interact with the sound environment are good.
5. Can somebody think of a better title for this proposed series than "Avant-Garde in the Library"?
Again, I’ll do one or more of the StormSound pieces (ones that don’t use a piano), some free-improv on the hammer dulcimer, and I may bring the Lao mountain harp out of storage (I used to use it at open mikes years ago in California…)
2. Calling Improvisers! (and people who want to come and listen)
The first of what might be a series of "Avant-Garde in the Library" concerts is scheduled for Wednesday, October 27th, from 7:00 to 8:30 PM at the Lynnwood Public Library, 19200 44th Ave W, Lynnwood. This is not a paid concert, but it will give improvisers a chance to play for some who might have never heard this music before. It's free and open to the public.
How the concert will be run: improvised sets, 10-15 minutes each, with duos or trios (depending on how many musicians show up). Some may get to play twice, again, depending on who's there.
NOTES:
1. The concert will be in the meeting room to the side of the library foyer. It holds about 25 audience members plus musicians.
2. There is no piano or sound system.
3. The music must be of a quiet nature (not loud enough to disturb people using the main part of the library).
4. There will be some traffic noise from outside, so pieces that interact with the sound environment are good.
5. Can somebody think of a better title for this proposed series than "Avant-Garde in the Library"?
Again, I’ll do one or more of the StormSound pieces (ones that don’t use a piano), some free-improv on the hammer dulcimer, and I may bring the Lao mountain harp out of storage (I used to use it at open mikes years ago in California…)
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Sound Installation Review: “Chamber Music 8: Particles/Waves” by Steve Peters; Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Seattle
An entry in a guest book in the gallery foyer described this music as “delicate splatters”. And that’s what it is: delicate splatters of sound, and also metaphorically of light.
When you first walk in, it seems that there is nothing in the room (more on that idea later!). The walls are bare white. There are no pictures in the gallery. The ceiling lights are obscured but a white sheet (in fact, in the daytime when I went, they were not even lit). It is a blank white space with a round seat in the middle.
One becomes aware of the sounds. There are indeed delicate “splatters” of sound, single resonant notes or dots (which once when I was there spontaneously formed themselves into a melody). There are deep reverberating drones that enter one’s consciousness and cross-fade into other drones, sometimes below the threshold of hearing. There are occasional high squeals and sighs that would sound like auto brakes screeching, were they not so quieting.
Those high squeals probably were, in fact, originally derived from auto brakes. The sounds of this installation were made “from thin air”, that is, from the resonances of rooms in the gallery itself (think Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”) – and by extension, the sounds that have entered the room from elsewhere. I don’t know the details of the process by which they were then turned into this music – but the result is a set of sixteen continuous loops of sound (of different lengths) that are broadcast quietly by sixteen speakers placed around the gallery room floor and ceiling. Since these sounds were drawn from the room, they cause the room to echo in return; and they also blend with the sounds outside the room (which would have been filtered by the walls of the room when they were recorded) – in this case, the traffic sounds outside become part of the composition (I’ve written about that phenomenon in this blog before) and a commentary on the recorded sounds.
It is a profoundly meditative sound-space. I sat there and listened for about twenty minutes, then lay down on the round seat for another half-hour, listening still. I would have liked to have stayed longer. I drew this "picture" while listening, with the thicker lines indicating the deeper drones.
I started thinking about the nature of what I was hearing. These sounds are drawn from “nothing”. Yet they are not nothing. They are drawn from the reverberations of the room(s) in which they were recorded. Reverberations are not “nothing”. These sounds are drawn from empty space, but empty space (on earth) is full of air, and even a vacuum is full of quantum particles that continuously appear and disappear. Like the other works in Mr. Peters’ “Chamber Music” series, this is a (probably intentional) negation of the ideas of nothingness and emptiness – I’m also reminded of John Cage, who eloquently and beautifully disproved randomness by writing “random” music that is not random at all. (I realize that some would consider this a misinterpretation of Cage’s work – but I’m speaking of the results of his music and the “mood” and feeling that it produces, not the concepts behind the music itself.) Morton Feldman also comes to mind, and the “color field” paintings of Mark Rothko – because the sounds of Mr. Peters’ installation also can be interpreted as delicate splatters and washes of color in a blank expanse.
Another graphic using the same principle of pulling design from “nothing” – and again, there is no “nothing” here…
“The Jack Straw New Media Gallery, located in Seattle's University District at Jack Straw Productions, opened in 1999 to support artists working with visual and installation art, with an emphasis on sound.” – Jack Straw website. “Chamber Music 8: Particles/Waves” will run until November 12, 2010.
When you first walk in, it seems that there is nothing in the room (more on that idea later!). The walls are bare white. There are no pictures in the gallery. The ceiling lights are obscured but a white sheet (in fact, in the daytime when I went, they were not even lit). It is a blank white space with a round seat in the middle.
One becomes aware of the sounds. There are indeed delicate “splatters” of sound, single resonant notes or dots (which once when I was there spontaneously formed themselves into a melody). There are deep reverberating drones that enter one’s consciousness and cross-fade into other drones, sometimes below the threshold of hearing. There are occasional high squeals and sighs that would sound like auto brakes screeching, were they not so quieting.
Those high squeals probably were, in fact, originally derived from auto brakes. The sounds of this installation were made “from thin air”, that is, from the resonances of rooms in the gallery itself (think Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room”) – and by extension, the sounds that have entered the room from elsewhere. I don’t know the details of the process by which they were then turned into this music – but the result is a set of sixteen continuous loops of sound (of different lengths) that are broadcast quietly by sixteen speakers placed around the gallery room floor and ceiling. Since these sounds were drawn from the room, they cause the room to echo in return; and they also blend with the sounds outside the room (which would have been filtered by the walls of the room when they were recorded) – in this case, the traffic sounds outside become part of the composition (I’ve written about that phenomenon in this blog before) and a commentary on the recorded sounds.
It is a profoundly meditative sound-space. I sat there and listened for about twenty minutes, then lay down on the round seat for another half-hour, listening still. I would have liked to have stayed longer. I drew this "picture" while listening, with the thicker lines indicating the deeper drones.I started thinking about the nature of what I was hearing. These sounds are drawn from “nothing”. Yet they are not nothing. They are drawn from the reverberations of the room(s) in which they were recorded. Reverberations are not “nothing”. These sounds are drawn from empty space, but empty space (on earth) is full of air, and even a vacuum is full of quantum particles that continuously appear and disappear. Like the other works in Mr. Peters’ “Chamber Music” series, this is a (probably intentional) negation of the ideas of nothingness and emptiness – I’m also reminded of John Cage, who eloquently and beautifully disproved randomness by writing “random” music that is not random at all. (I realize that some would consider this a misinterpretation of Cage’s work – but I’m speaking of the results of his music and the “mood” and feeling that it produces, not the concepts behind the music itself.) Morton Feldman also comes to mind, and the “color field” paintings of Mark Rothko – because the sounds of Mr. Peters’ installation also can be interpreted as delicate splatters and washes of color in a blank expanse.
Another graphic using the same principle of pulling design from “nothing” – and again, there is no “nothing” here…
“The Jack Straw New Media Gallery, located in Seattle's University District at Jack Straw Productions, opened in 1999 to support artists working with visual and installation art, with an emphasis on sound.” – Jack Straw website. “Chamber Music 8: Particles/Waves” will run until November 12, 2010.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Open Mike, Tim Noah's Thumbnail Theater, Snohomish, WA, 9-10-2010
Played at the open mike again last night – though due to a snafu in getting there, I wound up playing last (there were still enough people in the audience to be worth it)… I also tentatively scheduled a concert (not an open mike) for Thursday evening, October 14th. More on that as the time approaches.
Some highlights of this open mike:
Julio’s screaming of 20-something angst over technically impressive guitar work – a fusion of speed-metal and flamenco. This is what Al Di Meloa might do if he played in a punk rock band. One of the songs had the repeated refrain “Let it go,” which in itself wouldn’t be so interesting if he hadn’t somehow fused his voice and the guitar into a single percussive instrument right at the key point.
Jan’s rendition of “Summertime” in a very beautiful classic jazz-vocal style.
Marco’s jazz piano – he managed to mix Thelonious Monk and Rachmaninov into one style for an instrumental rendition of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” with lots of neo-Romantic runs and intentional “clunkers” hit at exactly the right time. His second piece was “in the style of a piano roll” and it did, in fact, sound like a player piano.
Greg’s humorous, high-energy Gospel song with a lot of fast swing guitar – none of those adjectives there need contradict each other.
As I’ve said before, this is one of the best open mikes north of Seattle. That’s me there with the mike in my face, playing the rondolin (see my July 19th and August 28th postings) and Vance on the djembe, though this picture was taken last month.
Some highlights of this open mike:
Julio’s screaming of 20-something angst over technically impressive guitar work – a fusion of speed-metal and flamenco. This is what Al Di Meloa might do if he played in a punk rock band. One of the songs had the repeated refrain “Let it go,” which in itself wouldn’t be so interesting if he hadn’t somehow fused his voice and the guitar into a single percussive instrument right at the key point.
Jan’s rendition of “Summertime” in a very beautiful classic jazz-vocal style.
Marco’s jazz piano – he managed to mix Thelonious Monk and Rachmaninov into one style for an instrumental rendition of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” with lots of neo-Romantic runs and intentional “clunkers” hit at exactly the right time. His second piece was “in the style of a piano roll” and it did, in fact, sound like a player piano.
Greg’s humorous, high-energy Gospel song with a lot of fast swing guitar – none of those adjectives there need contradict each other.
As I’ve said before, this is one of the best open mikes north of Seattle. That’s me there with the mike in my face, playing the rondolin (see my July 19th and August 28th postings) and Vance on the djembe, though this picture was taken last month.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
StormSound Bugs
This posting probably won’t be that interesting except to people who are really fascinated by the process of composition itself. Anyone else may want to skip to my next posting, coming, well, I don’t know when yet…
Though it seems like a long way off, May 21st 2011 (the tentative date of the performance of the entire StormSound Cycle) is approaching fairly rapidly. Before even worrying about that, there are still some bugs that need to be worked out in the music itself.
One of these is what to do with “Malacandra”, (#12 in the Cycle). The third of a set of essentially drone pieces for prerecorded sounds and solo percussion, it needs to be modal and relatively melodic, but still open-ended as the others are. I’ve somewhat decided on a series of motives without meter, which the performer fleshes out into a kind of melody – but it needs to be longer than the other moments of this type in the Cycle. Vibraphone will be the best instrument for this.
Another problem is the noisiest piece – the "Day Signals" (#19 in the set). This is the climax, describing a day in the life of that grand spoiler of nature, Homo sapiens. Here, the prerecorded nature sounds morph into traffic and hints of warfare. The piano part requires virtuosity quite beyond my skill. David Mesler has said he'd take a look at it, but the score is far from complete at this point. I think there will be open-ended variations on Takemitsu’s “For Away” (always one of my favorite piano pieces), played in the much louder, more staccato, “free-jazz” style of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X. The end of the piece resolves into the mystical C-chord that haunts much of the Cycle, and here the piano part could give way to a more or less conventional jazz piece (though it will “freak out” at the end, in contrast to the – now calm – prerecorded sound).
Earlier in the Cycle comes the “Night Signals” (#14 in the set). I’ve played this before as a piano piece with Dean Moore on gongs – but it would work better as originally conceived, for 4 recorders and percussion. (There are too many long piano pieces in the Cycle otherwise, and the recorders blend better with the prerecorded animal sounds.) However, the recorders have, in the past, been a difficulty. I took a shorter piece based on material from the Cycle to a recorder group (of which my Dad is a member) – they did well on the Canon (a short, traditionally notated composition, and not part of the Cycle) but they fell apart when they got to a free improvisation on a graphic score (“Points and Curves in a Silence that is not Silent”). This piece was only seven minutes long – the hour-long “Night Signals” would be much harder.
With that in mind, I reworked a shorter recorder piece based on the last part of the Cycle, “Consort of Voices”. Here, I used the same melody-without-meter that I’d used for “Phase Transition” (see my 9/1/2010 posting) and an earlier version of part of the Cycle in concert (with Stuart Dempster and Neal Meyer). I took the resulting score over to my Dad’s place to have looked at by the recorder group – and at least some of them seemed enthusiastic (though they didn’t get a chance to try to play it). They do, however, want to (possibly) perform it and (certainly) the Canon in a Composers’ Salon sometime (either in November or January) so I’ll see where that goes.
Though it seems like a long way off, May 21st 2011 (the tentative date of the performance of the entire StormSound Cycle) is approaching fairly rapidly. Before even worrying about that, there are still some bugs that need to be worked out in the music itself.
