Music
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Chamber Music
In the Spring of 2023 I was introduced to violist Jacob Clewell, and immediately began writing a short piece for him. He and Sasha read through the work and liked it. But then their career took off and it became hard to pin them to a date. Meanwhile, the Arts & Letters Club Night was on the horizon, with Peter Stoll and Steven Philcox being committed to the gig. So I re-arranged the Miniatures for the A clarinet and piano, and so that version was premiered 3 April 2024.
The original 8th Meditation went back to that October 2016 concert at St. Anne’s. At the time 2 members of the audience spoke to me at intermission, expressing admiration for it. That was the impetus for me to make revisions and insert it into a future programme. Better late than never. By the time I had the revisions done, the great COVID-19 lockdown was in place, and concerts had stopped. So stretching the limits of legal gatherings, Jamie Thompson, Janusz Boroweick, Saman Shahi and I gathered at old Saint Anne’s one last time to perform a programme for video streaming, in August 2020. Recorded with two M-150 tube microphones.
A piece with baggage: I had been recording concerts for Michael Pepa’s Les Amis chamber group for quite some years, without ever having any of the musicians show interest in my work. Now I had done a number of recording jobs for them, been paid only small amounts, or working pro bono. So for the first time in many moons, I stood up for myself and asked them if they would play one of my pieces. Assent was eventually given, and then we had an argument about which instruments could or could not be included. I was able to prevail and insisted on string trio plus piano. In the back of my consciousness I realized that this particular combination of instruments was also used by Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms and many more, so If completed and performed once, it just might interest another group later. Premiered in 2019 in Heliconian Hall with Joyce Lai, Erika Crino, Ian Clarke and Andras Weber. It gave me great satisfaction that Michael Pepa was in the audience.
In many ways, I wish that the Junction Trio events at Saint Anne’s on Gladstone had never ended. By 2017 it was at the point where another of the Meditations was expected of me. In that spirit, this one was written in haste. My prime concern was to get the score out to the players in time for rehearsals. Two B4-capsule FET transformerless microphones, high on poles in A-B configuration.
The Junction Trio and friends concert of October 2016 was rather weighted with John S. Gray music. For the 9th Meditation I brought back a very old friend: The “Olivier bars.” I call them that as it was Oliver Metson who brought them to my attention back in 1975; a welded steel door guarding the propane tanks in the loading bay of the Dalhousie Central Services unit on Henry Street. I had a recorded catalogue of the sounds of those bars, so I found some events on the old tape and processed them with a DAW. So yes, they’re the same bars that were the “church bells” in Rievaulx, now being heard again at Saint Anne’s. In this Meditation, musicians are instructed to ignore the recorded bells, just play as if they weren’t there. I love the effect, and Jamie did, too.
The Junction Trio and friends concert of October 2016 became heavily weighted in John S. Gray musical content, at least partially in celebration al my surviving that very scary operation. The sixth Meditation didn’t quite work as I wanted; I still wish to revise it and try without the violin, to get back to the sparse textures of the first five. World premiere, October 2016 in St Annes.
Artistic director Ronald Royer of the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra has been in the habit of commissioning me for small, relatively short works over the decade from 2012 onwards. The Allemande is scored for double wind quintet and double bass, so, a total of eleven instruments. This recording is the premiere in the Scarborough Citadel in February 2015, with Ron Royer conducting. Other musicians included Kaye Royer, David Lasker, Chris James and Larkin Hinder. The work was later revised and became part of the CANADIAN PANORMA CD. Of special note: this premiere conflicted with a performance of my orchestral work Canon and Steps in a nearby community. I couldn’t be in two places simultaneously so I had to flip a coin. That had never happened before.
Trio No. 2 “The Disquiet” was originally written for the Ardeleana Trio and featured at the 2009 Blue Bridge Festival in Jackson’s Point. As it was written in a hurry for a tight deadline, I made several changes after the piece was given its premiere. In the spring of 2014, Jamie’s Junction Trio worked at the revised version, and presented it at a Junction Trio concert in Saint Anne’s Gladstone. Jamie Thompson, flute; Lucas Tensen, violoncello; Dan Norman, piano. Recorded live with a pair of Blue B4-capsule FET trnsformerless microphones.
In 2013 I was still reeling from the passing of Joseph S. Lipson (1950-2012). Joseph had been many things to the many people he touched over the years, but to me he had always been the most unyielding positive influence in my composition life. Some months later I made up my mind to have a commemorative concert at Toronto’s 519 Centre. I hired the Annex Quartet, asking them to perform some underperformed works by Canadian Composers. In the process, I took a little song that Joseph had sung to me one day under the apple tree, and on the basis of that I wrote a short piece for string quartet. That was full of heavy baggage. As a music major in 1974, Peter Fletcher had instructed me to write a string quartet as an assignment. At the time, I never got past the first page. It had been instilled in me that string quartets were hard, and Fletcher had me studying the Bartok set, to frighten me, perhaps. I somehow forgot that earlier trepidation and had this little ditty ready in under a week,
After the performance in Florida with Victor Feldbrill, I felt quite pleased with myself. About 20 months afterward, Kerry Stratton asked if I had anything ready for a strings-only concert he was planning. As I had almost 11 months to consider this, I made some revisions to the work. Stratton’s string group were much smaller, a chamber strings group in essence, and they played much tighter than the group in Florida. This was one of the first concerts that I recorded with M-150 tube microphones. The technician at the Jane Mallett Theatre lowered a motorized hanging bar at the edge of the stage for me, so the A-B array was up out of the sightlines for the audience. A first rate performance.
