Fail Mary - Demos

Almanac

Performed live at The Jazz Gallery, May 2, 2019

Featuring Variant 6, Warp Trio, and the Kevin Sun Quartet

I. Palette/Inkjet
II. A Patter Song
III. Oystercatchers in Flight - text by Eamon Grennan
IV. Inviting a Friend to Supper - text by Bens Jonson & Franklin
V. The Gardener/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves - text by Patricia Hooper & Gerard Manley Hopkins
VI. A Catalog of Cliches (for when there's nothing left to say) - text by Jenny Schwartz

Variant 6 - Rebecca Myers & Molly Netter, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Steven Bradshaw & James Reese, tenor; Daniel Schwartz, bass-baritone

Warp Trio - Josh Henderson, violin; Ju-Young Lee, cello; Mikael Darmanie, piano & keyboards

Kevin Sun Quartet - Kevin Sun, tenor saxophone; Tree Palmedo, trumpet; Walter Stinson, bass; Matt Honor, drums

When I was eight years old, I received the newest edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for Christmas. Though it may seem like an odd gift for a child, my favorite books at the time were the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and my dad’s 30-year collection of the Who’s Who in Baseball. I loved poring over almanacs and memorizing facts, whether flags of the world or U.S. presidents or how many home runs my favorite baseball players hit each year. I can’t say why I would get absorbed in lists rather than stories, but I did, and that penchant for collecting and list-making has carried over into my musical life as well. Like the character Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, I could tell an autobiographical story through an arrangement of my CD collection.

Out of this penchant for list-making—musical and otherwise—comes Almanac, an evening-length work for voices and instrumentalists featuring both fixed and improvised sounds. The piece is a musical almanac of sorts, featuring a catalog of diverse texts and musical styles. But the piece also examines an almanac’s dual nature as information compendium and prophetic text. The earliest editions of the Farmers’ Almanac in the 19th century, for instance, featured long-range weather forecasts so farmers could pick the best crops to plant in the coming season. While printed almanacs are likely headed for obsolescence (the Who’s Who in Baseball ceased publication in 2017, for instance), the impulse to compile information in order to predict the future is still immensely strong, whether forecasting athletic performance, election results, or the fate of our planetary climate. Yet with increasingly powerful tools to store and interpret data, our predictions still fail a lot. In response to these failures, computer scientist and information studies scholar Philip Agre writes that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation.” Like its forebears and despite its best efforts, this Almanac fails to predict its own fate. Confronted with both dark prophesies and unforeseen circumstances, the performers improvise.

Almanac - Live at The Jazz Gallery

For Mom :)

A favorite singer sings a favorite song, but now with a full orchestra.

Surrey With The Fringe on Top

This is a short setting of Shakespeare's Sonnet no. 73 that acts as both a presentation of the text, and a sort of literary analysis. My hope is that the music helps illuminate the sonnet's inner workings, rather than just amplifying its emotional affect. 

The spoken text in the latter half of the piece uses only words found in Sonnet 73.

Performed by the San Francisco Choral Artists, Magen Solomon, Artistic Director, June 8, 2014.

Second prize winner of the San Francisco Choral Artists' 2014 "New Voices Project," that supports the work of composers under the age of 30.

Sonnet 73 - Chorale and Explication

What do you do with 8 seconds?

A game you love to hate and hate to love.

Featuring Elie Sutherland and Steven Hrycelak.

Fail Mary - Pregame

"When I Was Nine" from Fail Mary.

Music by Kevin Laskey, Lyrics by Cheri Magid

Sung by Michael Jones & Elisa Sutherland

When I Was Nine

Furious fans, dubious layers, spurious sportscasters, and a special appearance by... REPLACEMENTS!!!!

Fail Mary - Pregame - Part 2

Touchdown!? Touchback!? What in God's name is the call!?

Featuring: 

Charlotte Mundy, soprano (Big Baller, Ref #102)
Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano (Sidelined Gal)
Miyuki Miyagi, mezzo-soprano (Ref #26) 
Gregório Taniguchi, tenor (Refs #84 and #77; QB1)
Jeff Gavett, baritone (Refs #46 & #59, Play-By-Play Commentator)
Steven Hrycelak, bass (Ref #28, Color Commentator)

Fail Mary - 2nd Quarter -

I. Punditry II. False Equivalence III. This Just In

Awesomely performed by Bearthoven

A serious note: 
When some ideas are repeated incessantly, they become familiar, like conventional wisdom. When others are repeated incessantly, they become more and more disorienting.

A less serious note:
“Donald Trump may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.” - Les Moonves, Chairman of CBS

Scene: Kenneth, an NBC page, sits in a boardroom with several television executives, about to pitch an idea for a new TV game show.

Kenneth: It's called Gold Case. It's Deal or No Deal meets Millionaire. There are 10 models, each holding an identical briefcase, but one of them is filled with gold.