One of these is what to do with “Malacandra”, (#12 in the Cycle). The third of a set of essentially drone pieces for prerecorded sounds and solo percussion, it needs to be modal and relatively melodic, but still open-ended as the others are. I’ve somewhat decided on a series of motives without meter, which the performer fleshes out into a kind of melody – but it needs to be longer than the other moments of this type in the Cycle. Vibraphone will be the best instrument for this.
Another problem is the noisiest piece – the "Day Signals" (#19 in the set). This is the climax, describing a day in the life of that grand spoiler of nature, Homo sapiens. Here, the prerecorded nature sounds morph into traffic and hints of warfare. The piano part requires virtuosity quite beyond my skill. David Mesler has said he'd take a look at it, but the score is far from complete at this point. I think there will be open-ended variations on Takemitsu’s “For Away” (always one of my favorite piano pieces), played in the much louder, more staccato, “free-jazz” style of Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X. The end of the piece resolves into the mystical C-chord that haunts much of the Cycle, and here the piano part could give way to a more or less conventional jazz piece (though it will “freak out” at the end, in contrast to the – now calm – prerecorded sound).
Earlier in the Cycle comes the “Night Signals” (#14 in the set). I’ve played this before as a piano piece with Dean Moore on gongs – but it would work better as originally conceived, for 4 recorders and percussion. (There are too many long piano pieces in the Cycle otherwise, and the recorders blend better with the prerecorded animal sounds.) However, the recorders have, in the past, been a difficulty. I took a shorter piece based on material from the Cycle to a recorder group (of which my Dad is a member) – they did well on the Canon (a short, traditionally notated composition, and not part of the Cycle) but they fell apart when they got to a free improvisation on a graphic score (“Points and Curves in a Silence that is not Silent”). This piece was only seven minutes long – the hour-long “Night Signals” would be much harder.
With that in mind, I reworked a shorter recorder piece based on the last part of the Cycle, “Consort of Voices”. Here, I used the same melody-without-meter that I’d used for “Phase Transition” (see my 9/1/2010 posting) and an earlier version of part of the Cycle in concert (with Stuart Dempster and Neal Meyer). I took the resulting score over to my Dad’s place to have looked at by the recorder group – and at least some of them seemed enthusiastic (though they didn’t get a chance to try to play it). They do, however, want to (possibly) perform it and (certainly) the Canon in a Composers’ Salon sometime (either in November or January) so I’ll see where that goes.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Concert Review: Composers’ Salon 9-3-2010, Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
“The Seattle Composers’ Salon fosters the development, performance and appreciation of new music by regional composers and performers. At bi-monthly, informal presentations, the Salon features finished works, previews, and works in progress. Composers, performers, and audience members gather in a casual setting that allows for experimentation and discussion. Everyone is welcome!” – From the Composers Salon Website, http://www.composersalon.com/
Tom Baker, the organizer and MC of the Salons, had been on the program for the previous Salon (in July), but that piece had been for a deconstructed piano (a project he’d worked on with some other musicians) and the instrument itself had proved problematic in moving to the chapel. His piece had, therefore, not been played (he didn’t play at all). When I saw his name on the list for composers at this Salon, I expected that a solution had been found and they were going to play it this time. I was wrong. Tom told me that it would be some months before they’ll be able to perform that piece at the Salon. Instead, he (Tom, on electric guitar) and Jesse Canterbury (clarinet) played an untitled piece that “explored the boundaries between composition and improvisation”.
Exploring the boundaries between composition and improvisation has, of course, been a major part of jazz since its beginnings (indeed, Jesse and Tom warmed up before the salon by playing a 30-second jazz improvisation) but this piece took it in a different direction. In a lengthy discussion of the procedure (after playing), Tom mentioned that there were sections where the pitches were given but not the duration or any ornamentation, resulting in a kind of heterophony. (An audience member asked if there was a part in the score where it says, for example, “Do something weird with trills”? The answer was no.) The piece began with an introduction made with circular breathing of overtones on the clarinet (there was also a long discussion afterwards about how to do this technique). Then there were two sections of roughly equal duration. In the first, modal melodic fragments came and went over a drone/loop (created with a guitar effects box); the second was sparser and contained longer developments of the melodic material, now augmented and/or diminished in turn to sound slightly atonal – played in the heterophonic style I mentioned above. This second section reminded me a lot of the guitar music of Takemitsu, with its nods to jazz and “popular” music within a quite different framework. Altogether very beautiful, peaceful, and a little nostalgic – a good piece to begin a concert in the evening of the fading days of summer.
Doug Palmer’s “Domestic Disturbance”, for violin and piano, was the second piece on the concert. Doug explained that it told the story of a “young girl who’s had a life-threatening experience – her boyfriend hasn’t texted her in over 15 minutes…!” She and her father argue, and in the end she “just drifts off into a reverie”. A humorous program, and the piece was light-hearted to match. Doug didn’t specify that the teenaged girl was represented by the violin (and the father by the piano) but it seemed that this was the case. The violin part were capricious, flighty, “talkative”, but capable of serious thought anyway; the piano part seemed capable of nothing but serious thought. The violin played two longer, slower, cadenzas – the last was microtonal and “drifted off into a reverie”. The sections where the two instruments “argued” contained much of the harmonic language of Aaron Copland, and I realized that this was certainly an argument that took place in the United States. Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi (mktalvi.blogspot.com) played the violin and David Mesler played the piano, both beautifully.
Two longer piano pieces, played by their composers, rounded out the concert.
David Mesler, already at the piano, first played his memorial piece for the late George Shangrow. The piece did not try to sound elegiac or funereal, nor did it attempt to describe Shangrow’s “ebullient personality”, according to David. Rather it was one of a long series of pieces that take names, change their letters to numbers, put them through mathematical permutations according to Pythagorean numerology, and change the resulting numbers into notes – which David then uses as the basis for a composition. This sort of alternate serialism resulted in, in this case, a 13-minute piano allegro-fantasy with hints of Chopin and Debussy. The multiple layers of quick notes (of which nearly the whole piece consisted) were, in themselves, cheery, and they did describe an ebullient personality. Even more interestingly, when these arabesques and filigrees of notes collided, they often resulted in minor tonalities (traditionally elegiac), which David let ring before beginning the next group. The piece ended with an extended coda on an open-fifth against a minor sixth (think of the characteristic “orange note” – opposite of a blue note – in the Mahler 7th), and in the end was resolutely minor, so it also sounded, despite its quick pace, like a memorial piece as well. David’s considerable piano virtuosity added to both the technique and the expressiveness of the piece. (George Shangrow, a well-known Seattle musician and music director, was killed in a car accident on July 31st.)
Lastly, Keith Eisenbrey played his “Sonata Liebeslied”. I’ve reviewed this piece before on this blog, so I won’t talk about it at length here (see my posting for July 12, 2010). It was, however, interesting to hear this piece again, because Keith played it differently. He emphasized the dissonance and the clatter of the piano’s extreme range and dynamics, de-emphasized the long delay and ringing that a piano can be made to do, and somehow reformatted it so that the climax was in the middle and the second half was a gradual release from the tension (in the previous performance, all the tension had built up to a climax near the end). Was it, then, the same piece? I’m certain that it was; the notes were the same, the harmonies were the same, the overall development was the same. (I can’t be certain if it was, in fact, note-for-note identical, though I’m certain it was very close, since the whole piece is written in conventional notation.) It was merely Keith’s playing that made it different. The work does not involve improvisation in any normal sense, but maybe it did in this case because Keith was relying on the context of the piece (different from when he’d played it previously) to decide how to play. Thus, the question that began the Salon is left open: what is the boundary between composition and improvisation?
Tom Baker, the organizer and MC of the Salons, had been on the program for the previous Salon (in July), but that piece had been for a deconstructed piano (a project he’d worked on with some other musicians) and the instrument itself had proved problematic in moving to the chapel. His piece had, therefore, not been played (he didn’t play at all). When I saw his name on the list for composers at this Salon, I expected that a solution had been found and they were going to play it this time. I was wrong. Tom told me that it would be some months before they’ll be able to perform that piece at the Salon. Instead, he (Tom, on electric guitar) and Jesse Canterbury (clarinet) played an untitled piece that “explored the boundaries between composition and improvisation”.
Exploring the boundaries between composition and improvisation has, of course, been a major part of jazz since its beginnings (indeed, Jesse and Tom warmed up before the salon by playing a 30-second jazz improvisation) but this piece took it in a different direction. In a lengthy discussion of the procedure (after playing), Tom mentioned that there were sections where the pitches were given but not the duration or any ornamentation, resulting in a kind of heterophony. (An audience member asked if there was a part in the score where it says, for example, “Do something weird with trills”? The answer was no.) The piece began with an introduction made with circular breathing of overtones on the clarinet (there was also a long discussion afterwards about how to do this technique). Then there were two sections of roughly equal duration. In the first, modal melodic fragments came and went over a drone/loop (created with a guitar effects box); the second was sparser and contained longer developments of the melodic material, now augmented and/or diminished in turn to sound slightly atonal – played in the heterophonic style I mentioned above. This second section reminded me a lot of the guitar music of Takemitsu, with its nods to jazz and “popular” music within a quite different framework. Altogether very beautiful, peaceful, and a little nostalgic – a good piece to begin a concert in the evening of the fading days of summer.
Doug Palmer’s “Domestic Disturbance”, for violin and piano, was the second piece on the concert. Doug explained that it told the story of a “young girl who’s had a life-threatening experience – her boyfriend hasn’t texted her in over 15 minutes…!” She and her father argue, and in the end she “just drifts off into a reverie”. A humorous program, and the piece was light-hearted to match. Doug didn’t specify that the teenaged girl was represented by the violin (and the father by the piano) but it seemed that this was the case. The violin part were capricious, flighty, “talkative”, but capable of serious thought anyway; the piano part seemed capable of nothing but serious thought. The violin played two longer, slower, cadenzas – the last was microtonal and “drifted off into a reverie”. The sections where the two instruments “argued” contained much of the harmonic language of Aaron Copland, and I realized that this was certainly an argument that took place in the United States. Marjorie Kransberg-Talvi (mktalvi.blogspot.com) played the violin and David Mesler played the piano, both beautifully.
Two longer piano pieces, played by their composers, rounded out the concert.
David Mesler, already at the piano, first played his memorial piece for the late George Shangrow. The piece did not try to sound elegiac or funereal, nor did it attempt to describe Shangrow’s “ebullient personality”, according to David. Rather it was one of a long series of pieces that take names, change their letters to numbers, put them through mathematical permutations according to Pythagorean numerology, and change the resulting numbers into notes – which David then uses as the basis for a composition. This sort of alternate serialism resulted in, in this case, a 13-minute piano allegro-fantasy with hints of Chopin and Debussy. The multiple layers of quick notes (of which nearly the whole piece consisted) were, in themselves, cheery, and they did describe an ebullient personality. Even more interestingly, when these arabesques and filigrees of notes collided, they often resulted in minor tonalities (traditionally elegiac), which David let ring before beginning the next group. The piece ended with an extended coda on an open-fifth against a minor sixth (think of the characteristic “orange note” – opposite of a blue note – in the Mahler 7th), and in the end was resolutely minor, so it also sounded, despite its quick pace, like a memorial piece as well. David’s considerable piano virtuosity added to both the technique and the expressiveness of the piece. (George Shangrow, a well-known Seattle musician and music director, was killed in a car accident on July 31st.)
Lastly, Keith Eisenbrey played his “Sonata Liebeslied”. I’ve reviewed this piece before on this blog, so I won’t talk about it at length here (see my posting for July 12, 2010). It was, however, interesting to hear this piece again, because Keith played it differently. He emphasized the dissonance and the clatter of the piano’s extreme range and dynamics, de-emphasized the long delay and ringing that a piano can be made to do, and somehow reformatted it so that the climax was in the middle and the second half was a gradual release from the tension (in the previous performance, all the tension had built up to a climax near the end). Was it, then, the same piece? I’m certain that it was; the notes were the same, the harmonies were the same, the overall development was the same. (I can’t be certain if it was, in fact, note-for-note identical, though I’m certain it was very close, since the whole piece is written in conventional notation.) It was merely Keith’s playing that made it different. The work does not involve improvisation in any normal sense, but maybe it did in this case because Keith was relying on the context of the piece (different from when he’d played it previously) to decide how to play. Thus, the question that began the Salon is left open: what is the boundary between composition and improvisation?
Friday, September 3, 2010
Avant-Garde in the Library?
The last couple of times I’ve been to the public library, I’ve noticed that there are meetings and art shows in the adjoining side rooms. It occurred to me that it might be possible to give a concert in there too, as long as the music is not loud enough to disturb the patrons in the main part of the building. I asked about it. The librarian mentioned that it might be possible, as long as the concert was free and open to anyone. She gave me a form to fill out.