While working on Promenade, I was informed that clarinettist Ori Carmona would be part of the event. In hot blood, I wrote this short work for string trio and clarinet fully in the knowledge that Mozart had written for the identical grouping, so perhaps it might be attached to another programme by another ensemble in the future. My mentor Alexander Levkovich was in attendance at that February 2006 concert, and complimented me, saying that I’d finally “grown up.”
One result of my throwing together musicians for the October 2002 Music Gallery concert was how Dawn and Phoebe formed their own chamber group in the months following. They had a series of very successful recitals in Barrie and asked me if I could revise my piece 4W-1 for them. I countered that I’d prefer to offer a newer, stronger piece, and set about writing in the Temple Room at Ian Young’s house. As a basis I took the instrumental grouping of 4W-1, starting a new piece that evolved around a 3+3+2 dance rhythm. Historically, so much of my music has been large abstract nebulous textures; this new work with strong rhythmic drive was quite a departure from my earlier practice. Premiere February 2006 at St. George’s on the Hill, Toronto.
Electroacoustic
In 1983, out of money for rent, I chose a most unlikely route: I became the world’s worst piano salesman, becoming the assistant to the legendary Hans Moeller (1901-1995). All because I’d fallen in love with old #161500 at Dalhousie, also the Ibach 215 at St. Mary’s Art Gallery, knowing that both pianos had come though Moeller’s store. I spent seven years with him, learned how pianos are made, how they are maintained, and how the are safely moved. During the times when the store was empty, I often got out my TCD5M recorder and the tiny condenser microphones, recording my improvisations on pianos that I could never afford myself. Over the years I’ve digitized most of that old audio so I used DAW software to create this five-minute piece, all sounds from pianos in Moeller’s last store near Broadview on Danforth.
I was at old Saint Anne’s one last time to perform music for video streaming, in August of 2020. The instrument used for Embers Part Three was a rented Sequential Prophet Six synthesizer, the output sent to two Boss DD8 Delay lines. This began as a written-out chart to guide me into several distinct sections of the piece. There is a vague paraphrase of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ SEA SYMPHONY last movement at the end this routine. Unusual for me, I rehearsed this routine for a good six weeks before the show. By the way, all these sounds went directly into the PA. There was no “board mix.”
Recorded with two M-150 tube microphones, high up. in the middle of the space.
I originally intended to play this in the background at venues where the audience were seating themselves in preparations for one of my gigs. I had a piano routine CONSOLATION in my repertoire at the time. So this disembodied electronic piece made use of the same themes, treated in a very different way. Created on the TEAC A3440 open reel deck, the extended drone was accomplished my holding down a series of keys on the Moog 203A using masking tape and tuner’s wedges. The resulting drone was then subjected to extensive filtering. After that I used the same Moog to add high melodies, including using the pitch bend ribbon to achieve frequencies beyond those available from the keyboard alone. Assembled in the warehouse studio at 510 Front St. W., in the old Copp Clar Building.
In the fall of 1984, Sandi Galloway asked for a background music tape for her exhibition of hand-painted silk pieces. So I decided to add newer works to the earlier collection. In my cubicle at the Copp Clark Building (near King and Bathurst) I had my two large open reel decks on either side of my mixer. I hadn’t up to this point ever threaded a tape between the two decks simultaneously to make a “Fripp and Eno” echo-regeneration loop. In the EMBERS pieces the sounds were generated by the Moog 203A and my little Sequential Pro-One.
This was originally created for one of Sandi Galloway’s painted silk exhibition openings. In contrast to the 1981 Ambient pieces, this evolved along progressive lines, with impressions of huge slow waves on the sea. Most sounds from the Moog 203A with a small contribution from the SCI Pro-One. Assembled at the 24 Noble Street loft studio, and later released on John’s cassette VENEZIA and other music, csm-003
This was a live gig at the 24 Noble Street loft studio with many visitors present for an open house. This is the last few minutes of the routine, an expansion of the music I’d evolved in my earlier collaborations with visual artist Floyd Gillis. Both my fingers and the old 1892 Hardman and Peck were tuned to near perfection in this instance. In truth, this event was the final end of the Great 1982-83 Tour.
The other bands for this gig had already rented gear from the MusicStop. A modest PA system with two full-range cabinets was in the big room. I was practicing without it being plugged in, a nearly silent keyboard, while Andrew and Steve, with some help from Phil Walling, spent time tweaking the PA. I was interested in the possibilities once the system was hooked up. But rock and roll orthodoxy meant that the system was bridged into a mono PA, and so the cabling for that arrangement was what was supplied as part of the rental.
“Couldn’t this run in stereo,” I asked.
Probably not, was the consensus. That required several duplicate cables to bypass the bridging arrangement, and none of those were present.