Nameless NBC Executive: Have you pitched this idea to anyone else?

Kenneth: Well I talked to moonvest at CBS.

Executive: Les Moonves, president of CBS, knows about this?

Cut to scene of Kenneth in front of CBS headquarters talking about his show idea to a homeless man wearing a vest adorned with moons. Cut back to the boardroom.

Executive: We’ve got to move fast. Mr. Parcell. We love “Gold Case.” How do we make your show?

—from 30 Rock

Art in the Age of Trump

Another News Cycle

A surreal soundtrack to a nonexistent film taking place at the Long Island mansion that inspired elements of The Great Gatsby, and was featured in Citizen Kane and Blank Space.

Performed by Exceptet.

Live in Philly

The Party at Otto H. Kahn's

What if Anton Webern survived World War II, then moved to New York and started hanging out at Minton's, where he met another musical iconoclast who loved the interval of a major seventh?

Kevin Laskey—drums, Mark Micchelli—piano, Will Yager—bass

NMOP 2018

Modernist Nightmare (A Monk's Dream Variation)

An interlude for prepared piano written for & commissioned by Amy Williams.

Good things happen when you follow you nose!

Interlude (Follow Your Nose)

Almanac

Performed live at The Jazz Gallery, May 2, 2019

Featuring Variant 6, Warp Trio, and the Kevin Sun Quartet

IV. Inviting a Friend to Supper - text by Bens Jonson & Franklin
V. The Gardener/Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves - text by Patricia Hooper & Gerard Manley Hopkins
VI. A Catalog of Cliches (for when there's nothing left to say) - text by Jenny Schwartz

Variant 6 - Rebecca Myers & Molly Netter, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Steven Bradshaw & James Reese, tenor; Daniel Schwartz, bass-baritone

Warp Trio - Mikael Darmanie, keyboards, Josh Henderson, violin, Ju-Young Lee, cello

Kevin Sun Quartet - Kevin Sun, tenor saxophone, Tree Palmedo, trumpet, Walter Stinson, bass, Matt Honor, drums

When I was eight years old, I received the newest edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for Christmas. Though it may seem like an odd gift for a child, my favorite books at the time were the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and my dad’s 30-year collection of the Who’s Who in Baseball. I loved poring over almanacs and memorizing facts, whether flags of the world or U.S. presidents or how many home runs my favorite baseball players hit each year. I can’t say why I would get absorbed in lists rather than stories, but I did, and that penchant for collecting and list-making has carried over into my musical life as well. Like the character Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, I could tell an autobiographical story through an arrangement of my CD collection.

Out of this penchant for list-making—musical and otherwise—comes Almanac, an evening-length work for voices and instrumentalists featuring both fixed and improvised sounds. The piece is a musical almanac of sorts, featuring a catalog of diverse texts and musical styles. But the piece also examines an almanac’s dual nature as information compendium and prophetic text. The earliest editions of the Farmers’ Almanac in the 19th century, for instance, featured long-range weather forecasts so farmers could pick the best crops to plant in the coming season. While printed almanacs are likely headed for obsolescence (the Who’s Who in Baseball ceased publication in 2017, for instance), the impulse to compile information in order to predict the future is still immensely strong, whether forecasting athletic performance, election results, or the fate of our planetary climate. Yet with increasingly powerful tools to store and interpret data, our predictions still fail a lot. In response to these failures, computer scientist and information studies scholar Philip Agre writes that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation.” Like its forebears and despite its best efforts, this Almanac fails to predict its own fate. Confronted with both dark prophesies and unforeseen circumstances, the performers improvise.

Almanac - Part 2

Almanac

Performed live at The Jazz Gallery, May 2, 2019

Featuring Variant 6, Warp Trio, and the Kevin Sun Quartet

I. Palette/Inkjet
II. A Patter Song
III. Oystercatchers in Flight - text by Eamon Grennan

Variant 6 - Rebecca Myers & Molly Netter, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, mezzo-soprano; Steven Bradshaw & James Reese, tenor; Daniel Schwartz, bass-baritone

Warp Trio - Mikael Darmanie, keyboards, Josh Henderson, violin, Ju-Young Lee, cello

Kevin Sun Quartet - Kevin Sun, tenor saxophone, Tree Palmedo, trumpet, Walter Stinson, bass, Matt Honor, drums

When I was eight years old, I received the newest edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts for Christmas. Though it may seem like an odd gift for a child, my favorite books at the time were the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas and my dad’s 30-year collection of the Who’s Who in Baseball. I loved poring over almanacs and memorizing facts, whether flags of the world or U.S. presidents or how many home runs my favorite baseball players hit each year. I can’t say why I would get absorbed in lists rather than stories, but I did, and that penchant for collecting and list-making has carried over into my musical life as well. Like the character Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, I could tell an autobiographical story through an arrangement of my CD collection.