Performing in such a concert would not be for commercial purposes anyway, but for the promotion of one or more genres of music. I’m reminded of the Shakespeare in the Park series of plays – those were begun (so I’ve heard) because actors in theater groups were tired of the boring “classical” old-fogy image that Shakespeare had, and they wanted to shed that baggage. Avant-garde music could be another example – but with a difference. It doesn’t have a boring “classical” old-fogy image to shake off. It doesn’t have any image at all. To a lot of people, it simply doesn’t exist.
Case in point: after hearing some excerpts from the StormSound Cycle at a concert I did with Stuart Dempster, Mary Kantor, Neal Meyer, and Dean Moore a couple of years ago, someone described my music as “very different”. I’ve heard the same comment about Takemitsu, Phill Niblock, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But different from what? To me, my music is rather ordinary, and I wish I could be as inventive as those other three that I just mentioned. It only sounded “different” because it was unfamiliar. To someone who’s never had sushi, an ebi-roll is certainly “different”.
So I play at open mikes, and I’ll see if I can do some concerts at the libraries. I’ve already got a couple of others interested. I’ll keep anyone reading this posted on what the library staff decides about doing the concerts, and when and where they will be. In the meantime, I’m going to a Seattle Composers’ Salon concert this evening, and I’ll ask some there if they’d like to join in (I’ll review that concert on this blog too…).
Performing in such a concert would not be for commercial purposes anyway, but for the promotion of one or more genres of music. I’m reminded of the Shakespeare in the Park series of plays – those were begun (so I’ve heard) because actors in theater groups were tired of the boring “classical” old-fogy image that Shakespeare had, and they wanted to shed that baggage. Avant-garde music could be another example – but with a difference. It doesn’t have a boring “classical” old-fogy image to shake off. It doesn’t have any image at all. To a lot of people, it simply doesn’t exist.
Case in point: after hearing some excerpts from the StormSound Cycle at a concert I did with Stuart Dempster, Mary Kantor, Neal Meyer, and Dean Moore a couple of years ago, someone described my music as “very different”. I’ve heard the same comment about Takemitsu, Phill Niblock, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But different from what? To me, my music is rather ordinary, and I wish I could be as inventive as those other three that I just mentioned. It only sounded “different” because it was unfamiliar. To someone who’s never had sushi, an ebi-roll is certainly “different”.
So I play at open mikes, and I’ll see if I can do some concerts at the libraries. I’ve already got a couple of others interested. I’ll keep anyone reading this posted on what the library staff decides about doing the concerts, and when and where they will be. In the meantime, I’m going to a Seattle Composers’ Salon concert this evening, and I’ll ask some there if they’d like to join in (I’ll review that concert on this blog too…).
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Free Music: This is for those interested in actually hearing some of the StormSound Cycle.
I’ve just finished putting together a 4-CD compilation of some of my experimental pieces. Called “Abstracts”, it includes nine of the StormSound pieces – some of these with the “live” instrumental parts played on top, some without. (All of the “StormSound” pieces are for “live” instrumental parts realizing graphic scores over prerecorded electronic material.) The longest of these is the hour-long “Spherics”.
I haven’t had “Abstracts” printed up yet. However, I’m offering a chance to hear a couple of tracks. Write to me at eskribby@gmail.com and I’ll send you two tracks. This is not a scam – I won’t try to steal any of your information.
The two pieces:
“Winds of the Sun”
This is a computer-processed drone improvisation. Over a synthesized drone, the pipe organ plays a fragment of “Amazing Grace”, slowed and overlapped to produce chords. The slower vibrations are a natural part of the sound, made in some cases by opening stops part way. The sound was computer-processed to emphasize the timbre. I then added another (faster) vibration – a birdcall slowed 1000 times. The result should suggest how the solar wind would sound, if we could hear it.
Excerpt from “Phase Transition / Convergence”
Though this sounds like an amiable bit of piano “noodling”, it is actually computer music. The piano plays two realizations of the same graphic score, a given series of pitches of a melody without meter. These are then multi-tracked by computer according to a strict mathematical time sequence (which will not be notable in this brief excerpt). This is not one of the “StormSound” pieces, though I use the same technique in the much longer and more developed “Song from Deep Silence”, the sixteenth piece in the Cycle and the beginning of its climax.
Hope you enjoy these!
I haven’t had “Abstracts” printed up yet. However, I’m offering a chance to hear a couple of tracks. Write to me at eskribby@gmail.com and I’ll send you two tracks. This is not a scam – I won’t try to steal any of your information.
The two pieces:
“Winds of the Sun”
This is a computer-processed drone improvisation. Over a synthesized drone, the pipe organ plays a fragment of “Amazing Grace”, slowed and overlapped to produce chords. The slower vibrations are a natural part of the sound, made in some cases by opening stops part way. The sound was computer-processed to emphasize the timbre. I then added another (faster) vibration – a birdcall slowed 1000 times. The result should suggest how the solar wind would sound, if we could hear it.
Excerpt from “Phase Transition / Convergence”
Though this sounds like an amiable bit of piano “noodling”, it is actually computer music. The piano plays two realizations of the same graphic score, a given series of pitches of a melody without meter. These are then multi-tracked by computer according to a strict mathematical time sequence (which will not be notable in this brief excerpt). This is not one of the “StormSound” pieces, though I use the same technique in the much longer and more developed “Song from Deep Silence”, the sixteenth piece in the Cycle and the beginning of its climax.
Hope you enjoy these!
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Concert Review: Improvised Music at Gallery 1412, Seattle, Thursday, August 26th, 2010
Gust Burns (homemade instrument), Paul Hoskin (electronics), Jesse Kudler (contrabass clarinet), Chandan Narayan (autoharp), Tyler Wilcox (sax), Mara Sedlins (violin), and Asimina Chremos (dance).
This was a chance to hear Gust’s music in a different setting. The Gallery (a small one-room building with a few half-abstract half-cartoon paintings on the wall and about fifteen chairs set up for a minimal audience) is in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. It is on street level, a half-block away from a major thoroughfare and three doors down from a yoga place that seemed to have a techno band playing (I could hear it in the street as I walked by). But, oddly, the extraneous noise (which would have overwhelmed any aleatory-improvisatory attempts to play with it) didn’t seem to filter into the studio itself. At first I thought this was just because the MC was playing rap music through the PA system while the musicians were setting up (this is not as incongruous as it might seem!); but as soon as the rap stopped, I realized that there was little other sound.
The musicians, not a “band” per se, played four sets of varying length. First up, Jesse and Paul. Jesse played an electronic contraption that I couldn’t really get a good look at, but seemed to be an old synthesizer extended with microphones and USB plugs for sampled sound; he also used a hand-held radio to produce static sounds. Paul played the contrabass clarinet, an equally arcane (but beautiful) instrument. They began with loud feedback/static (at first I thought they were playing along with the traffic noise, though as I said earlier I soon realized that it wasn’t traffic noise…!) overlaid with screeches from Paul’s clarinet; a second section was mellower with a barely-discernable electronic drone and circular breathing. They played a second, shorter, piece that began with grunts on the clarinet and suddenly made a crescendo into long, strident drones. Interesting to listen to. Perhaps not the best set of the evening, but an effective opener.
The second (longer) set was by Gust, Tyler, and Chandan. The latter played an extended autoharp, highly amplified, with techniques reminiscent of my own “crywire” effect on the piano, Gust’s “dowel” technique on the piano, and Fred Frith’s guitar styling. Gust played a homemade box resonator with a couple of attached piano strings, again amplified, using the “dowel” technique that I’ve commented on many times before. He actually played with his little daughter (age 4?) sitting on his knee – she watched and listened with more attention that I would expect from someone that young. Tyler played the saxophone, a continuation of the sounds Paul had played in the opening set – but there was a twist. One of Chandan’s techniques was to play a metal rod against the body of the autoharp, in the manner of Gust’s dowel, to produce a sound that was almost indistinguishable from the sax. This sound emerged after a couple of minutes of extremely high-pitched plunks and scrapes (on the threshold of pain); after this, they settled into a very beautiful ensemble sound of meditative drones, with overtones and hints of a sitar. The sound slowly approached and receded like waves on the seashore. Tyler played a sudden splatter of louder notes, which introduced a second section of stuttering notes and hiccups of sound.
The third set featured Tyler; Mara on violin (who used a number of “extended” techniques to produce beautiful harmonics, bell-like and bird-like tones, and drones); Jesse (who extended the performance space of the musicians into the audience by placing half-tuned radios and vibrating boxes in various places around the room during the performance); and Asimina, a dancer. She extemporized fluid movements that both added to and commented on the music. At one contrasting point, she went into a bit of butoh intensity – seeming to be spastically locked into a rigid position leaning against a chair, and trying to break out of it back into the flowing dance movements.
The last set was the most beautiful to my ear. Jesse and Chandan played a long set of noise/drones, otherworldly harmonics, and microtonal resonances – in the dark. Thus, the audience experienced the music with no visual distractions. Voices from Jesse’s radio gradually filtered into the music, including a conversation on stem-cell research – then this quickly faded back into static in spontaneous stream-of consciousness. The result was almost like sound-text poetry, and in some ways brought the concert back to the rap (of course, another form of sound-text poetry) that had started it, though transformed into something entirely different.
Gallery 1412 seems to be an exciting venue for new music, at least from this concert and from what I’ve seen on the web when I looked them up, and I’m looking forward to seeing more shows there.
This was a chance to hear Gust’s music in a different setting. The Gallery (a small one-room building with a few half-abstract half-cartoon paintings on the wall and about fifteen chairs set up for a minimal audience) is in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. It is on street level, a half-block away from a major thoroughfare and three doors down from a yoga place that seemed to have a techno band playing (I could hear it in the street as I walked by). But, oddly, the extraneous noise (which would have overwhelmed any aleatory-improvisatory attempts to play with it) didn’t seem to filter into the studio itself. At first I thought this was just because the MC was playing rap music through the PA system while the musicians were setting up (this is not as incongruous as it might seem!); but as soon as the rap stopped, I realized that there was little other sound.
The musicians, not a “band” per se, played four sets of varying length. First up, Jesse and Paul. Jesse played an electronic contraption that I couldn’t really get a good look at, but seemed to be an old synthesizer extended with microphones and USB plugs for sampled sound; he also used a hand-held radio to produce static sounds. Paul played the contrabass clarinet, an equally arcane (but beautiful) instrument. They began with loud feedback/static (at first I thought they were playing along with the traffic noise, though as I said earlier I soon realized that it wasn’t traffic noise…!) overlaid with screeches from Paul’s clarinet; a second section was mellower with a barely-discernable electronic drone and circular breathing. They played a second, shorter, piece that began with grunts on the clarinet and suddenly made a crescendo into long, strident drones. Interesting to listen to. Perhaps not the best set of the evening, but an effective opener.
The second (longer) set was by Gust, Tyler, and Chandan. The latter played an extended autoharp, highly amplified, with techniques reminiscent of my own “crywire” effect on the piano, Gust’s “dowel” technique on the piano, and Fred Frith’s guitar styling. Gust played a homemade box resonator with a couple of attached piano strings, again amplified, using the “dowel” technique that I’ve commented on many times before. He actually played with his little daughter (age 4?) sitting on his knee – she watched and listened with more attention that I would expect from someone that young. Tyler played the saxophone, a continuation of the sounds Paul had played in the opening set – but there was a twist. One of Chandan’s techniques was to play a metal rod against the body of the autoharp, in the manner of Gust’s dowel, to produce a sound that was almost indistinguishable from the sax. This sound emerged after a couple of minutes of extremely high-pitched plunks and scrapes (on the threshold of pain); after this, they settled into a very beautiful ensemble sound of meditative drones, with overtones and hints of a sitar. The sound slowly approached and receded like waves on the seashore. Tyler played a sudden splatter of louder notes, which introduced a second section of stuttering notes and hiccups of sound.
The third set featured Tyler; Mara on violin (who used a number of “extended” techniques to produce beautiful harmonics, bell-like and bird-like tones, and drones); Jesse (who extended the performance space of the musicians into the audience by placing half-tuned radios and vibrating boxes in various places around the room during the performance); and Asimina, a dancer. She extemporized fluid movements that both added to and commented on the music. At one contrasting point, she went into a bit of butoh intensity – seeming to be spastically locked into a rigid position leaning against a chair, and trying to break out of it back into the flowing dance movements.
The last set was the most beautiful to my ear. Jesse and Chandan played a long set of noise/drones, otherworldly harmonics, and microtonal resonances – in the dark. Thus, the audience experienced the music with no visual distractions. Voices from Jesse’s radio gradually filtered into the music, including a conversation on stem-cell research – then this quickly faded back into static in spontaneous stream-of consciousness. The result was almost like sound-text poetry, and in some ways brought the concert back to the rap (of course, another form of sound-text poetry) that had started it, though transformed into something entirely different.