Almost immediately, I produced my toolkit. I had enough two-conductor wire and quarter-inch phone plug connectors to do the job, so I plugged in the soldering iron and set to work. Steven and Andrew had little confidence that I could make this work, nor that it would make a difference in the end, even if it did, so they headed off to a NSCAD New Years’ Eve party, where I was expected to be with them. I wrote down the address, promising to join them later.
I stayed in the empty dance studio late into the night, determined to make the system run in full stereo. A fair number of cables had to be made from scratch, and I gave myself a few minor solder burns. Finally, I was finished. I tested the system in stereo, and all mixer pan pots were responsive. The CP70 with a bit of help from a chorus box filled the room with vibrant sound. Satisfied, I hurried off to the party and was with the others at 11:50PM for a celebratory drink.
At the 1 Jan. gig I played for 19 minutes, without any chart to guide me. Any old thing that came into my head. Dave Barteaux recorded me on my TCD5M. The audience loved it. It was the high mid-point of the Great 1982-83 Tour.
The next stop on the Great 1982-83 tour was 23 September 1982 at Saint Mary’s Art Gallery in Halifax. Since the installation of a a large grand piano in the middle of the room in the 1970’s, it became as much a recital hall as an art gallery. This event was a collaboration between me and electronic musician David Barteaux. David had a Korg MS-20 synth, a Roland TR606 and a Roland Juno 6, plus an array of processing pedals and devices. I was seated at the Ibach piano with the Moog 203A and a pair of Pro-One synths, which provided the repetitive sequencer riffs. An utter maze of patch cords and wires connected Dave’s machines to mine. We were both amazed when it all sort of worked, with over 150 people crowded into the room.
This event was the start of the legendary Great 1982-93 Tour. It was the third of my live collaborations with film-maker/digital artist Floyd Gillis happened at the Centre for Art Tapes in Halifax. An absolute mountain of equipment including a CP70 piano were carried up two flights of stairs to make this event happen. Instruments involved here: Moog 203A synth through Electro-Harmonix Echoflanger; Kork PolySix, CP70 piano, Pro-One synthesizers. Journalist Tom Regan reviewed the show for the Halifax Daily News:
This past Friday night I was witness to a most unique musical experience. John Gray and Floyd Gillis presented their Interdisciplinary Live performance at the Centre for Art Tapes on Argyle Street. A combination of electronic keyboard instruments played by Gray and a video display ‘played’ on a computer terminal by Gillis, Friday night’s show was an impressive and entertaining display of art and music working together. Gray’s keyboard playing was subtle and investigative. He roamed the valleys of his imagination and produced a harmonious work that always remained just right, never overbearing or off on a tangent. The combination of background sounds with a score that was often headily romantic produced interesting moments throughout. Equally impressive was Gillis’ computer paintings. Building upon sounds and variations, Gillis’ computer drawings often echo Gray’s music like a mirror. It’s interesting that this performance was just a warm-up for the one that will be given this week in Toronto. This talented duo should be encouraged to keep up the good work.
In that brief 3-day period in the lead up to the November 1981 cassette release gathering, I was quickly making ambient tracks to fill up a 90-minute cassette. While happy with LAMENTATION, it was in a minor key and filled up the entire 45 minute side. To start the second side, I knew that the piece would have to be shorter and in a major key. Having heard the track after the first pass, I wasn’t satisfied. Then one of Eno’s “oblique strategies” popped into my brain and so I deliberately threaded the tape backwards on the 4-channel TEAC and played it back. I was amazed at the change. All my ideas being presented in reverse order totally changed the feel of the track. I loved it.
This was the first and longest of the Ambient Music pieces that I did throughout the 1980’s. The original impetus was a series of receptions to promote the sale of John Gray’s Cassette. Originally there were just a few tracks on one cassette:
Thinking of the experience of the Halifax Cassette release party, the only music on offer had been the cassette itself. Once the reception ran over ninety minutes in length, the tape would reach its end. So for the 6 November Toronto reception, I came up with a spur-of-the-moment idea: Why don’t I rustle up some low-key music that would be easy to talk over? If I could come up with enough of that music to fill another C90 cassette, then I would have a total of three hours of music accounted for at the reception, all of it my own creation.
There wasn’t much time to do this, though. So the very day that I was back at the studio, I switched on the machines. A very slow dirge-like piece began to emerge after a few minutes. I kept playing with the tape rolling. It ended up being over forty minutes long. Some pitch-altered wind chime bells were mixed in to spice it up a bit, but I didn’t put too much thought into it.
At the reception, people remarked on the long drone piece with the occasional bell sounds in the background. “Oh, what lovely music; I like this. Is it on your cassette? I’d love to get a copy.”
No, it wasn’t for sale. It was hard for me to get them to understand that this was merely music meant for the reception, so that we could have conversations right over the top of it. The music that I sweated over during the previous summer was the item that I wanted to sell.
In a hurry to finish the 1981 Ambient cassette with the November cassette release party just days ahead, I still had blank tape on side two. Re-patched so the mixer was going direct into the cassette deck, and not into the open reel. Played away with Moog 203A and SCI Pro-One. In recent years I took it into a DAW and slowed it down considerably, bathed it in wet reverb and I like it even better now.
