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 
two for one (1980) 11:38 Janet Packer, violin;  Anne Black, viola 
-and, as i was saying .. . (1979) 5:29 Anne Black, viola
sextet (1981) 21:58 
i. Smooth-Going 
ii. Slow 
iii. Quick

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 In his unpublished but learned scholium he draws a plausible chronology of sequicentennial periods in composition, from monodic chant through organum, motet and Ars Nova, to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."

The etiology of Two for One is as follows. Sims wrote something called Ruminations for a Dutch virtuoso on the bass clarinet, but it proved unworkable. "To get some more mileage out of it," he says, "I converted it into a piece for violin and viola, distributing the parts of the single line, sometimes in heterorhythmic canon, between the two instruments." The result is played by the fantastic Janet Packer on the violin and by the no less fantastic Anne Black on the viola. The piece was first performed at the Somerville (Massachusetts) Public Library on 6 March 1981.

-and, as I was saying ... is a work for viola solo, written for Aaron Picht and first performed by him in a recital at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston) in June 1979. Sims had to write it in a hurry, and to save time, decided to plagiarize, or rather cannibalize, some viola bits from his other compositions. The harmonic and tonal background of the piece is derived from the overtone series of C, and the tonic appears also as the final note, not explicitly sounded, but perceived subliminally in the cochlea of the listener's ear.

Sextet is in three movements. It is scored for clarinet in A, alto saxophone in E-flat, French horn, violin, viola, and cello. The work was written at the instigation of the saxophonist Kenneth Radnofsky and performed by Dinosaur Annex in March 1982. It is based on Louis Armstrong's performance of "St. James Infirmary." Sims points out that the intonation of the great trumpeter fits congenially into his eighteen-note scale, as the blue notes that elude standard notation are handily described by his microtonal system. Sims remarks, in his characteristic scholium, that "In Plato's real world, the horn fingerings would be automatically correct; in this sublunary one, they must of course be adjusted by the player."

-Nicholas Slonimsky

 The Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble (Scott Wheeler, Artistic Director) began its existence in 1975 as an affiliate of the New England Dinosaur Dance Theater, and has been independent since 1977. In addition to its annual Boston concert series, the group has been active in recordings, residencies, and concerts throughout the New England and New York areas. The members of Dinosaur Annex are professional musicians whose sustained working relationship with composers has made the ensemble uniquely expert in the performance of twentieth-century music.

Executive Producer: L. E. Joiner; Recording: Frank Cunningham; Technical Direction: Scott Kent; Album Production: Rosalyn Reiser; Special Assistance: Eithne Margaret Dundas. Recorded June and July 1982 at the First and Second Church, Boston, Masschusetts. Special thanks to: Samuel Barker, Mrs. Gardner Cox, Mrs. Margaret Lee Crofts, The Foundation for the Humanities, Hugh Hunter, Leah Jones, Kenneth Radnofsky, Jerome Reich, Mrs. E. G. Sims, Mr. and Mrs. Thos Tenney, and Janice Williams. Northeastern Records is a division of Northeastern University Press, William A. Frohlich, Dean. This recording is manufactured and distributed under license from the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble, Inc. Recording copyright (r) Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble 1985. All rights reserved. Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.