Gallery 1412 seems to be an exciting venue for new music, at least from this concert and from what I’ve seen on the web when I looked them up, and I’m looking forward to seeing more shows there.
Open Mikes - Tim Noah's Thumbnail Theater
Been busy for the last two weeks, so I didn’t go to a lot of concerts or work on anything for the StormSound Cycle. But I have managed to attend the open mike twice again at Tim Noah’s Thumbnail Theater in Snohomish, though I had to leave early. This venue continues to be (at least for me) the premier open mike north of Seattle, despite being not too close to where I live, and despite them not having the grand piano on the stage any more. Musicians get longer than one song there (usually two, or ten minutes) and there’s a real sense of community. There’s also an actual audience of people who’ve come to listen, not just to play.
Some of my favorites from the last couple of times I’ve been there: 1.) “Joyful Noise”, an acoustic Gospel trio with gritty female vocals reminiscent of Kim Hill; 2.) Hank (don’t remember his last name) who plays blues on a twelve-string guitar with consummate skill and lots of non-bluesy ad-libs that morph the genre into something quite new while still being true to its roots; 3.) Isla playing Swedish fiddle music expressively and starkly on a solo viola; and 4.) Wayne Lovegrove’s guitar music – I would have to classify this as the so-called “new acoustic” that was an offshoot of the new-age music in the 1980’s, but that would do a disservice to Wayne’s music. It’s relaxing, yes, and pretty – but not only that. It’s tightly composed and beautifully played, and he uses unconventional tunings, some of which I’m sure he’s invented himself.
As far as my playing goes, this last time (8-27-10) I just played a couple of rather conventional pieces. The time before (8-13-10) was more interesting to me at least. I played two pieces: “Strange Repeating Bird”, based on a birdcall I heard while living in Japan some years ago, and another improvisation on the rondolin. (The word “rondolin” is probably the result of a high-speed collision between “rondo”, meaning “round”, and “mandolin”, or possibly “violin”.) The first piece I played, “Strange Repeating Bird” (SRB), is based on the repetitive call of the kijibato, known to me as the “repeater pigeon”. It makes its hooting, cooing call with the help of an inflatable throat sack. It is a sound that often gently awoke me in the morning while I was living in Fukushima in the late 1980’s. My music based on this call is in my “popular” style (though the people in Japan didn’t think so back then, minimalism having not gotten there yet) and is usually a big hit at open mikes – though I don’t like to draw a line between my “mainstream” and “experimental” pieces. The rondolin improv was much like the previous one, with Vance playing the djembe. I recorded both pieces, but the recordings were messed up by a mysterious rumbling noise that goes on pretty much continuously through the first half of both pieces (I didn’t hear it while playing).
For those who are interested, the open mikes are on Friday evenings; sign-up begins at 7:00.
Some of my favorites from the last couple of times I’ve been there: 1.) “Joyful Noise”, an acoustic Gospel trio with gritty female vocals reminiscent of Kim Hill; 2.) Hank (don’t remember his last name) who plays blues on a twelve-string guitar with consummate skill and lots of non-bluesy ad-libs that morph the genre into something quite new while still being true to its roots; 3.) Isla playing Swedish fiddle music expressively and starkly on a solo viola; and 4.) Wayne Lovegrove’s guitar music – I would have to classify this as the so-called “new acoustic” that was an offshoot of the new-age music in the 1980’s, but that would do a disservice to Wayne’s music. It’s relaxing, yes, and pretty – but not only that. It’s tightly composed and beautifully played, and he uses unconventional tunings, some of which I’m sure he’s invented himself.
As far as my playing goes, this last time (8-27-10) I just played a couple of rather conventional pieces. The time before (8-13-10) was more interesting to me at least. I played two pieces: “Strange Repeating Bird”, based on a birdcall I heard while living in Japan some years ago, and another improvisation on the rondolin. (The word “rondolin” is probably the result of a high-speed collision between “rondo”, meaning “round”, and “mandolin”, or possibly “violin”.) The first piece I played, “Strange Repeating Bird” (SRB), is based on the repetitive call of the kijibato, known to me as the “repeater pigeon”. It makes its hooting, cooing call with the help of an inflatable throat sack. It is a sound that often gently awoke me in the morning while I was living in Fukushima in the late 1980’s. My music based on this call is in my “popular” style (though the people in Japan didn’t think so back then, minimalism having not gotten there yet) and is usually a big hit at open mikes – though I don’t like to draw a line between my “mainstream” and “experimental” pieces. The rondolin improv was much like the previous one, with Vance playing the djembe. I recorded both pieces, but the recordings were messed up by a mysterious rumbling noise that goes on pretty much continuously through the first half of both pieces (I didn’t hear it while playing).
For those who are interested, the open mikes are on Friday evenings; sign-up begins at 7:00.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Discarded Poems, Part Three: Concert at the Chapel, 7-24-2010
Some wonderfully atmospheric pictures that my wife Arleen snapped of me practicing before the concert: the altered “Gust Burns” technique (see my 6/28 posting); one of the slab-gongs.
At the Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center (Seattle), we (Neal Meyer and I) played “Discarded Poems” in concert last Saturday night… (So this blog update is a little late. Been busy lately…!) The concert came off pretty good, though it had a number of minor mishaps (perhaps “mishaps” is the wrong term for a concert of mostly aleatory music).
At the beginning Neal played a half-hour edit from his Gradus, a hyper- universal-length study of all the possible combinations of notes on the piano. This is a continuation of the “Gust Burns” type of music, with the silences and outside noises highlighted by the instrumental sounds on stage; the difference here is that this is a piano piece (for piano played in the “conventional” manner, on the keys) and it has some pretty extreme dynamics. It is rather startling to hear for the first time, however – since at least this section is a half-hour of all A’s and chords consisting of all A’s. At first one might think it’s nothing. And maybe that’s the point – listening to it over the course of the half-hour increases one’s awareness of the pitch A, and then the fact that all other pitches (including those filtering in from outside) are related to A. And, though this is only one note, the timbre of that note is infinitely varied; Neal used different techniques of duration, holding, releasing, half-releasing, pedaling, half-pedaling, and various combinations – to bring out the various harmonics of the note as he played it. Sometimes it was as loud and strident (figuratively) as a Hendrix guitar solo, completely drowning out the silence as it commented on it. At other times it was a quiet as the ambient sound from out the window: birds, distant voices, little bits of traffic sound, and a police siren at the end that went by in glorious stereo. That Neal accidentally played two G’s and one B shouldn’t worry us here – these notes could be considered part of the ambient sound surrounding the A’s, as they literally surround it on the piano keyboard.
The next couple of pieces were short, and the first of the mishaps started to occur. I played an improvisation on piano, with Neal playing electric guitar – I started with just A’s, spinning off of what I’d just heard, then threw in some G’s, while Neal went all over the pitch and effects range, then we went from there into other territories. Upon listening to a playback, however, I heard a problem: neither Neal nor I could tell how loud our respective instruments were to the audience (not the soundman's fault; neither of us were plugged in to the system), and throughout the performance, either the piano was too quiet or the guitar too loud. Not that this was necessarily a problem (electric guitar is known as a loud instrument, of course); one audience member commented on the piano part afterwards, noting that whatever I played, it was still “A” – so obviously the piano was audible to him. (And yes, I was generally basing everything off of that initial “A”.)
Next I played “Water”, the prologue to my set of compositions, “SoundScrolls”. Usually I play it as “Wind over Water” with an added part for (any) wind instrument; here, however, I played just the (prepared) piano. One of the pen-caps I’d stuck between the strings worked its way loose and popped out partway through, changing the timbre of the piano. It seems that the audience thought the change was on purpose so I won’t comment further (there’s another change later that is on purpose).
Then came “Discarded Poems”. This time we did destroy the slab-gongs intentionally, though not with as much élan as the first time. Right after that came the poems that give the piece its title: one about (an unpleasant memory of) childhood; one a stream-of-unconsciousness a la Finnegan’s Wake; and two satirical commentaries on modern culture. One of the latter contains, after a long description of the beauty in a given piece of experimental music, this:
“They listened, and decided.
This is not music.
It is not popular.
It is wrong.
It must not continue.”
Having had two record producers tell me more or less exactly that, I could have written it: "This is not music. It is not popular. It is wrong. We must prevent anyone from hearing it." The audience, however, definitely thought it was music, and they bought my CD’s to prove it.
I’m rambling, and I guess there’s a sort of conflict of interest here in reviewing my own concert, so I’ll leave it at that.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Open Mike, Tim Noah's Thumbnail Theater, Snohomish, WA, 7-16-2010
So the oft-asked question is, “What is an avant-gardist doing playing at an open mike?” The answer of course, is, “What are avant-gardists doing not playing at open mikes?” The music needs exposure. Open mikes are usually full of musicians playing various types of folk and traditional music (including acoustic versions of current and not too distant pop) but I’ve never known them to throw a classical, jazz, world music, or experimental musician off the stage (in fact they usually welcome these). …And I might add that most of the “traditional” musicians are really good.
I’ve been to the Thumbnail several times before. Though about a half-hour’s drive from where I live (if there’s no traffic), it’s well worth the slight inconvenience. It’s a quaint, intimate little performance space, with just enough room four or five people to play guitars or mandolins at one time, along with a baby grand piano and about twenty audience members. Or at least it was like this – on Friday I discovered (after not having been there for a couple of months) that it’s expanded. Now they’re holding it in the large hall of the same building (the building is a former church, so the large hall was the sanctuary). There’s room for about fifty people, and it seemed nearly full.
I came early to sign up (once or twice before I hadn’t gotten there on time and wound up playing last), then realized how things had changed. The baby-grand piano is still in the smaller room, with the upright in the large hall – and I got a well-deserved chew-out from the MC for stupidly trying to “prepare” the upright and nearly demolishing it in the process. I’d planned to do the one prepared piano piece that I was going to play in the upcoming “Discarded Poems” concert (see my previous two postings), but thought better of it at this point. The upright piano had no damage once I got it back together.
Wandering out in the hallway, saying hello to some of the regulars that I recognized, and wondering what to play instead of what I’d planned, I came across a Harry-Partch contrivance sitting unobtrusively in a corner. A round column of wood, with two doughtnut-shaped wooden resonators, strung with piano wires and held together by a crescent moon sounding board – it looked like something I’d like to give a try. There was a bow sitting on one of the resonators. I drew it across several of the strings. It made a thin, quiet, but not inharmonious sound. Obviously it wasn’t in tune, but that didn’t seem to matter. I got more interesting sounds out of it when I took out my percussion mallets and hit the strings in the manner of a dulcimer or cimbalom. Then on a whim I decided to try playing it during the open mike.
I asked the MC about it. He called it a rondolin, and said that there had been several of them made by someone there in Snohomish some years back. The historical society had the rest of them. And yes, I could take a stab at it. So two of us hauled it up on stage (“Don’t grab it by the resonators!” the MC shouted protectively – apparently it’s not as sturdy as it looks) and left it there in the corner until it was my turn to go on.
I played the piano (the prepared piano piece with an “unprepared” piano) and then tried the rondolin. I’d met a Celtic harp player, Francois Pernel, before the open mike, and asked him if he wanted to improvise something – and then, at the last minute, I called for anyone who wanted to play the djembe drum that they had on the stage too. This made an improvising band, and (if I do say myself) we did a pretty good job of ad-libbing on something that at least I’d never played before. The drum started, with a vaguely African beat (that morphed into reggae, and then hip-hop, at least once); Francois added rhythmic sounds on the harp (mostly untuned, behind the bridge) and I played the rondolin with the percussion mallets. The result sounded raw, “primitive”, and unrehearsed; but it also had odd shades of Harry Partch (of course), Lou Harrison, Foday Musa Suso, and Stravinsky. I made a recording of it, and (on playback) heard lots of maracas and shakers from the audience. They loved it, at least if the wild applause at the end is any indication (or maybe they were just glad that we’d finished).
Anyway, the rondolin turns out to be an interesting instrument, and the question looms: is there any way to get one into the StormSound Cycle? It might work, still untuned, for those atmospheric drone and percussion passages in some of the pieces.
I’ve been to the Thumbnail several times before. Though about a half-hour’s drive from where I live (if there’s no traffic), it’s well worth the slight inconvenience. It’s a quaint, intimate little performance space, with just enough room four or five people to play guitars or mandolins at one time, along with a baby grand piano and about twenty audience members. Or at least it was like this – on Friday I discovered (after not having been there for a couple of months) that it’s expanded. Now they’re holding it in the large hall of the same building (the building is a former church, so the large hall was the sanctuary). There’s room for about fifty people, and it seemed nearly full.