When I was compiling tracks for John Gray’s Cassette in the summer of 1981, one of my initial decisions was to include my 1979 Dinner Music One. But having spent much of the summer making new pieces in the studio, my technique and my sound had made subtle improvements. I became dissatisfied with the 1979 track for some reason. On a roll, I powered up the equipment thinking to do a quick drone piece to fill the gap. Simultaneously, I realized that I had a cassette of piano improvisations freshly recorded form my recent trip to Halifax. I found a segment on that cassette with about 30 seconds of free tonality that settled on a pregnant C seventh chord. So I layered several tracks of ethereal Moog 203A and SCI Pro-One onto the end of that, so the piece became a drone in F. Then I went back to the new cassette of piano and copied all instances of my doing fast arpeggios in the key of F., C or B flat, and then mixed them in, fading in and out, in the background. I liked the piece, and many others who heard it liked it too. But I do wish I’d come up with a better title.
In May 1981, my two brand-new open reel recorders arrived at the Studio near Campbellford. Just as soon as they were out of their factory packing, I powered up all the studio electronics and laid down a sample-and-hold drone using the big Moog 203A. Various other sounds from the big Moog were layered over that. In behind the fast dense riffing, you can make out a stately cantus firmus from yet another patch on the Moog. This piece was in the running for John Gray’s Cassette of Music and Other Sounds (csm 001) but ultimately was laid aside to make room for a stronger track. My work on D3W-1 began just a day after I finished this one. Behind the house at the edge of the cornfield was evidence of a barn foundation. I suppose that influenced the title.
After 1967, my dad (divorced from my mom in 1966) used to give me a flashy present to be considered both a Christmas AND Birthday present for me. As my birthday is so close to Christmas, I went with the logic in that.
For the December 1973 present, it was a Sony TC377 open reel tape recorder. 1 7/8, 3 3/4, and 7 ½ IPS speeds in glorious 2-channel stereo. For the initial months of this, I copied my favorite records to tape. My mom hated my having this; when under headphones I could tune out her yelling at me.
But in the summer of 1974, I was experimenting with ping-pong echo technique in Doug’s room at 1434 Henry Street. In the late summer I was preparing to become a first-year Music Major in the Arts Centre right around the corner, and Chris in the basement listening room presented me with a bag of used 5 and 7 in. reels. One was a teaching reel from Theory Professor Dennis M. Farrel, whose voice begins and ends the piece. While recording, various people came and went at random and made noises. The final edit sounds suspiciously like classic 1960’s musique concrete, but I still hadn’t attended the 200-level Music History course to understand what that meant. It was just something that sounded cool.
Orchestral
With 'Murphy's Law'
After the December 1977 Murphy’s Law concert, we had the usual party after the show with a few invited guests.
Barry Morshead attended the concert, joining us for the party afterwards. Barry had brought his film projector with him, and at one point we doused the room lights, he cued the turntable and we watched the nearly complete edit of Barry’s Movie.
A number of ideas seemed to magically form in that little party. Tittle announced two dates in the coming months of 1978 wherein Murphy’s Law was going to act as a bar band at the Grad House. Also the band would go to the Odin’s Eye coffee house for a concert in late January, and as a special feature of that gig, Barry’s Movie would receive its world premiere, the public baptism of fire.
And it was at that party that I found a free chair in a corner. I pulled a sheet of paper out of my bag and began drawing a series of blocks. It seemed that I was rather inspired by Tittle’s December Dance Piece score. I labeled my blocks:
1: Improvised section,
2: Slow written-out section,
3: Short improvised section,
4: Fast written out section,
5: Piano improvisation,
6: Quirky written out section,
7: Improvisation,
8: Final written out section,
9: Improvisation-coda.
Before the party ended, I summoned up the courage to ask Tittle if it would be okay to have a piece of mine in one of the spring concerts.
“Okay,” he said, “just don’t present me with some big thing that’s half-an-hour long.”
Over the next few days, I made several re-drawings of my block diagram, until I had the sections as proportional in their length as my instincts had instructed me. Over tables at the Odin’s Eye coffee house, I cajoled Michael Thompson to get out his calculator and convert the millimeter measurements of my score into minutes and seconds. That task took some doing, but in the end Michael did it with more precision than I thought possible. The piece would run twenty-one minutes, I estimated, and the score timings had been adjusted to fit.
Over the holiday I maximized my use of the practice rooms, with most of the students home with their families. I walked down to Phinney’s Music on Barrington Street and bought twenty extra-large 24 staves-per-page score sheets on very heavy paper, and a cheaper music dictation book.
I would call my new piece Rievaulx, after my powerful memory of that fleeting visit to the ruined Cistercian abbey with Fletcher. I was still hearing the phantom sounds of large bells in my head, and then I remembered that Oliver Metson had brought to my attention a very heavy steel grill that was placed in front of a set of propane storage tanks at the side of the Dalhousie Central Services building. When he first took me to show them that day, early in 1976, he whacked one of the bars with a piece of two-by-four and it made a wondrously loud, clangourous discordant sound. I knew instinctively that the recorded sound of one of those bars would be perfect for a synthetic bell when slowed down with tape recording technology.
