We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.
RileyKoenig Home Projects Soundtracks About

UBC Masters and Doctoral Compositions

by Riley Koenig

/
1.
Chase 04:18
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Space 06:23
7.
Crush 02:02
8.
Funky Beets 04:08
9.
10.
11.
Imagine 06:09
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Fanfare 05:13
17.
18.
The sun went down behind yon hill, across yon dreary moor; Weary and lame a boy there came up to the farmer's door; Can you tell me if any there be, that will give me employ, For to plough and sow, for to reap and mow, and be a farmer's boy?" "My father's dead and mother's left with her five children small. And what is worse for my mother still, I'm the oldest of them all; Though little I am, I fear no work, if you'll give me emply, For to plugh and sow, for to reap and mow, and be a farmer's boy." "And if that you won't me employ, one favour I've to ask. Will you shelter me till the break of day from this cold winter's blast? At the break of day I'll trudge away, elsewhere to seek employ For to plough and sow, for to reap and mow, and be a farmer's boy." The farmer said, "I'll try the lad, no further let him seek," "Oh yes! dear father," the daughter said, while tears ran down her cheek; For them that will work it's hard to want, and wander for employ For to plough and sow, for to reap and mow, and be a farmer's boy." At length the boy became a man, the good old famer died; He left the lad the farm he had, and his daughter to be his bride; And now the lad a farmer is, and he smiles and thinks with joy, Of the luucky, lucky day when he came that way, to be a farmer's boy.
19.
The Taxidermist The Taxidermist was simply good at what he did, and I’m not just saying that because of the situation I’m in now. He completed his diploma in taxidermy at the Northwest School of Iowa in 1985 and finished top of his class in six subjects. He had practiced trapping across the country in a variety of different seasons and biomes and could skin a 7 pound squirrel in 44 seconds. Fine-tuning his craft for fifty-three-and-a-half years (as he often liked to remind us), he paid regular dues to the National Taxidermist Association. A tradesman, artist, and survivalist, the Taxidermist was the ideal postmodern Renaissance man (as far as he was concerned), a regular Leonardo Da Vinci. The one thing that may have separated The Taxidermist from Da Vinci was that he was cranky as all hell, a grumpy son of a bitch if I’d ever seen one. He was older than Christ but looked even older, probably because he spent so much time frowning and chastising and cursing his fucking face off. Some of the younger taxidermists drove him completely mental, performing incredulously stupid feats like trying to cut costs by skipping out on buying smaller dentistry tools for small mammals or forgetting to extract the eyes or brain of amphibians. * Two years ago, in my first year, he invented these pretentious little memory aids with minimal to poor rhyme and inadequate metre because he thought they would help with what he termed our adolescent idiocracy. But the problem had nothing to do with our memory capacities. We came in greener than a gardener’s thumb: cocky farm boy jocks wanting to play hunter, too stupid to enroll in medical school, too smart not to develop a trade. Many dropped out in the first few months, however, those who made it past the first year were likely to become talented taxidermists themselves. * The taxidermist ran his all-boy boarding school singlehandedly, Karolyi-style. We ate what we were told to eat, we slept when we were told to sleep, we jumped when we were told to jump. We strove to become well rounded, dynamic and self-disciplined thinkers, but most of all, we had to execute. We were not here to get jobs, the Taxidermist said, we were here to become masters. One evening, while relaxing in the common room after dinner, some of the boys were dicking around, not studying art history or practicing their violin like they were supposed to, but playing cards and drinking beers and passing around homemade pin-up posters of some of the senior journalist females from the local university that someone made as a joke, when in walked the Taxidermist. Now, I can see that you’re an intelligent person- the hardworking, homesteading type who understands various types of conditioning and also the process by which situational determinants undercut personal characteristics- but I must humbly remind you that I, of course, by no means intended to become involved in such a scandal as this one. I know you’re the type who give good looking, clean cut boys like myself the benefit of the doubt without projecting your own personalities and insecurities onto others, Rorschach inkblot style - but I just want to reiterate that I was there, in my usual spot, running my scales and arpeggios with magic fingers as if I was Vivaldi himself, telling Tommy K. and Eddie Hardcock to knock it off before we all got caught. It was Gerard Cummings who passed on the posters to me; I just didn’t notice until the Taxidermist picked it up. I realize how vexatious it is to have your story interrupted so many times in such close proximity to the previous interruption, but here I must offer my humblest apologies and also inform you of a missing piece of information from this story, something about the Taxidermist that I have left out in all due respect in order to preserve his humility, but, at this part of the story, it has become imperative that I fill you in to afford you the opportunity to develop a fully informed opinion. I must modestly convey that the Taxidermist himself was especially sensitive to the feminine species, in particular little brunettes with underappreciated torpedos, which is what these jaded little minxes had. Now, just to back up a bit and catch you up to speed, it was rumoured once that the Taxidermist had a woman for a couple of years back in the 60s, got