I came early to sign up (once or twice before I hadn’t gotten there on time and wound up playing last), then realized how things had changed. The baby-grand piano is still in the smaller room, with the upright in the large hall – and I got a well-deserved chew-out from the MC for stupidly trying to “prepare” the upright and nearly demolishing it in the process. I’d planned to do the one prepared piano piece that I was going to play in the upcoming “Discarded Poems” concert (see my previous two postings), but thought better of it at this point. The upright piano had no damage once I got it back together.
Wandering out in the hallway, saying hello to some of the regulars that I recognized, and wondering what to play instead of what I’d planned, I came across a Harry-Partch contrivance sitting unobtrusively in a corner. A round column of wood, with two doughtnut-shaped wooden resonators, strung with piano wires and held together by a crescent moon sounding board – it looked like something I’d like to give a try. There was a bow sitting on one of the resonators. I drew it across several of the strings. It made a thin, quiet, but not inharmonious sound. Obviously it wasn’t in tune, but that didn’t seem to matter. I got more interesting sounds out of it when I took out my percussion mallets and hit the strings in the manner of a dulcimer or cimbalom. Then on a whim I decided to try playing it during the open mike.
I asked the MC about it. He called it a rondolin, and said that there had been several of them made by someone there in Snohomish some years back. The historical society had the rest of them. And yes, I could take a stab at it. So two of us hauled it up on stage (“Don’t grab it by the resonators!” the MC shouted protectively – apparently it’s not as sturdy as it looks) and left it there in the corner until it was my turn to go on.I played the piano (the prepared piano piece with an “unprepared” piano) and then tried the rondolin. I’d met a Celtic harp player, Francois Pernel, before the open mike, and asked him if he wanted to improvise something – and then, at the last minute, I called for anyone who wanted to play the djembe drum that they had on the stage too. This made an improvising band, and (if I do say myself) we did a pretty good job of ad-libbing on something that at least I’d never played before. The drum started, with a vaguely African beat (that morphed into reggae, and then hip-hop, at least once); Francois added rhythmic sounds on the harp (mostly untuned, behind the bridge) and I played the rondolin with the percussion mallets. The result sounded raw, “primitive”, and unrehearsed; but it also had odd shades of Harry Partch (of course), Lou Harrison, Foday Musa Suso, and Stravinsky. I made a recording of it, and (on playback) heard lots of maracas and shakers from the audience. They loved it, at least if the wild applause at the end is any indication (or maybe they were just glad that we’d finished).
Anyway, the rondolin turns out to be an interesting instrument, and the question looms: is there any way to get one into the StormSound Cycle? It might work, still untuned, for those atmospheric drone and percussion passages in some of the pieces.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Discarded Poems, Part Two (Concert Review: Seattle Composers' Salon, 7-2-2010)
We didn’t destroy the slab gongs on purpose this time. But next time we will.
The event was the bi-monthly Seattle Composers’ Salon. On the program were four pieces: an electronic work by Nathaniel Evans, two chamber pieces by Kam Morrill, and my piece “Discarded Poems”, with the afore-mentioned slab gongs.
Nathaniel’s electronic piece, done originally for a runway fashion show in Berlin, was both what one would expect and what one would not expect from fashion-show music. He explained before playing that one usually thinks of “pounding techno music” for a runway show, and that this wasn’t that. He also said that most of his compositions were in the “West-Coast-can’t-play-slow-enough” style, and that this wasn’t that either. He was right; it was neither, but in a way, it was both. Ambient sounds from Berlin and Seattle (voices, traffic, rain) faded in and out of massive electronic chords and an understated “electronica” beat. This was ambient techno music, yes, but in a way that was somehow not ambient techno music at all. It reminded me of Robert Rich or Carl Stone, the quieter moments of effects-laden 70’s rock (think Pink Floyd or the intro to Rush’s “Xanadu”), and, oddly, some of the more percussive music by Hovhaness or Lou Harrison (if I could imagine the electronic chords as played by acoustic instruments). There was also a polyrhythm and an accelerando in the middle, both unexpected in this genre but quite effective. Near the end, there was what sounded like a sample from Pauline Oliveros on accordion. A beautiful piece, all the more so because this is a style that usually shuns the rarified world of “new music”.
In contrast, the two pieces by Kam Morrill, both duets, were decidedly “classical” in nature. The first, a brief (1-minute) violin and piano piece, had the German title “Stück an Gerhard Samuel” and used the late composer’s name as the basis for its melodic material (the letters A-G were used as notes – though oddly it didn’t use the German system of assigning the sharps and flats letters like “H” and “S”). This melody was repeated in several quick variations, culminating in a flashy unison coda. As a composer of sprawling pieces like the StormSound Cycle, I’m amazed at how Kam condensed his musical material into such a small space.
Kam’s second piece, “Elegy”, for viola and piano, was a little longer (about seven minutes). He said after the performance that he didn’t compose according to any particular formula, though in this piece it was obvious that end was the same as the beginning but with the piano and viola parts switched. To me it didn’t sound particularly elegiac, with its broad melodies, open chords based on fourths and fifths, and little hints of Scriabin – I heard it as a mostly tranquil meditation, perhaps in a pastoral setting.
Both pieces were played by Kam on piano with Gwen Franz on the stringed instruments.
Now we get to those slab gongs. Neal Meyer and I played them as part of the “live” music for excerpts from my piece “Discarded Poems”, which is related to the StormSound Cycle. Like the StormSound pieces, it uses “live” instruments over prerecorded electronics, and, like the StormSound pieces, it’s on the longish side (in fact, Tom Baker, MC at the Composers’ Salons, had to fade in the prerecorded sound partway through to make the piece fit the 20-minute time limit). At the beginning, Neal and I played the room, using the walls, doors, windows, etc., as percussion; then we moved to the slab gongs.
Improvising over prerecorded sound also derived from slab gongs, at first we played resonant metallic sounds. Then Neal began to damp the reverberations with his hands, an interesting effect, and I joined in – watching as Neal’s slab gong (a precarious contraption even in the best of circumstances) suddenly began to destabilize. I continued to play mine, perhaps helplessly, as his wobbled, collapsed, and sort of melted itself sideways onto the stage. He continued to play. All hint of “beautiful” reverberation was gone; after another minute I joined in by deliberately knocking mine over and scattering the pieces. Now we both hammered on the remaining metal slabs, making quite a racket – but it worked so well with the piece that we decided to do it next time we play it. “Discarded Poems” is not about destruction or death, but it is about moving from the “here and now” into the realm of the eternal, discarding worldly things along the way. Hence, destroying the slab gongs works perfectly (in the manner of the poems that later get “discarded” as metal pipes rolled across the floor).
In the last section we played “real” instruments (guitar and piano), not in the conventional way, but in a ringing style over a microtonal drone – a sound that is supposed to both break away from and fulfill the “noise” that we made earlier. Whether this works or not, I’ll leave up to the listener. I can say, however, that two sounds were very beautiful to my ear: jewel-like bell-tones from Neal’s prepared guitar (with paper clips inserted among the strings) and a sliding overtone effect on the piano strings that I adapted (not stole exactly) from Gust Burns.
Next performance of “Discarded Poems” (complete this time):
8:00 PM,
Saturday, July 24, 2010,
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center (50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford, Seattle).
Also on the program: an excerpt from Neal’s “Gradus: for Tesla, Fux, and Milo the Wrestler”, a vast supra-universal-length study of all the possible combinations of notes on the piano; a couple of shorter, more conventionally melodic, piano pieces by me (probably one with percussion played from the piano); and an improvised set (guitar and piano).
The event was the bi-monthly Seattle Composers’ Salon. On the program were four pieces: an electronic work by Nathaniel Evans, two chamber pieces by Kam Morrill, and my piece “Discarded Poems”, with the afore-mentioned slab gongs.
Nathaniel’s electronic piece, done originally for a runway fashion show in Berlin, was both what one would expect and what one would not expect from fashion-show music. He explained before playing that one usually thinks of “pounding techno music” for a runway show, and that this wasn’t that. He also said that most of his compositions were in the “West-Coast-can’t-play-slow-enough” style, and that this wasn’t that either. He was right; it was neither, but in a way, it was both. Ambient sounds from Berlin and Seattle (voices, traffic, rain) faded in and out of massive electronic chords and an understated “electronica” beat. This was ambient techno music, yes, but in a way that was somehow not ambient techno music at all. It reminded me of Robert Rich or Carl Stone, the quieter moments of effects-laden 70’s rock (think Pink Floyd or the intro to Rush’s “Xanadu”), and, oddly, some of the more percussive music by Hovhaness or Lou Harrison (if I could imagine the electronic chords as played by acoustic instruments). There was also a polyrhythm and an accelerando in the middle, both unexpected in this genre but quite effective. Near the end, there was what sounded like a sample from Pauline Oliveros on accordion. A beautiful piece, all the more so because this is a style that usually shuns the rarified world of “new music”.
In contrast, the two pieces by Kam Morrill, both duets, were decidedly “classical” in nature. The first, a brief (1-minute) violin and piano piece, had the German title “Stück an Gerhard Samuel” and used the late composer’s name as the basis for its melodic material (the letters A-G were used as notes – though oddly it didn’t use the German system of assigning the sharps and flats letters like “H” and “S”). This melody was repeated in several quick variations, culminating in a flashy unison coda. As a composer of sprawling pieces like the StormSound Cycle, I’m amazed at how Kam condensed his musical material into such a small space.
Kam’s second piece, “Elegy”, for viola and piano, was a little longer (about seven minutes). He said after the performance that he didn’t compose according to any particular formula, though in this piece it was obvious that end was the same as the beginning but with the piano and viola parts switched. To me it didn’t sound particularly elegiac, with its broad melodies, open chords based on fourths and fifths, and little hints of Scriabin – I heard it as a mostly tranquil meditation, perhaps in a pastoral setting.
Both pieces were played by Kam on piano with Gwen Franz on the stringed instruments.
Now we get to those slab gongs. Neal Meyer and I played them as part of the “live” music for excerpts from my piece “Discarded Poems”, which is related to the StormSound Cycle. Like the StormSound pieces, it uses “live” instruments over prerecorded electronics, and, like the StormSound pieces, it’s on the longish side (in fact, Tom Baker, MC at the Composers’ Salons, had to fade in the prerecorded sound partway through to make the piece fit the 20-minute time limit). At the beginning, Neal and I played the room, using the walls, doors, windows, etc., as percussion; then we moved to the slab gongs.
Improvising over prerecorded sound also derived from slab gongs, at first we played resonant metallic sounds. Then Neal began to damp the reverberations with his hands, an interesting effect, and I joined in – watching as Neal’s slab gong (a precarious contraption even in the best of circumstances) suddenly began to destabilize. I continued to play mine, perhaps helplessly, as his wobbled, collapsed, and sort of melted itself sideways onto the stage. He continued to play. All hint of “beautiful” reverberation was gone; after another minute I joined in by deliberately knocking mine over and scattering the pieces. Now we both hammered on the remaining metal slabs, making quite a racket – but it worked so well with the piece that we decided to do it next time we play it. “Discarded Poems” is not about destruction or death, but it is about moving from the “here and now” into the realm of the eternal, discarding worldly things along the way. Hence, destroying the slab gongs works perfectly (in the manner of the poems that later get “discarded” as metal pipes rolled across the floor).
In the last section we played “real” instruments (guitar and piano), not in the conventional way, but in a ringing style over a microtonal drone – a sound that is supposed to both break away from and fulfill the “noise” that we made earlier. Whether this works or not, I’ll leave up to the listener. I can say, however, that two sounds were very beautiful to my ear: jewel-like bell-tones from Neal’s prepared guitar (with paper clips inserted among the strings) and a sliding overtone effect on the piano strings that I adapted (not stole exactly) from Gust Burns.
Next performance of “Discarded Poems” (complete this time):
8:00 PM,
Saturday, July 24, 2010,
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center (50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford, Seattle).
Also on the program: an excerpt from Neal’s “Gradus: for Tesla, Fux, and Milo the Wrestler”, a vast supra-universal-length study of all the possible combinations of notes on the piano; a couple of shorter, more conventionally melodic, piano pieces by me (probably one with percussion played from the piano); and an improvised set (guitar and piano).
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Discarded Poems, Part One
Last night I went to the music building at Seattle Pacific University to practice for the upcoming Seattle Composers’ Salon (7/2/2010). Neal Meyer, guitarist, and I are going to play part of a piece called “Discarded Poems”, which is related to (but not necessarily part of) the StormSound Cycle. It’s a performance art piece involving improvising on slab gongs, playing the walls and fixtures in the performance space, reading poems and “discarding” them as metal pipes rolled across the floor; and making unheard-of sounds with prepared guitar and piano strings – all over an accompaniment of prerecorded, computer-processed sounds originally derived from nature (but altered beyond recognition). More intense than most of the “StormSound” pieces, it belongs by itself in a concert, not as part of that gigantic opus – but nevertheless is derived from some of the same sources.
