Much of Eisenbrey's music explores the inner sonorities of the piano with spiky notes, unusual chords, and confounding forms. I still vividly recall a performance of his Slow Blues. This solo piano piece elongates the blues into a time-dilated haze where loud clusters of chords ring and decay as if compact clouds of granulated chalk could swim inside the piano and scour the strings.
For this talk titled "Sowing Dischord," Eisenbrey discusses dissonance as a prime generating concept in music. Form, or how music is made and structured, remains an Eisenbrey preoccupation. In concluding our chat, he reflected, "Form, in its deepest and most interesting sense, is just how a music sounds at each of its moments. The formal strength with which a music proceeds, and the subtlety with which it comments upon its own going, affects not just the power of the utterance, but its content as well. If we need to mean what we say, we must take great care how we say it." CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI
Catch Keith Eisenbrey Wed Aug 11 (Jack Straw Productions, 4261 Roosevelt Way NE, 634-0919) at 7:30 pm, free.
