paul bailey ensemble live, beyond baroque, 021206

the mp3's are up from our concert at beyond baroque on 021206 (venice, ca)

retrace our steps, act 1
retrace our steps, act 2
retrace our steps, act 3
retrace our steps, act 4

retrace libretto

cheap admiration

summerland

sweater song (weezer/bailey)

recorded on sony mz-rh910 minidisc, using my sound professionals portable recording rig (SP-SPSB-5)

that's the way its supposed to go

sunday's show was a blast.

thanks to all of you who made it across town to venice to see the pbe.

thanks to my great vocalists who gave an incredible performance with only one rehearsal

thanks to nicole and the "continuo" who just keeps getting tighter and more fun to play with.

the show was a great 4th and final performance of retrace our steps (for now). it was a whole other level above our cerritos center show a year ago. we played way outside of the score taking the piece to its definitive performance.

some nights the first half is great and others the 2nd, but when it starts good and keeps getting better those are the rare evenings that everybody can remember exactly where they were.

i can't emphasize enough how fortunate i feel to be able to perform with such great musicians.

i can't emphasize enough how the process and realization of these great performances are the reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

i cannot emphasize how exhilariated and tired that i am right now. after the concert is over you then realize what abuse you have been doing to yourself (and your family)

i'm sorry if this sounds a bit melodramatic, but sunday night's performace is the reason i do this.
so... i'll try to get another day of rest and then start planning for the next one.

paul

p.s. mp3's coming soon. we had a great minidisc recording of the night.

retrace our steps (2005), background and influences

i started assembling the librettro for retrace our steps at the end of my grad school experience sometime in spring of 03. i had never written any vocal music and was encouraged by vocalist nicole baker (who is on the faculty at csuf) to write her a piece.

background
i not really a "word" guy and have never been able to remember lyrics from any song, but writing for how the voice sounds was of course really appealing... duh.

influences
at the time i was writing retrace i was coming out of my grad school experience and had been studying major large scale works that represented composers at the top of their game. after studying monteverdi's coronation of poppea, bach's goldberg variations, and glass's einstein on the beach i had been blown away by the amazing artistic and contemplative music that each had written. these pieces really make it for me as a listening experience, but to dissect them and understand how they are organized and the logic used to create them was very humbling. did i feel that my first vocal piece attain those goals? not really, but after writing large amounts of consumable music i really wanted to play in a different sandbox.

during this time i was also very taken with my friend and mental collaborator sean ferguson's great piece society of the spectacle (2000?). watching its first performance was an electrifying experience and really motivated me to get off my ass and write. there are many similarities to both pieces (that should be discussed further) and we have had some great nights discussing my "plagiarism" of his work (the penultimate line in both of our pieces is plagiarism is necessary). the best thing of sean's spectacle that i stole was the way he used levels of obliqueness to create meaning in his text . although i think philip glass's non-narrative work einsten on the beach is the most important work written in the last 50 years, i do have one conceptual gripe with him and a few others. the non-narrative obliqueness of the text for three+ hours is a little much for my friends to endure. (i know... mtv generation) sean solved this problem beautifully by creating a non-narrative composition whose subject is vague and oblique (consumerism/alienation) and used levels of obliqueness to delay the first direct statement to the audience 3/4 of the way through his piece. he then retreats back into a more oblique setting of his libretto, leaving through the same rabbit hole he entered.

this was going to be my solution also... i could present a subject drama (oratorio) that contained a politically aggressive message by setting the text using various levels of obliqueness to obscure my "message". as the piece unfolded it would i would come out of the rabbit hole and "get to my point" and then immediately retreat into the symbols and layers of the assembled text.

in short, i had a strong message to convey, but didn't want to the performance to become "preachy" by dealing with the libretto in a direct fashion.

the pbe performs retrace our steps this sunday

paulbaileyensemble and syncrhomy

sunday february 12th 7pm

beyond baroque

681 venice blvd venice, ca 90291

$7 general admission, $5 students

google map

next...

libretto, rewrites

band night?

i just finished my first week of classes and so far i am really happy with my classes.

last semester is another story.

i failed 11 students in my eartraining/dictation class. i didn't feel good about it and spent much of the break trying to figure out if it was me or them. i decided to start this semester by giving a pretest assignment to my theory classes to find out what they knew before class started. the results were more encouraging and my current students all were much stronger than the ones from last fall.

why could this be?

then i remembered a parallel from teaching 5th beginning band. let me digress...

every spring would spend a lot of time demonstrating and pretesting all incoming 5th graders to help them pick an instrument they would best succeed at. we had parent meetings, letters home, and many conversations with the students about playing in the band or orchestra in the fall. our two main goals were to put the student on an instrument he/she could be immediately successful on, and have a relatively balanced instrumentation. through this process i noticed a few unsettling patterns evolve every year.

no matter how much we tried and educate the parents about the program, there are some that fight it or choose not to participate until the last minute (the program was mandatory for all 5th graders). the problems that i started to see was that all these families who came in at the end (or not at all) were left playing the least popular instruments (trombone and tuba). this was mostly because parents cannot see their ten year old playing such a big instrument. we tried to combat this buying a class set so they could keep the one they rented at home.

for the first few years these students were the least likely to have any musical support at home. the result was high concentrations of students with little interest and parental support on the most needed instruments. the thing that really started to piss me off was when i realized i was one of those kids.

my parents skipped the "band night" and probably was pushed into playing trombone because that is all that was left. i instinctively knew there was no real choice and getting out of the house after school would be a good thing. what a wonderful way to start my musical career.

that all being said, i think that my fall eartraining class probably falls into a similar category.
it was added at the last minute and many students (not all, the other half were very hardworking) were probably late adds and transfers who might not have the best organizational skills and motivation for college.
maybe this is the reason for the high concentration of fails?

i wonder if their parents skipped band night also?