We talked originally about amplifying the slab-gongs; it turns out (after hearing Neal’s sonorous improvisation) that this won’t be necessary. Besides, there will be two slab-gongs in the concert. The second section is improvised on a graphic score over a microtonal drone. I tried some Gust Burns techniques with the dowels (actually mallets in my case) in the piano; these were beautiful but too quiet for this particular piece. I reverted to some of my usual “inside piano” techniques. Neal prepared his guitar with paper clips per my instructions; the result sounded somewhere between an electric pipa (!) and a gamelan. At first my instructions were to play seventh and ninth chords, which even with the paper clips had a film noir feel, as Neal succinctly pointed out – (strum) “I work in the rough part of town…”. We dropped the chords. There were two versions of the background drone: one is the drone played straight, the other has an extra layer of an out-of-sync hip-hop beat derived originally from a 2002 pop tune (I can picture it now, “…and now for something that you never thought you’d hear at a Composers’ Salon – a Stacie Orrico remix…!”) It didn’t work, however; the “beat” (even in a Steve Reich “phase” version) distracted from what we were playing – the interesting was covered up with the less interesting. So we’ll do the straight no-beat version.
Anyway, the practice went off well, and we’ll see how it turns out in the Salon. And, of course, the Salon is just a warm-up for playing the entire “Discarded Poems” in a full-length concert at the same performance space that I’ve been blogging about on this thing.
8:00 PM
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center
50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford (Seattle, WA)
We talked originally about amplifying the slab-gongs; it turns out (after hearing Neal’s sonorous improvisation) that this won’t be necessary. Besides, there will be two slab-gongs in the concert. The second section is improvised on a graphic score over a microtonal drone. I tried some Gust Burns techniques with the dowels (actually mallets in my case) in the piano; these were beautiful but too quiet for this particular piece. I reverted to some of my usual “inside piano” techniques. Neal prepared his guitar with paper clips per my instructions; the result sounded somewhere between an electric pipa (!) and a gamelan. At first my instructions were to play seventh and ninth chords, which even with the paper clips had a film noir feel, as Neal succinctly pointed out – (strum) “I work in the rough part of town…”. We dropped the chords. There were two versions of the background drone: one is the drone played straight, the other has an extra layer of an out-of-sync hip-hop beat derived originally from a 2002 pop tune (I can picture it now, “…and now for something that you never thought you’d hear at a Composers’ Salon – a Stacie Orrico remix…!”) It didn’t work, however; the “beat” (even in a Steve Reich “phase” version) distracted from what we were playing – the interesting was covered up with the less interesting. So we’ll do the straight no-beat version.
Anyway, the practice went off well, and we’ll see how it turns out in the Salon. And, of course, the Salon is just a warm-up for playing the entire “Discarded Poems” in a full-length concert at the same performance space that I’ve been blogging about on this thing.
8:00 PM
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center
50th and Sunnyside, in Wallingford (Seattle, WA)
Monday, June 28, 2010
Concert Review: Gust Burns (piano) & Tyler Wilcox (saxophone) with Seattle Improvisers; Chapel Performance Space, 6/25/2010
This was not so much a concert as it was the fulfillment of the possibilities presented in aleatory music and silence – the sounds presented (whether or not they were made by the musicians) perfectly fit with the time and place that they were made.
This was not so much a concert as a jam session – there were only about twelve chairs set out for the audience, and most of them were occupied by musicians who played in at least one piece in the concert.
They obviously weren’t expecting an audience, and it looks like they didn’t do much advertising. Pity, in a way; this kind of music needs to be moved out of “the fringe” and into the mainstream. Making more people aware of it would be a start.
On the other hand, too large of an audience would have sabotaged it. This is music that needs to be heard one-on-one; one or two musicians to one audience member. Direct communication, nothing held back by player or listener, with no outside interference.
Or actually, everything held back, with all outside interference. The music is one or two notes, understated, almost unsaid, against silence. The silence is part of the music. The outside is part of the silence. The outside is part of the music. The windows were open; sounds from outside of the performance space drifted in – mingled with, interpenetrated, commented on the sounds played on stage. And vice versa.
And always, there was that silence. Different kinds of silence, in fact, made different by the sounds that framed them.
They played, altogether, six pieces. The first was an “overlong” duet for saxophone (Tyler) and piano (Gust). Gust played the entire piece by rubbing his fingers quickly and repeatedly downward on rosined wooden dowels pressed against the piano’s sounding board, producing a sound that was basically white noise but included a hint of the blending of many dimly audible notes.
1. Silence. Airplanes pass over. Silence.
2. Rubbing dowel in piano. Breathing sounds from sax. Silence.
3. Traffic in the distance. Silence.
4. Rubbing dowel in different places in the piano. Quiet drone from sax; screeching overtones (barely audible) blend into airplane passing over. Silence.
5. Harley wolf-howls in the distance. Rubbing of dowel in piano again, letting it bump against the sounding board briefly. Silence.
6. Sax removes mouthpiece. Makes no sound for two minutes, then a short set of exhalations. Silence.
7. Footsteps outside, voices, birds. Silence.
8. Sax plays a set of overtones, with circular breathing. Dowel makes a short set of “hiccoughs”. Silence.
9. Sax and dowel sounds more frequent, fragmented, then scattered. Outside sounds continue: airplanes, traffic, birds, voices. Silence.
It was difficult to tell where it had ended (though it had been nearly an hour); the continuous faint outside sounds had become enough of the “performed” music that I got the impression that it was still continuing, would still continue, was, in fact, all of the continuing sounds and silence that were being made anywhere.
I didn’t want to applaud. It would destroy the silence.
There was a brief break; then they played the other five pieces. These were continuations in the same vein, always the sounds and the silence that were indistinguishable from each other (only one piece, a solo by Gust on the piano keys, had a couple sections of faster notes).
This was the other side of silence; these were sounds that were quieter than silence. This was a new form of silence. This was a new form of beauty.
These pieces were part of a series played by the same musicians. Gust told me afterwards that they play in an ongoing set, once a week, at Gallery 1412 in Seattle.
This was not so much a concert as a jam session – there were only about twelve chairs set out for the audience, and most of them were occupied by musicians who played in at least one piece in the concert.
They obviously weren’t expecting an audience, and it looks like they didn’t do much advertising. Pity, in a way; this kind of music needs to be moved out of “the fringe” and into the mainstream. Making more people aware of it would be a start.
On the other hand, too large of an audience would have sabotaged it. This is music that needs to be heard one-on-one; one or two musicians to one audience member. Direct communication, nothing held back by player or listener, with no outside interference.
Or actually, everything held back, with all outside interference. The music is one or two notes, understated, almost unsaid, against silence. The silence is part of the music. The outside is part of the silence. The outside is part of the music. The windows were open; sounds from outside of the performance space drifted in – mingled with, interpenetrated, commented on the sounds played on stage. And vice versa.
And always, there was that silence. Different kinds of silence, in fact, made different by the sounds that framed them.
They played, altogether, six pieces. The first was an “overlong” duet for saxophone (Tyler) and piano (Gust). Gust played the entire piece by rubbing his fingers quickly and repeatedly downward on rosined wooden dowels pressed against the piano’s sounding board, producing a sound that was basically white noise but included a hint of the blending of many dimly audible notes.
1. Silence. Airplanes pass over. Silence.
2. Rubbing dowel in piano. Breathing sounds from sax. Silence.
3. Traffic in the distance. Silence.
4. Rubbing dowel in different places in the piano. Quiet drone from sax; screeching overtones (barely audible) blend into airplane passing over. Silence.
5. Harley wolf-howls in the distance. Rubbing of dowel in piano again, letting it bump against the sounding board briefly. Silence.
6. Sax removes mouthpiece. Makes no sound for two minutes, then a short set of exhalations. Silence.
7. Footsteps outside, voices, birds. Silence.
8. Sax plays a set of overtones, with circular breathing. Dowel makes a short set of “hiccoughs”. Silence.
9. Sax and dowel sounds more frequent, fragmented, then scattered. Outside sounds continue: airplanes, traffic, birds, voices. Silence.
It was difficult to tell where it had ended (though it had been nearly an hour); the continuous faint outside sounds had become enough of the “performed” music that I got the impression that it was still continuing, would still continue, was, in fact, all of the continuing sounds and silence that were being made anywhere.
I didn’t want to applaud. It would destroy the silence.
There was a brief break; then they played the other five pieces. These were continuations in the same vein, always the sounds and the silence that were indistinguishable from each other (only one piece, a solo by Gust on the piano keys, had a couple sections of faster notes).
This was the other side of silence; these were sounds that were quieter than silence. This was a new form of silence. This was a new form of beauty.
These pieces were part of a series played by the same musicians. Gust told me afterwards that they play in an ongoing set, once a week, at Gallery 1412 in Seattle.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Concert Review: Bill Horist at the Chapel 6/11/2010
This was another amazing concert at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford. Bill is an experimental guitarist, of the Fred Frith variety – the guitar, with various implements in and around the strings, becomes an electro-acoustic ensemble by itself.
Before the concert, an MC (turned out to be Bill’s fiancée) walked onto the stage: “The hush of everybody holding their breath in anticipation – He’s being fashionably late. He’ll be another ten minutes or so… – Breathe, people! Be loud!!”
A couple of minutes later Bill appeared, shuffling onto the stage quietly, deliberately acting sheepish as if sneaking into his own concert. As the audience started clapping, he sat down on a chair between his amp and a table holding cymbals, a waterphone, a violin bow, and other miscellaneous objects. He tuned his guitar, and talked briefly about thanking all of the Seattle musicians who’d helped him with his new CD. “…No, they’re not all here…” he muttered, “I wonder if they’re being dogged by volcanoes, as I was…” He explained that he had just been to two places where volcanoes had erupted, including being in Amsterdam when the one in Iceland went off. “Good to be home where I don’t have to worry. …Uh, anyone heard anything about Mt. Rainier…?”
He played two half-hour improvised sets. The first was mellow, a stream-of-consciousness with folk, rock and raga overtones. I began taking notes about what I heard: “E-bow high drone, e-bow chord (open 4th), minor third (triad), 4th above 3rd (do, sol, mi, la), chord kept reverberating as began conventional guitar picking. Jazz raga against drones. Pentatonic with accidentals. Began rock ground-bass, improv over top. Folk guitar, developed as minimalism. Drones fade. Some dissonance (minor 2nd). Change of style, “electro” birdcalls (prerecorded?); folk guitar resumes. Lets some overtones ring. Electro continues as other sounds fade. Manipulation of sounds: “old school” electronic music (Stockhausen, Subotnick). Return to the e-bow, now with dissonance (minor 2nds, flat 5ths, microtones). Hints of Niblock with microtonal vibrations, though faster (not drone-minimalism). Blues. Plucked harmonics (bell-tones) for next section. Slower folk guitar, “electro” reappears during quiet moments…”
I decided about ten minutes in that that kind of writing wasn’t that interesting, and it certainly didn’t tell about the feel of the piece (which was surprisingly mellow); so I began writing about it in a different way. I just let my pen wander across the paper, going up as the music went up, flowing as the music flowed, stopping as the music stopped. Each horizontal group of lines is a couple of minutes of music.
During the intermission, I showed the resulting abstract to some other audience members, who commented that it was a beautiful graphic. Later, I showed it to Bill, and commented that, “Now it’s a graphic score…” “…And I could play it again!” he said.
Before starting the second half, Bill stated that he should have brought a change of clothes because now he’s an entirely different person. And he was right. The second set was much more abstract, less linear, less melodic and concerned with “real notes”, more freeform, more concerned with interesting sounds that were intrinsically beautiful. Bill inserted the waterphone and the cymbal between the strings of the guitar (not at the same time), and at various points played it with the bow or with an electric toothbrush. I described the sound later as “heavy metal Takemitsu”. The volume built, reaching a screaming climax, and then Bill abruptly turned off the amp, leaving a startling silence. The sudden cessation of sound actually made me dizzy for a second or two – a surprising effect. (For those who are reading this and wonder if there were any chemicals involved here, the answer is no, I don't do drugs.)
I did two graphics inspired by the feel of the music for this second half as well. Since the music was not linear, neither are the graphics (I actually seldom looked where my pen was going, though when I sensed that I was getting close to an edge, I started over on the left).
And that was that. Some of the audience members hung around for a few minutes afterwards, talking about various things musical. Bill made an interesting comment that he had a friend, a percussionist, who used to play with Bill in a rock band and who said, “Forget all that experimental garbage – let’s just do straight-ahead rock, rock, rock!” and then started doing experimental music. I’ve switched styles like that several times too…
Before the concert, an MC (turned out to be Bill’s fiancée) walked onto the stage: “The hush of everybody holding their breath in anticipation – He’s being fashionably late. He’ll be another ten minutes or so… – Breathe, people! Be loud!!”