Out of this penchant for list-making—musical and otherwise—comes Almanac, an evening-length work for voices and instrumentalists featuring both fixed and improvised sounds. The piece is a musical almanac of sorts, featuring a catalog of diverse texts and musical styles. But the piece also examines an almanac’s dual nature as information compendium and prophetic text. The earliest editions of the Farmers’ Almanac in the 19th century, for instance, featured long-range weather forecasts so farmers could pick the best crops to plant in the coming season. While printed almanacs are likely headed for obsolescence (the Who’s Who in Baseball ceased publication in 2017, for instance), the impulse to compile information in order to predict the future is still immensely strong, whether forecasting athletic performance, election results, or the fate of our planetary climate. Yet with increasingly powerful tools to store and interpret data, our predictions still fail a lot. In response to these failures, computer scientist and information studies scholar Philip Agre writes that “activity in worlds of realistic complexity is inherently a matter of improvisation.” Like its forebears and despite its best efforts, this Almanac fails to predict its own fate. Confronted with both dark prophesies and unforeseen circumstances, the performers improvise.

Almanac - Part 1

Performed by the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Yue Bao.

In typography, kerning refers to the horizontal spacing between characters in a font. Good kerning makes a font proportional and pleasing to the eye, while bad kerning, for example, can make “cl” look like “d” (just think of the unintended typographical entendres). In Kerning, for orchestra, this space between letters is directly (and rather naively) translated as the vertical space between musical pitches. The piece offers a series of “kernings” on a single musical phrase. Sometimes, the pitches are tightly packed together in clusters. Other times, they are much more spread out, notably over the open, consonant interval of a perfect fifth. The result is perhaps akin to reading a single sentence in a variety of fonts. While the linguistic material is the same, the different fonts can illicit different expressive connotations. Or, the meaning of the sentence can fade to the background as you admire a font’s distinct serifs, or in this piece, maybe the particular blend of muted trumpet and english horn.

Kerning

With the news that Taylor Swift is re-recording her back catalog, wouldn't it be cool if she collaborated with her favorite contemporary classical composer, John Luther Adams? Back in 2015, she donated $50,000 to the Seattle Symphony after listening to and loving Adams's piece "Become Ocean," so I'm sure she's been planning for a collabo ever since.

An acoustic performance of Blank Space remixed with Adams's The Wind in High Places, Canticles of the Sky, and The Farthest Place.

The Immeasurable Blank Space Of Tones - Swift Luther Adams

Text by Eamon Grennan, used with permission of the author & Graywolf Press.

Performed by Hillary LaBonte, soprano; Ezra Gans, bassoon; Christopher Otto, violin; and Louise King, cello.

Sea’s stony greenblue shatters to white
          in a running swell under noonsky of cloudlight
where on a foamed-over cropping of rock
          a band of oystercatchers faces all one way
into a nor’wester so shafts of windlight
          ignite each orange beak in this abiding
tribe of black till you clap and their risen black
          turns white as they veronica on wind and
then away with them (shrill-pitched as frighted
          plovers only harsher more excited)
and riding the stiff wind like eager lovers straining
          into its every last whim: its pulsing steady
heart-push in every flesh-startling open-eyed
          long-extended deepening sea-breath.

Oystercatchers in Flight

Commissioned & performed by Shizuka Duo

Sam Kelder & Hannah Nicholas, violas

“I’m a good person. Starting… now.” – Barry Berkman, from Barry

“I’m just… Weighing up the pros and cons. Of what it would mean. To take the law into your own hands. The upside… would be the exquisite satisfaction you’d get. From grinding his severed scrotum into the mud. With your shittiest shoe.” – Catherine Cawood, from Happy Valley

If a ballad is a narrative text set to music, what’s a ballad without lyrics? Can music tell a story on its own? This Ballad may not have a definite narrative program like a 19th century tone poem, but I like to imagine it having a story structure. Inspired by the narrative devices and messy characters from two favorite TV shows—HBO’s Barry and BBC’s Happy Valley—the piece attempts to articulate dual narrative perspectives. One creates a sense of distance and omniscience through thorny and abstract sounds. The other probes the internal thoughts of the protagonist, featuring a balladic tune which reflects the protagonist’s construction of their own unreliable narrative. These dual perspectives gradually become suffused with each other, attempting to reconcile their conflicting realities with explosive results.

A Ballad (For Barry Berkman And Catherine Cawood)

Written and performed by Aidy Bryant | Arranged and orchestrated by Kevin Laskey

If My Dog Was a Piano

Composer, drummer, and lover of megamixes. I write music that lives in a netherworld between contemporary classical and improvised music traditions.

Kevin Laskey

Pinned to spotlight

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