In the subterranean practice rooms, I began sketching out the four ensemble sections of Rievaulx, first on the music dictation staves, and soon putting pencil to the expensive 24-stave sheets. Ensemble A was by intention a slow movement, intended to grow out of the group improvisation that preceded it. Ensemble B was very much influenced by the Murphy’s Law players I was used to working with; a fast 4/4 rhythm would propel it forward. Ensemble C would be my response to the idea of a scherzo, in 12/8 time, with a brief trio section in 10/8 time. Ensemble D would be a close cousin of Ensemble B, but with more harmonic twists and turns temporarily pulling things away from the tonic of D minor.
I worked on this score like a madman. Not since 1973’s Elegy had I spent so much time writing notes, erasing them, then finding my way to a piano to test things out, followed by more erasing and re-writing. Somehow, the worrisome hesitancy that characterized Fletcher’s 1974 String Quartet assignment, was now gone.
I fell into a fairly productive routine, taking my breakfast at the SUB cafeteria, sneaking into a practice room if I could get into one while most of the students were in classes, and then walking downtown to the Odin’s Eye for a noon coffee pick-me-up. I could then continue writing and erasing, in the slow afternoon when there were few people in the place. Now that Carl’s electric piano was there to test things on, it helped speed things up; Odin’s Eye became my prime writing spot for several months.
Carl’s CP30 electric piano remained in position onstage at Odin’s Eye. I had an impression that the people relaxing in the afternoon with coffee were tolerant with a gentle smile if I went up on the stage for a few moments to test out permutations of the recent chord progression I was working on.
While still making changes to the written-out parts of Rievaulx. I penciled in at the top margins of one of the pages:
77 DAYS! 8 REHEARSALS!
Obviously, I was sending messages to myself to hurry up and finish. Through long afternoons at Odin’s Eye, I parked myself on the old donated couch with the radiator and the light from the south window keeping me warm, and there I worked at the notated ensemble sections of the piece. More than one person asked me what was so important about that sheet of paper.
“Why are you writing music all the time, all of a sudden?”
Although we had a few inches of snow on the ground, the Murphy’s Law concert at Odin’s Eye was in a period of relatively mild winter weather. Just a few days afterward, the more usual savage Atlantic winter storms followed, three of them over the space of four weeks. It had one good effect of keeping me at the writing table. In the first days of February I began the painstaking process of writing out the parts in pencil.
In the midst of it all I was slowly plodding through the parts to Rievaulx, trying to practice piano and attending Murphy’s Law rehearsals.
I finished my parts to Rievaulx in time for the next Murphy’s Law rehearsal. A group of students had booked in advance our fifth-floor sound studio, on our rehearsal night no less. So we gathered in the old student listening lab amongst the basement practice rooms. The subterranean room was completely changed since the days of Chris DeRosenrall and those banks of Telex tape recorders. Every bit of that infrastructure had long since been ripped out, and the space was transformed into a rather smallish rehearsal space. The 45-inch Danemann piano and a handful of chairs and music stands, were now the sole occupants of the room.
That rehearsal was nerve-wracking; the small windowless area put us off our game, and percussionist/drummer Joey Cunningham was also having us read through his new piece for the same upcoming concert.
I worked at practicing my synthesizer part to Rievaulx. One task that I needed to do was to assemble a tape of background sounds to go with the piece. To begin with, I borrowed a sound effects LP from the Dal Radio library and from those tracks assembled a random series of sheep utterances. I used the Dalhousie Studio’s arsenal of Arp 2600 modular synthesizers to generate the high-pitched murmur of numerous tiny insects such as I had heard it during my surrealistic afternoon at Goddard College in Vermont. Henry Rojo came up to the studio one night and helped me with one of those complex mix-downs requiring more than two hands.
One thing remained, though: the recording of Oliver’s Central Services Building bars to generate the larger-than-life bell sounds. Big piles of snow had yet to be cleared; presumably the huge propane tanks had been topped up before the recent winter storms arrived.
Then, even while that issue was weighing more and more on my mind, in just a few days a big Caterpillar machine made an appearance. The laneway to those propane tanks was plowed out.
With Tittle’s guarded permission, I borrowed the Music Department’s brand-new Nakamichi 550 battery-powered portable cassette recorder, a pair of line matching transformers and a pair of EV635A microphones. George Beatty was a great help in lugging the equipment down to the big steel bars late one night and I tried hitting the bars with a heavy rock, then a piece of two-by-four, and finally with my bare knuckles, which hurt considerably after a couple of knocks. After about ten minutes in the freezing cold, we’d had quite enough.
We got the equipment safely back to the studio and made it up to the Grawood in time for last call; George treated me to a couple of Keith’s India Pales, when it was me who should have been treating him.
I called up Kurt Haughan at the MusicStop in Dartmouth, ascertaining from him that their rental stock had a couple of string ensemble synthesizers ready to go; the cheaper Solina was constantly in and out, but the more pricey Arp Omni 2 had only been out once, and would likely be available.
I booked time in the Dalhousie studio and worked long and hard at assembling the background sounds tape for Rievaulx. Wanting to be as faithful as possible to the original “full” score, now that Michael Thompson’s calculations had everything down to the exact second, I found myself inserting bits of leader tape into the master while timing things repeatedly with the stopwatch. The larger-than life bells took some experimentation; best result from the two-by-four struck bars. I achieved the effect I wanted by slowing the recording down to one-quarter speed, using the Revox A700 deck.