A couple of minutes later Bill appeared, shuffling onto the stage quietly, deliberately acting sheepish as if sneaking into his own concert. As the audience started clapping, he sat down on a chair between his amp and a table holding cymbals, a waterphone, a violin bow, and other miscellaneous objects. He tuned his guitar, and talked briefly about thanking all of the Seattle musicians who’d helped him with his new CD. “…No, they’re not all here…” he muttered, “I wonder if they’re being dogged by volcanoes, as I was…” He explained that he had just been to two places where volcanoes had erupted, including being in Amsterdam when the one in Iceland went off. “Good to be home where I don’t have to worry. …Uh, anyone heard anything about Mt. Rainier…?”
He played two half-hour improvised sets. The first was mellow, a stream-of-consciousness with folk, rock and raga overtones. I began taking notes about what I heard: “E-bow high drone, e-bow chord (open 4th), minor third (triad), 4th above 3rd (do, sol, mi, la), chord kept reverberating as began conventional guitar picking. Jazz raga against drones. Pentatonic with accidentals. Began rock ground-bass, improv over top. Folk guitar, developed as minimalism. Drones fade. Some dissonance (minor 2nd). Change of style, “electro” birdcalls (prerecorded?); folk guitar resumes. Lets some overtones ring. Electro continues as other sounds fade. Manipulation of sounds: “old school” electronic music (Stockhausen, Subotnick). Return to the e-bow, now with dissonance (minor 2nds, flat 5ths, microtones). Hints of Niblock with microtonal vibrations, though faster (not drone-minimalism). Blues. Plucked harmonics (bell-tones) for next section. Slower folk guitar, “electro” reappears during quiet moments…”
I decided about ten minutes in that that kind of writing wasn’t that interesting, and it certainly didn’t tell about the feel of the piece (which was surprisingly mellow); so I began writing about it in a different way. I just let my pen wander across the paper, going up as the music went up, flowing as the music flowed, stopping as the music stopped. Each horizontal group of lines is a couple of minutes of music.
During the intermission, I showed the resulting abstract to some other audience members, who commented that it was a beautiful graphic. Later, I showed it to Bill, and commented that, “Now it’s a graphic score…” “…And I could play it again!” he said.
Before starting the second half, Bill stated that he should have brought a change of clothes because now he’s an entirely different person. And he was right. The second set was much more abstract, less linear, less melodic and concerned with “real notes”, more freeform, more concerned with interesting sounds that were intrinsically beautiful. Bill inserted the waterphone and the cymbal between the strings of the guitar (not at the same time), and at various points played it with the bow or with an electric toothbrush. I described the sound later as “heavy metal Takemitsu”. The volume built, reaching a screaming climax, and then Bill abruptly turned off the amp, leaving a startling silence. The sudden cessation of sound actually made me dizzy for a second or two – a surprising effect. (For those who are reading this and wonder if there were any chemicals involved here, the answer is no, I don't do drugs.)
I did two graphics inspired by the feel of the music for this second half as well. Since the music was not linear, neither are the graphics (I actually seldom looked where my pen was going, though when I sensed that I was getting close to an edge, I started over on the left).
And that was that. Some of the audience members hung around for a few minutes afterwards, talking about various things musical. Bill made an interesting comment that he had a friend, a percussionist, who used to play with Bill in a rock band and who said, “Forget all that experimental garbage – let’s just do straight-ahead rock, rock, rock!” and then started doing experimental music. I’ve switched styles like that several times too…
Origins of the "StormSound Cycle"
This is an excerpt from a journal I wrote seven years ago – just if anyone’s curious about how this nine-hour piece got started. I’ve added a couple of explanations [in brackets] where necessary; and note that I now have music-editing software on my own computer.
Went over to Seattle Pacific University [I was a grad student there] to do some recording. The idea was to try to get the Eco Slab Gong piece recorded, and try out another conceptual piece, Nature Lives in Motion.
Eco Slab Gong didn’t work. The nature sounds, courtesy of Randy Storm, were supposed to resonate the metal sheet, the sounds of which would be picked up by the engineer’s sensitive mikes as an interesting percussion sound. So, brought the metal slab in from the car, unwrapped it from its cardboard. Sliced my finger on the edge of the metal. No blood. Set up the metal on the balloons, allowing it to freely vibrate. Set the headphones on it, cranked up the volume of Randy’s nature recordings. Set up the mikes, a mere mm. from the metal slab. Everything was working but. Failed. Nature sounds too loud or reverberations too quiet. Tried another set of louder headphones, hanging from a mike stand and themselves only a mere mm. from the metal. Again everything was working but. Failed. Randy’s recordings too loud period. There wasn’t a way to even anything out. Oh well. “Experimental” music is just that: experimental. Some experiments don’t work.
So we [the engineer and I] tried the other concept. We loaded two of Randy’s completed CD’s which I’d always liked these because of their arrangements (the sounds are put together almost like music in themselves, complete with recurring motifs – types of birdcalls, etc. – and an interesting overall shape). The concept was to take these recordings – already masterpieces in themselves – and overlay them, one atop the other, and then stretch them out into at least double of their length by elongating the individual sounds (without lowering their pitch – possible with a computer – I may decide later to raise the pitch of selected sections.). The result should be a “spacey aural fabric” (old Miles Davis reviewer) that is suggestive of natural sounds but difficult to pin down exactly because of the altered time frame.
Some experimental music doesn’t work. This worked marvelously. The sounds stretched into a fantastic tapestry of sound, vaguely strange and alien, vaguely familiar, and (after the harsher sounds near the beginning, made from stretched wolf-howls) quite relaxing. There is a section of water running that’s particularly interesting – the individual “drops” in the flow are audible, almost as bamboo wind chimes and tiny voices muttering in an unknown language. Overlaid with this are a few deep wooden sounds of branches breaking under a heavy snowfall – slowed down, these become resonant percussion. Thunder slowed down shows definite “notes”; Tolkien’s “drums in the deep” but not as frightening. Frogs and crickets become a whole Latin percussion band with shakers and maracas – playing polyrhythms that the human mind can’t comprehend. I took the CD home and listened to it several times, loaded it into the computer, and listened to it several times again – I’m listening to it as I write this. Can’t stop listening to it.
Meaning, of course, what I’ve commented on before. Nature (sounds made by things made by God) is the best composer, and nothing is truly random. The overlaying of these sounds was done in an essentially aleatory manner (though the original length of each section was planned by Randy on the original CDs) – but it resulted in a large-scale composition that is far more than the sum of its parts.
The result gives me the idea for a lengthy piece of music in the manner of FTOFTS and SoundScrolls (thus it could form a huge trilogy with these two works). It is the first piece I will have written that doesn’t have a part for piano in it. [FTOFTS, “From the Oceans’ From the Stars” and “SoundScrolls” are two large-scale compositions for “live” instruments and prerecorded sounds. FTOFTS – which I don’t pronounce “eff-tofts” but just “f’tofts” – is the oldest, dating from a music class I took at the University of Washington in 1983.]
“First of all, let me explain that, if you’ve come here to listen to Mozart or Chopin, you will probably be disappointed. This piece is not classical in the narrow sense. But if you’ve come for a sound adventure, or if you like the music of John Cage, George Crumb, LaMonte Young, Toru Takemitsu, or Phill Niblock, then you’ll probably enjoy this. I will warn you in advance, though, as it says on your programs – this piece is nearly two and a half hours long. I you have to leave the auditorium, please try to do so return quietly.
"Now, the piece is titled ‘Nature Lives in Motion’. It is one of a series of three large-scale pieces using pre-recorded sounds and percussion, in addition to various other instruments. The other instrument is, in this case, a ‘cello. The percussion is divided into two groups, for two players: metal and wood. These are ‘natural’ materials representing the inorganic and the organic, respectively.
“The meaning of the piece is not only the ‘movement’ of nature, but the movement – the vibration – that produces sound. It is about sound – it is not just sound, but it is about sound. Specifically, it is about the meaning of sound. Nature is full of sound, and the ultimate purpose of that sound, I believe, is praising God. This music is, then, about nature praising its Creator. Much of what you will hear is either joyous (bird calls – exuberant) or meditative, as in prayer. But you will hear some other sounds too, particularly near the beginning – there are some harsh sounds in nature as there is harshness in nature. This world has become corrupted, and has violence and pain. Near the end of the piece, all the various sounds will come together harmoniously for a while – a yearning for the perfect world without its Darwinian elements – as this world was meant to be.
“So, with no further ado, sit back, and let’s enjoy a performance of ‘Nature Lives in Motion’. Thank you.”
The percussion and ‘cello parts will be graphically notated, in the manner of the Cage “number pieces”, with lengthy time-spans (up to three minutes) for each sound, which are single sounds that respond to the sounds on the tape, or drones that do not. The “harmonious” part near the end is merely an overlaying of two-note motives, in the manner of the repeated birds and frogs that are on the tape at this time. There are long silences in all of the parts, filled in by the pre-recorded sounds.
[After writing this, I started adding to it, and “Nature Lives in Motion” became just the first movement of an all-day piece. It grew without bounds, so to speak, until I finally put a limit on it by simply saying to myself, “The number of pieces in this cycle is now set. Any new pieces I write in a similar style will be by themselves, or be part of a ‘Second StormSound Cycle’ – which may at some point come into existence.” That’s where it is now. And there are a lot of other sounds that I added to the prerecorded part of “Nature Lives in Motion” as well.]
Went over to Seattle Pacific University [I was a grad student there] to do some recording. The idea was to try to get the Eco Slab Gong piece recorded, and try out another conceptual piece, Nature Lives in Motion.
Eco Slab Gong didn’t work. The nature sounds, courtesy of Randy Storm, were supposed to resonate the metal sheet, the sounds of which would be picked up by the engineer’s sensitive mikes as an interesting percussion sound. So, brought the metal slab in from the car, unwrapped it from its cardboard. Sliced my finger on the edge of the metal. No blood. Set up the metal on the balloons, allowing it to freely vibrate. Set the headphones on it, cranked up the volume of Randy’s nature recordings. Set up the mikes, a mere mm. from the metal slab. Everything was working but. Failed. Nature sounds too loud or reverberations too quiet. Tried another set of louder headphones, hanging from a mike stand and themselves only a mere mm. from the metal. Again everything was working but. Failed. Randy’s recordings too loud period. There wasn’t a way to even anything out. Oh well. “Experimental” music is just that: experimental. Some experiments don’t work.
So we [the engineer and I] tried the other concept. We loaded two of Randy’s completed CD’s which I’d always liked these because of their arrangements (the sounds are put together almost like music in themselves, complete with recurring motifs – types of birdcalls, etc. – and an interesting overall shape). The concept was to take these recordings – already masterpieces in themselves – and overlay them, one atop the other, and then stretch them out into at least double of their length by elongating the individual sounds (without lowering their pitch – possible with a computer – I may decide later to raise the pitch of selected sections.). The result should be a “spacey aural fabric” (old Miles Davis reviewer) that is suggestive of natural sounds but difficult to pin down exactly because of the altered time frame.
Some experimental music doesn’t work. This worked marvelously. The sounds stretched into a fantastic tapestry of sound, vaguely strange and alien, vaguely familiar, and (after the harsher sounds near the beginning, made from stretched wolf-howls) quite relaxing. There is a section of water running that’s particularly interesting – the individual “drops” in the flow are audible, almost as bamboo wind chimes and tiny voices muttering in an unknown language. Overlaid with this are a few deep wooden sounds of branches breaking under a heavy snowfall – slowed down, these become resonant percussion. Thunder slowed down shows definite “notes”; Tolkien’s “drums in the deep” but not as frightening. Frogs and crickets become a whole Latin percussion band with shakers and maracas – playing polyrhythms that the human mind can’t comprehend. I took the CD home and listened to it several times, loaded it into the computer, and listened to it several times again – I’m listening to it as I write this. Can’t stop listening to it.
Meaning, of course, what I’ve commented on before. Nature (sounds made by things made by God) is the best composer, and nothing is truly random. The overlaying of these sounds was done in an essentially aleatory manner (though the original length of each section was planned by Randy on the original CDs) – but it resulted in a large-scale composition that is far more than the sum of its parts.
The result gives me the idea for a lengthy piece of music in the manner of FTOFTS and SoundScrolls (thus it could form a huge trilogy with these two works). It is the first piece I will have written that doesn’t have a part for piano in it. [FTOFTS, “From the Oceans’ From the Stars” and “SoundScrolls” are two large-scale compositions for “live” instruments and prerecorded sounds. FTOFTS – which I don’t pronounce “eff-tofts” but just “f’tofts” – is the oldest, dating from a music class I took at the University of Washington in 1983.]
