Ezra Sims, "all done from memory"

From Northeastern Records NR 224:

ezra sims
all done from memory and other works
dinosaur annex music ensemble
Scott Wheeler, artistic director

all done from memory (1980) 7:46 Janet Packer, violin

Janet Packer, violin; Anne Black, viola; Ted Mook, cello; Ian Greitzer, clarinet; Kenneth Radnofsky, saxophone; Thomas Haunton, French horn; Ezra Sims, conductor

Ezra Sims is a philosophical musician whose evident intent is to make order out of the chaotic universe of sound that has existed for two and a half millenia since the time of Pythagoras. In his tonal structure, he is up against that intractable Pythagorean comma, an incommensurate little residue that is left over when we try to equate twelve consecutive perfect fifths, making up our cycle of scales, to seven octaves. "The twelve notes of our tempered system of tuning," comments Sims, "do not allow for the difference musicians have always heard between the ascending and descending chromatic accidentals." Our tempered scale is tampered.

Thus spake Ezra Sims; and having spoken, he proceeded to remedy the situation. He constructed a scale in which the octave is divided into eighteen intervals, which takes care of the Pythagorean comma and other tonal impurities, such as the septimal chroma. He also devised a semiotic notation in which fractional intervals are designated by arrows, hooks, and crooks, remarkably similar to the medieval neumes, which indicated the rise or fall of a given tone. Indeed, Ezra Sims finds a kindred soul, or rather a multitude of kindred souls, among medieval music theorists. In his unpublished but learned scholium he draws a plausible chronology of sequicentennial periods in composition, from monodic chant through organum, motet and Ars Nova, to classicism and modernism.

The asymmetrical Ezraic scale of eighteen degrees, drawn from a seventy-two note division of the octave, did not spring from the brain of Ezra Sims by spontaneous generation, but was the terminus of his versatile education. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama on 16 January 1928, and studied music and mathematics. He subsequently enrolled at Yale University as a student of Quincy Porter, graduating in 1952. Following Yale he entered the U. S. Language School, where he learned Mandarin Chinese. After that, he took courses with Darius Milhaud and Leon Kirchner at Mills College and also attended Aaron Copland's seminar at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.

Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he makes his permanent home, Sims, with Scott Wheeler and Rodney Lister, initiated a concert series under the name Dinosaur Annex; Sims describes his position in it as "figurehead." There is nothing extinct about Dinosaur Annex's programs, however; far from being fossilized, the ensemble latches itself onto an unforeseeable future. Happily enough, Sims found performers who could play his microtonal music with spectacular ease. But while engaged in these esoteric activities, Ezra Sims had to keep body and soul together; for this purpose, he accepted jobs as steelworker, choir director, display designer, and, as he puts it, "general dogsbody" at the Harvard University Music Library, serving finally as a cataloguer and programmer.

Like many mathematicians (Charles Dodgson is a famous example) Ezra Sims indulges in whimsicalities and titular-oxymorons. His Aeneas on the Saxophone has no saxophone part; a chorus for children is entitled The Bewties of the Fute-Ball (do children really say that?). A tape collage is entitled The Inexcusable, and who knows what Four Dented Interludes means? In his opus Stow Hiccups, admittedly for the version in retrograde inversion, he had the title printed upside down and backwards. On one occasion, he spotted an erroneous reference to a non-existent string quartet in a dictionary compiled by the undersigned; he corrected it by actually composing one to specifications of the erroneous reference-but he scored it for a quintet.

But when Sims is serious, he is very, very serious. The present album is a nice florilegium of Ezraic elucubrations. All Done From Memory was written for Janet Packer at her request, and it is doubtful whether there is in the known universe another human or non- human being who could better perform the piece in the precise intonation of quarter-, sixth-, and twelfth- tones as specified by the composer. The tempo indication is "Innocently," but the score is anything but. Janet Packer performed it for the first time in Switzerland in July 1980 and for the first time in the United States on the Dinosaur Annex concert of 18 January 1981. It is "a series of variations and quasi-cubistic re-assortments of the elements of an old gospel hymn, 'Lily of the Valley,'" Sims says. "Growing up with it I used to scorn the hymn, until one day I realized it was something very important to me. So when Janet asked for a piece that would show her off in microtones, or be a piece of Americana, or provide her with a light little encore piece, I was able to use it to satisfy at least the first two requests in the same piece."

-- from Avant Garde Project