Back in the Music Department I got out my pens and nibs, producing the most adventurously psychedelic of all my Murphy’s Law posters. Joanne printed up 200 copies of it on orange legal-sized paper and they began to go up on notice boards all over the Dalhousie campus.
By the second week of April, the deep freeze of winter abruptly gave way. A huge rolling warm front brought two solid days of torrential rain into the region. When the sun came back with a vengeance on the third day, the snow was almost gone, winds diminishing and the temperature rising. I celebrated the coming of spring by getting out my tiny tin of bright green enamel and a number zero sable brush, and added some artistic licensed greenery to the Day-Glo Pole.
A week before the concert I took possession of the Arp string machine, signing the forms, with Kurt Haughan all the while giving me a rather worried look. I also rented a Big Muff Pi guitar fuzzbox, for Scott’s big solo.
That night Murphy’s Law was back in the fifth-floor studio for a rehearsal and we were back in the game. We had by that point had several run-throughs of “John’s piece”, as Tittle and Gibson persisted in calling it, so we all had a reasonably good feel for it. This time we rehearsed with the background tape and with me having the Arp string ensemble at my fingers. The piece suddenly came together; it began to sound more or less the way I wanted it to.
Then, new wrinkles were added to the final anxiety-producing days before April 19th: our regular sound-man Jon Walsh informed us that he had a paying gig, one which would keep him busy for most of the afternoon on April 19th. This meant that his sixteen-channel mixing board wouldn’t be with us for the afternoon dress rehearsal, and he would only be able to arrive one half hour before the actual concert, assuming we had something set up for him to operate with. The bigger board belonging to the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium was also unavailable. To make matters even worse, the Experimental studio was temporarily down one open reel recorder, the Revox temporarily out for service at this, the most inconvenient of all moments.
But as luck would have it, the Odin’s Eye coffee house’s little EM150 mixer was available, no act having been booked on their stage for that night. I came up with a plan to feed it with the two little six-channel Tapco mixers from the Music Department studio, as Steve Penney had done in the January gig. We would still end up with fourteen channels, and as long as I was careful with keeping pre-amp levels in the same ballpark, everything should theoretically work.
I rented a new Akai GX400 open reel recorder. Similar to the Sony TC377, the Akai could accommodate up to a seven-inch reel, and it was a snap to set up. While I was picking up the Akai, I made one of the really bad decisions of my life, without knowing it at the time; I bought an Ampex 20+20 reel holding 1,800 feet of blank audiotape. This was premium priced; I would record the bulk of the concert on the Music Department’s supply of AV176 tapes, but switch over reels when it came time for Rievaulx, so my set could be recorded on the premium tape.
That Spring Thing concert was a long one, with two intermissions.
Many of the pieces in the show featured images that were projected from the back of the stage onto huge translucent screens. The Dunn Theatre stage was vast, so there was ample space for a whole other visual team to man the table hidden and unseen for the entire evening.
When the house opened, I was up in the sound engineering table in the middle of the audience seating. I discovered that I had quite the diverse fan clique arriving to sit in the house for the evening. Arriving just three minutes before the show began, were my mother Shirley and husband Ernest Theophilus. They were dressed as if for a Sunday morning church service, looking very much out of place and slightly uncomfortable.
Jon Walsh sat with me at the mixer array at the beginning, to familiarize himself with my jury-rigged setup. He took over the station during the first intermission, while I nipped down to a practice room to warm up with some Hanons and scales at a U1 piano. Allan Middleton followed me down there and tried to get me to smoke a little cannabis with him.
“Sorry Allan, not on this night of all nights; but you can spark it up while I practice.” So I went through some of the most difficult Hanons while Allan smoked the whole joint all by himself. Seeing my supple fingers dance through exercise number 17, Allan uttered “Holy shit!” and then excused himself to go enjoy the middle part of the concert upstairs in the theatre. It should be said that, while smoking was discouraged in the practice rooms in the late 1970’s, it was vaguely tolerated, on the assumption that it would be mere tobacco. Bill Tritt would frequently light up a king sized Rothmans, right in the middle of his master class.
I crept back into the hall to join Jon Walsh at the audio mixing table towards the end of the second set. The audio system was performing flawlessly. The modest power amp in the little EM150 board seemingly became a super-amp while it was connected to the Dalhousie Arts Center’s monster A7 speakers; with more than adequate volume, the top of the unit was only just comfortably warm in this situation, compared to its usual red-hot state at Odin’e Eye with a rock band on stage, and their smaller column speakers.
The other Murphy’s Law musicians were already onstage and humorously calling, “John, where are you?” So, forty-five seconds fashionably late, I walked alone to the keyboards and ceremoniously dropped the day-glo pole into its cardboard-and-tape socket. Tittle announced over the PA system: “For all the surviving intellectuals, this is John’s piece,” generating an enthusiastic response from my claque.
How the performance went is a matter of record, preserved to this day as an audio file. My impressions from out there on the stage at the time, were that it was going fairly well, except where it came for me to actually play something on a keyboard. At the end of the first slow section Scott Macmillan came up with the perfect improvised D minor solo on his Fender Stratocaster, with that Big Muff PI fuzz-box plugged in. Scott’s playing was loud, gritty and as un-Celtic as anything he played, before or ever after that night. That fuzz-box was well worth the few dollars rental fee that I paid.