“First of all, let me explain that, if you’ve come here to listen to Mozart or Chopin, you will probably be disappointed. This piece is not classical in the narrow sense. But if you’ve come for a sound adventure, or if you like the music of John Cage, George Crumb, LaMonte Young, Toru Takemitsu, or Phill Niblock, then you’ll probably enjoy this. I will warn you in advance, though, as it says on your programs – this piece is nearly two and a half hours long. I you have to leave the auditorium, please try to do so return quietly.
"Now, the piece is titled ‘Nature Lives in Motion’. It is one of a series of three large-scale pieces using pre-recorded sounds and percussion, in addition to various other instruments. The other instrument is, in this case, a ‘cello. The percussion is divided into two groups, for two players: metal and wood. These are ‘natural’ materials representing the inorganic and the organic, respectively.
“The meaning of the piece is not only the ‘movement’ of nature, but the movement – the vibration – that produces sound. It is about sound – it is not just sound, but it is about sound. Specifically, it is about the meaning of sound. Nature is full of sound, and the ultimate purpose of that sound, I believe, is praising God. This music is, then, about nature praising its Creator. Much of what you will hear is either joyous (bird calls – exuberant) or meditative, as in prayer. But you will hear some other sounds too, particularly near the beginning – there are some harsh sounds in nature as there is harshness in nature. This world has become corrupted, and has violence and pain. Near the end of the piece, all the various sounds will come together harmoniously for a while – a yearning for the perfect world without its Darwinian elements – as this world was meant to be.
“So, with no further ado, sit back, and let’s enjoy a performance of ‘Nature Lives in Motion’. Thank you.”
The percussion and ‘cello parts will be graphically notated, in the manner of the Cage “number pieces”, with lengthy time-spans (up to three minutes) for each sound, which are single sounds that respond to the sounds on the tape, or drones that do not. The “harmonious” part near the end is merely an overlaying of two-note motives, in the manner of the repeated birds and frogs that are on the tape at this time. There are long silences in all of the parts, filled in by the pre-recorded sounds.
[After writing this, I started adding to it, and “Nature Lives in Motion” became just the first movement of an all-day piece. It grew without bounds, so to speak, until I finally put a limit on it by simply saying to myself, “The number of pieces in this cycle is now set. Any new pieces I write in a similar style will be by themselves, or be part of a ‘Second StormSound Cycle’ – which may at some point come into existence.” That’s where it is now. And there are a lot of other sounds that I added to the prerecorded part of “Nature Lives in Motion” as well.]
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Concert Review: Piano Recital by Keith Eisenbrey, 6-5-2010
Two of the remarkable things about concerts in the Good Shepherd Center are the piano that they’ve got there, and the resonating space itself. The piano, of a brand I’ve not heard of before (and I can’t remember as I’m writing this), is a concert grand with such amazing tone that its voice leaps out of it like a living thing, with all of the overtones clearly audible. The space of the hall is just as remarkable; sounds seem to hang in there forever, but without covering up the next sounds. The perfect concert venue for Renaissance choral music, string quartets, or (as in this case) contemporary piano music where the silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.
I’ve heard Keith play before, in solo recitals and at the composers’ salons, so I wanted to make sure not to miss this concert. I was only there for a couple of minutes (I had gotten there slightly late) before he walked onto the stage, uncharacteristically dressed in tails, and proceeded to play six pieces.
Most were in a style vaguely reminiscent of Messiaen. The opening piece, “Keyboard Shortcuts”, by Richard Johnson, was actually a set of six short pieces with “charmingly evocative titles” such as “Opposable Toes” and “Related Sweepstakes Entities”. Most seemed (to my ear at least) to be serialist, though the program notes indicated that “at the core of each is a tautly dissonant four-part chorale”. Part of the interest in the music was how this chorale was worked into the fabric of each piece, with strikingly different results: some of the pieces were loud and dramatic, while others were elegiac and at least one seemed rather humorous.
After this first piece, Keith gave a brief talk about the music, and mentioned that all of the composers except one (Sean Osborn) were in the audience. Sean, he said, was out of town attending a wedding – his own. We (the audience) all agreed that this was a good reason to miss a concert of his own music.
“Theme and Variations for Piano”, by the afore-mentioned Sean Osborn, was the next piece, and it began in sharp contrast. The theme, a series of individual note-heads to be played softly but without any discernible meter, sounded like a lazy river of notes, mostly in the mid-range but with an occasional resonant series in the bass. The three variations unfolded, each different in mood from the others, climaxing in the “Variation: Fast” – another set of note-heads without meter but here played as quickly and loudly as possible; then there was a return to the meandering ruminations of the opening.
The shortest piece (just over 6 minutes), “dear s.,” by Brian Cobb, was one of the highlights of the concert. This was an impressionistic love-ballad that somehow resisted all of the (by now) clichés of impressionism and ballads; a truly beautiful piece vaguely reminiscent of Takemitsu.
The remaining pieces all had something to do with composer Benjamin Boretz, who has been a frequent contributor to the journal “Perspectives of New Music” (http://www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org/). The first was “Liebeslied, amended”; Keith’s slight reworking of one of Boretz’s earlier pieces that had been left unfinished to head in a different musical direction. There were hints of various classical “Liebeslieder” here, in a double spiral of a piece that ascended to a dissonant climax, resolved into a series of arpeggios, hit a repeat sign, and then ended enigmatically without concluding. The position of this piece at the end of the first half of the concert was a masterstroke: it didn’t end, of course – so one needs to come back for the second half to find out what happens next…
The second half was dedicated to two long pieces, both in excess of twenty minutes. Benjamin Boretz, again, was the first composer – (“…my chart shines high where the blue milks upset…”) is the title; yes, that is the correct punctuation (complete with the parenthesis); and yes, that is a quote from James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. That novel’s dream imagery, fractured language, and stream of consciousness narrative formed the basis for this piece: a dreamy, unfractured, stream of consciousness for piano. Notes presented themselves, almost always two at a time as chords, unfolding gradually, usually (but not always) quietly, flowing, like a river of thoughts… A meditative piece, yet not “meditation music” – it had way too much substance for that. If I were to put a label on it, I’d say it was roughly in the style of Morton Feldman – but only roughly. There was way too much “action” below the surface for that; not so much meditation on single phrases; more (and at the same time less) thematic development. My descriptions are perhaps rather vague, but that’s how this piece should be talked about. There was a CD available of the same piece played by another pianist – I bought it and plan to listen to it several times more.
Keith’s own “Sonata Liebeslied”, the last piece, was in complete contrast and yet somehow of the same ilk. It likewise unfolded slowly, meditatively (from the first few notes of Boretz’s “Liebeslied”, but seemed to contain fragments of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” as well). However, its progression, according to Keith, was “lumpy” – clusters of notes appeared, developed, vanished into silence (and the amazing reverberations of that piano, which seemed made for this kind of piece), reappeared in the same or different manner, were crosscut with other clusters and themes, etc. I had the feeling of being taken along in a musical labyrinth, encountering bits of musical “lumps” here, memories of other “lumps” there, meandering, but always heading towards the exit. Near the end there was an actual climax (a brief, loud, allegro section) – this was both a complete surprise and the fulfillment of where the piece had been wanting to go all along. In all, a very beautiful piece. It needs intense concentration on both the part of the listeners and the performer – but that concentration is rewarded with beauty and silence.
And so the concert ended. Quite the work, there; more extended than many piano recitals, and worth repeating. One of its strengths was that the pieces were chosen and arranged to fit together into a giant meta-composition in several movements. (“…my chart shines high…”) was the long slow movement, and the “Sonata Liebeslied”, with its longer development and recall of the earlier piece(s), was the grandest of finales. Stylistically the pieces all related to one another, yet there was enough variety within that style to keep me interested (which would have been the case even if Keith had arranged them in a different order).
The listeners were enthralled. I myself intend to hear Keith’s next concert, and I asked him to play one or more of the piano parts for the StormSound Cycle…
I’ve heard Keith play before, in solo recitals and at the composers’ salons, so I wanted to make sure not to miss this concert. I was only there for a couple of minutes (I had gotten there slightly late) before he walked onto the stage, uncharacteristically dressed in tails, and proceeded to play six pieces.
Most were in a style vaguely reminiscent of Messiaen. The opening piece, “Keyboard Shortcuts”, by Richard Johnson, was actually a set of six short pieces with “charmingly evocative titles” such as “Opposable Toes” and “Related Sweepstakes Entities”. Most seemed (to my ear at least) to be serialist, though the program notes indicated that “at the core of each is a tautly dissonant four-part chorale”. Part of the interest in the music was how this chorale was worked into the fabric of each piece, with strikingly different results: some of the pieces were loud and dramatic, while others were elegiac and at least one seemed rather humorous.
After this first piece, Keith gave a brief talk about the music, and mentioned that all of the composers except one (Sean Osborn) were in the audience. Sean, he said, was out of town attending a wedding – his own. We (the audience) all agreed that this was a good reason to miss a concert of his own music.
“Theme and Variations for Piano”, by the afore-mentioned Sean Osborn, was the next piece, and it began in sharp contrast. The theme, a series of individual note-heads to be played softly but without any discernible meter, sounded like a lazy river of notes, mostly in the mid-range but with an occasional resonant series in the bass. The three variations unfolded, each different in mood from the others, climaxing in the “Variation: Fast” – another set of note-heads without meter but here played as quickly and loudly as possible; then there was a return to the meandering ruminations of the opening.
The shortest piece (just over 6 minutes), “dear s.,” by Brian Cobb, was one of the highlights of the concert. This was an impressionistic love-ballad that somehow resisted all of the (by now) clichés of impressionism and ballads; a truly beautiful piece vaguely reminiscent of Takemitsu.
The remaining pieces all had something to do with composer Benjamin Boretz, who has been a frequent contributor to the journal “Perspectives of New Music” (http://www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org/). The first was “Liebeslied, amended”; Keith’s slight reworking of one of Boretz’s earlier pieces that had been left unfinished to head in a different musical direction. There were hints of various classical “Liebeslieder” here, in a double spiral of a piece that ascended to a dissonant climax, resolved into a series of arpeggios, hit a repeat sign, and then ended enigmatically without concluding. The position of this piece at the end of the first half of the concert was a masterstroke: it didn’t end, of course – so one needs to come back for the second half to find out what happens next…
The second half was dedicated to two long pieces, both in excess of twenty minutes. Benjamin Boretz, again, was the first composer – (“…my chart shines high where the blue milks upset…”) is the title; yes, that is the correct punctuation (complete with the parenthesis); and yes, that is a quote from James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”. That novel’s dream imagery, fractured language, and stream of consciousness narrative formed the basis for this piece: a dreamy, unfractured, stream of consciousness for piano. Notes presented themselves, almost always two at a time as chords, unfolding gradually, usually (but not always) quietly, flowing, like a river of thoughts… A meditative piece, yet not “meditation music” – it had way too much substance for that. If I were to put a label on it, I’d say it was roughly in the style of Morton Feldman – but only roughly. There was way too much “action” below the surface for that; not so much meditation on single phrases; more (and at the same time less) thematic development. My descriptions are perhaps rather vague, but that’s how this piece should be talked about. There was a CD available of the same piece played by another pianist – I bought it and plan to listen to it several times more.
Keith’s own “Sonata Liebeslied”, the last piece, was in complete contrast and yet somehow of the same ilk. It likewise unfolded slowly, meditatively (from the first few notes of Boretz’s “Liebeslied”, but seemed to contain fragments of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” as well). However, its progression, according to Keith, was “lumpy” – clusters of notes appeared, developed, vanished into silence (and the amazing reverberations of that piano, which seemed made for this kind of piece), reappeared in the same or different manner, were crosscut with other clusters and themes, etc. I had the feeling of being taken along in a musical labyrinth, encountering bits of musical “lumps” here, memories of other “lumps” there, meandering, but always heading towards the exit. Near the end there was an actual climax (a brief, loud, allegro section) – this was both a complete surprise and the fulfillment of where the piece had been wanting to go all along. In all, a very beautiful piece. It needs intense concentration on both the part of the listeners and the performer – but that concentration is rewarded with beauty and silence.
And so the concert ended. Quite the work, there; more extended than many piano recitals, and worth repeating. One of its strengths was that the pieces were chosen and arranged to fit together into a giant meta-composition in several movements. (“…my chart shines high…”) was the long slow movement, and the “Sonata Liebeslied”, with its longer development and recall of the earlier piece(s), was the grandest of finales. Stylistically the pieces all related to one another, yet there was enough variety within that style to keep me interested (which would have been the case even if Keith had arranged them in a different order).
The listeners were enthralled. I myself intend to hear Keith’s next concert, and I asked him to play one or more of the piano parts for the StormSound Cycle…
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