In the fast middle of the piece I had imagined for myself four minutes of free piano improvisation and in this instance, I ran out of ideas just after the first minute. For all my worries about how this would go, I rather froze up with apprehension. Perhaps I should have had a few puffs with Allan down in the practice room; I still had to riff on in D minor for another two and a half minutes. One problem with the piano solo was the lack of support. The rented Arp Omni 2 string ensemble keyboard was as wonderfully tasteful and realistic as one could get in the late 1970’s, and my use of it to make light, soft, sparse D-minor chords had put a wonderful sheen over much of the first half of the piece.
There was the second half of the piece still to go, but through it all, the other musicians in Murphy’s Law kept to the script, so I was able to find my place if I got slightly lost. Steve Tittle’s trumpet solo in the slow coda at the end was perfectly fitting.
The audience exploded with enthusiasm at the end. It never occurred to me that there would be so much appreciation from a room full of people after my silly compositional ideas torturing their ears for more than twenty-four minutes.
One little problem I had created, was asking the bass to tune the lowest E-string down to D. On Richard’s vintage Hofner electric bass, this was asking quite a lot, but it worked in the end. However, Tittle wanted us to throw in a jazz standard to close the concert, and before we could begin, Richard needed a good two minutes to get his E-string back up to proper pitch.
And so the concert ended. I was a bit of a hero to my claque, some thirty or forty strong, all greeting me in the lobby with beaming smiles. Ernest and Shirley were in a hurry to get home, but they paused going past me long enough for Ernest to congratulate me, and for my mother to grimly state: “There’s no future in this kind of music, you know,” and off they went.
Solo Piano
Soon after the big Bechstein #170678 was set up, clients began asking to be recorded playing it. One such occasion was early August 2021. I arrived early to speak to the piano technician and pay him, proceeding to set up my recording gear. This little improvisation was a test for the setting of recording levels.
Some of my more satisfying regular gigs are put on by Canzona Chamber Players. Despite their early use of Bechstein #170678 in concerts between 2017 and 2019, pandemic restrictions limited their outreach to small house concerts distributed on streamed video. An old 1913 Steinway B211 is in their house, so having set up the recording microphones, I played a short improvisation to test recording levels.
Two musicians had heard online about the Bechstein piano #170678 online, and made an appointment to test out the beast before committing to any projects. I arrived with a mere TASCAM DR40 hand held recorder, and recorded these few notes while the two were conversing. The recorder was sitting on the frame inside the piano, so i later bathed it in excessive reverb, in honour of my hero Rick Wakeman’s 1977 efforts in Switzerland.
The same day as the musicians coming to test the Bechstein piano #170678. Having set up the TASCAM DR40 sitting on the frame inside the piano, this track also needed ridiculous amounts of reverb in post to make it sound like music.
With the deterioration of my outer limbs becoming worse week by week, I had a feeling that these would be some of my last utterances as a pianist. The Steingraeber was in good tune and I wasn’t feeling too awful that day. At least no co-workers were stomping around.
In my final years as a CMC worker, I occasionally tried my hand at the Steingraeber. with only eight fingers left to play, an improvisation like this one took some effort. At least one employee was making noise upstairs.
This was part of Jamie Thomson’s Junction Trio and Friends series at St. Anne’s Gladstone in Toronto. Jamie had been pestering me for some months to do a solo piano piece at one of his shows. St. Anne’s has a wonderfully well-behaved Petrof 195. Unbeknownst to him, I had to have the elbow joint replaced in my right arm thanks to autoimmune arthritis, in early August 2016. The operation was of limited success, even though the surgeon was first rate in every online review I’d read. But the shock of the operation did restore my elbow flexibility somewhat, while the implant deadened the nerves that connected to the 4th and 5th fingers of my right hand. I had only a few weeks to learn how to play with just eight fingers. Very scary to play this, with John Beckwith in the audience.
(photo: Pale Atmospheres One: still from a video shot by A.J. Gray)
One of my CMC duties was to occasionally travel with the Ontario Region team and set up microphones for an event. This occasion was a youth choir from Regent Park School recording from a songbook composed by members of the class. As I arrived to set up the microphones, there was the cheap little GE-1 Kawai piano, still there, dating back to my earlier life as a piano salesman. Once the equipment was set up and tested, I sat down and played a few chords and passages. By that point I already had a surgery date booked for just a few weeks hence, so this recording represents the very last time I was able to play with all ten fingers. In the background you can hear the voice of instructor Richard Marsella trying to marshal the students.
On the 10th of October 2002, had a whole evening’s worth of my music presented at Toronto’s Music Gallery at 197 John Street. Among several composed pieces I was able to come up with two piano improvisations, one before the intermission, one in the middle of the second half. It was quite frightening to make music like this, with John Weinzweig, Ann Southam, Michael Colgrass, David Jaeger and Larry Lake in the audience.
The piece itself is a et of variations on Benediction, a performance routine that i had been doing since 1986. I was already having some problems with one of my elbows by 2002, so I had a feeling that this just might be the last time to make music in this manner.
It was the spring of 2002, just after I had begun working at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto, that I returned to Port Hood Cape Breton for a few days, staying with Dave Martin. I had my tuning hammer with me, and tweaked up his old 1904 Gourlay three-quarter plate upright while I was there. One afternoon, with most out of the house on errands, I recorded this tiny improvisation on the piano. A few weeks later, the whole house and this piano burned to a cinder.
As I have stated, becoming good at repairing old pianos frequently gets in the way of creating music. One of the rare occasions when the two activities melded was in the restoration of Diane’s old Bell upright. Diane had a bathtub overflow in her cottage, and it soaked much of her old piano. So her husband bought her a new shiny black upright piano to replace it. The old 1916 Bell was one that old Moeller didn’t even want in the piano store, so it came to me. It became one of two Bell uprights in my tiny studio in Sambro NS a few years later, so I took it apart and gradually restored it so that it was fully functional again. Finally finished, I recorded an improvisation to an open reel tape, copied it onto a a cassette and sent it off to Diane in Ontario. She never thanked me, responded in any way, to say whether she liked it ot not. I went back a few moths later to tune her shiny black upright (which soon enough was damaged in yet another bathtub overflow!) and still no mention of the cassette I sent, so never brought it up with her. Phil Walling now has that piano in his studio in Herring Cove.
In 1988, we who lived in the old Copp Clark building at Wellington and Portland knew that our time there was finite, and soon to end. Illogically, we felt that as good a time as any to stage an open house event that would span a few days. As part of that, I was asked to do a musical performance. At that time I had just taken possession of John Ebata’s SCI Prophet 600, and soon programmed a series of chords into its onboard sequencer. My boss at the piano store loaned me one of his grand pianos for this gig, so the Prophet sequencer, the piano and the Moog 203A (masquerading as a cor anglais) all teamed together to make this audience-pleasing little piece.
In the Summer of 1987, I was able to escape Toronto’s excessive heat by taking a driving vacation to Nova Scotia in a well-used blue Malibu. In the old port city, I looked up my old haunts at the Music Department and ran into prof. D. Ray Byham, who taught the orchestration course back in 1974. Dr. Byham urged me to examine the big Bechstein piano in room 121 and report back, loaning me a key from his desk drawer. Down in the lowest level of the Arts Centre, there I found myself in a quiet room with #161500 again. First time in all those years that I was doing so on official business, without risk of being forbidden or chased away. having spent fifteen minutes identifying things needing to be rectified technically, i jotted those down and then pulled the Sony TCD5M out of its bag with the tiny condenser mics. As I sat down to play, The G-major ideas from my new routine Benediction started to emerge. This turned out to be the 21 minute extended version. It was the last time i touched that particular intrument in my life. The department used it and the Hamburg Steinway in the auditorium as trade-ins against the price of a Yamaha CFIII
11 February 1984, working in old Hans Moeller’s piano shop on the Yonge Street strip. Customer David Ablett has stayed behind after store closing to chat and perhaps treat me to beer next door once i lock the place for the night. But I’m thinking of my buddy in Halifax, another David, musical colleague. I open up the Feurich model 190 piano serial number 69731 (from Gunzenhausen) and play my last recording of the day. The tape runs out before I have quite finished. i get more compliments from this that anything else I ever played. before or since.
9 February 1984 in Moeller’s piano shop. The old owner has asked me NOT to play on the most expensive piano in the store, the Bechstein B203 serial number 176170. But he has gone home to have an early senior’s night, and I record the huge B-flat piece that journeys on for over 20 minutes. I have to take a break from putting out that amount of energy. When I resume, the mics are already set up. A gentle piece, reminiscent of things that I heard my friend Dave (in Halifax) play.
After the surprise 1 January gig which was Steve Slater’s idea, and which worked so well, I needed to focus on the upcoming March 1983 gig, where I was going to use the big Bechstein model E270 serial number 161500 in my rig. So security guard Gordon unlocked the room where the monster was, and left me to set up the TCD5M recorder and the tiny pair of Realistic subminiature condenser microphones. Initially I did a walk around of the instrument and voiced my concerns about items missing or misplaced from what i could see, for the benefit of piano technicians. Then I re-started the recorder and went into a rather explosive improvisation that did a segue into Bach’s Little Prelude in D minor, which I suppose I must have been practicing at that time. I managed to end the improvisation on a major chord.
In 1981 on a visit to Halifax from my studio near Campbellford Ontario, I dropped into the Saint Mary’s Art Gallery. With my TCD5M recorder and the tiny battery-powered condenser mics, I recorded myself playing the gallery’s wonderful Ibach model 215 piano. In subsequent years I had the privilege to visit the factory where the piano was made, and met some of the men who made it. But in 1981, my big project was a cassette of my own musical creations, almost entirely electronic pieces. In a hurry to compile two 45-minute sides, I discovered a short space at the end, so I made an excerpt form the recent improvisations on the Ibach. My cassette found its way into the hands of some conservative men, friends of my father, and they professed bewilderment or downright incomprehension of the bulk of the pieces. But they remarked that the “nice little bit of piano at the end” should have taken up more of the space on the cassette.