caught up in free love and sugar cubes and whatnot, ended up a little distracted from his work with maybe even a few (I’ve heard up to four in some accounts) simultaneously, and even a later visited a few indoor whores in massage parlors, but something happened that caused him to swear off the entire sex and turn to the hardknock ivory tower life he lived now. Nobody knows for sure what exactly happened, just that some sort of Ludovico behaviour-modification type conditioning occurred, the result being an severe aversion to women, images of women, and female-identified paraphernalia (and, I even heard, even feminine articles in French and Spanish). All I know is that I was a little bit on the fence about the whole thing up to this point- you know, you got to be careful about some of the guys here; they have a nasty tendency to make things up sometimes. And still, even though I knew the Taxidermist had never accepted a female student or even allowed female applications- something I chalked up to the nature of the job and the limits of the natural characteristics of female humans- and that it was overtly against school rules to be caught in possession of even the softest of pornography, I dismissed it. But afterwards, there was no denying the evidence. And while it’s not true that I’d never been punished in my life, I certainly hadn’t made a habit of it. I’d like to remain impartial when I tell you that the punishment I received that day changed my life. It must have all been true, otherwise, why would the Taxidermist have done to me what he did that day? If you ask virtually anyone around here, they will inform you that the Taxidermist had begun to age significantly long before the incident and his health continued to decline afterwards, right at the time in which we were all consolidating a somewhat fatherly-like respect for the Taxidermist- something that my therapist has suggested to contribute to my resistance to therapy and develop a proper therapeutic alliance with her through which my interpersonal patterns can be reenacted out- when his wellbeing took a turn for the worst. Bedridden and without access to medical care, the Taxidermist withered away. Even our classes were cancelled, something that had not occurred in the entirety of the school’s existence. Nobody called their parents. We stood outside the Taxidermists room and paced the hallways. Anyways, I’m not really allowed to talk about it- school rules and all-and at this point in my education, I think you’d agree, I can’t really afford to be expelled. Sometimes I look back on the event with intense admiration and longing but my therapist constantly reminds me that my confusion is my ego attempting to mask my inner trepidating, my recurring agitation, manifested in my longstanding insomnia and midmorning eye scratching. She says the only reason I miss the Taxidermist is because I am institutionalized, but I think she’s just trying to brainwash me. For example, she is currently trying to unstick my past traumatic memories with EMDR (short for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, for those of you not stuck in lifelong weekly therapy, meaning I sit there for an hour each Monday training my attention on my feelings towards the Taxidermist while I monitor uncomfortable sensations in my body and cognitions in my mind and follow her bilateral gestures until I become a new person). While I do harbour a great deal of guilt, a deep, relentless despair that the Taxidermists death was my fault, my therapist says I must learn to let accept and let go, set it free into the collective consciousness instead of suppress in my own fragile, fleshy existence. I just want you to know that just when I was beginning to love the Taxidermist the most, he fell the hardest. * When the Taxidermist finally left our world, I sent all of the boys out to run errands for the school, determined to keep the school in working order, with or without the Taxidermist. I decided to allow him to remain in his bed while I worked. I brought all my equipment to his bedside, and borrowed some of Eddie Hardcock’’s larger tools for I still only had small dentistry tools. I was certain Eddie wouldn’t mind given the circumstances. I was careful about the head, remembering that by taxonomic definitions he was a mammal and not an amphibian. I guess his little mnemonics weren’t as pretentious as I thought they were because they came to mind with relative ease and accuracy, and I was extremely grateful that I was able to leave the brain of such a wondrous specimen intact and marvelled at the contours of his physical form as I continued to work, thinking about what direction the school should take now that the Taxonomist had passed. Maybe, because you are the smart one here, you think that I jumped the gun a bit, maybe I should have invited the other boys to contribute their own creative energies, but I know it’s hard for you to understand, given that you have little experience in the type of work that we do here. It is hard to transcend our own identities even when we want to. As I finished and packed Eddie’s tools back into my bag for transport back to his room, I thought of this beautiful creature who had managed to form me into the artful man that I now was and how proud I was that I was able to preserve him, exactly as he was. He was the light that guided me to knowledge and strength, and he deserved everything I was capable of giving him in return. We were two of a kind, the Taxonomist and I. I know he would have wanted this.
20.
21.

about

A collection of pieces I composed during my Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts programs at UBC from 2013 to 2018. There is almost two hours of original music as well as a detailed CD Liner/Information Package highlighting each track that is available upon download.

PLEASE ENJOY THIS FREE ALBUM DOWNLOAD! BUT ANY SUPPORT YOU CHOSE TO GIVE WILL GO DIRECTLY TO PAYING OFF MY STUDENT LOANS. :)

Thanks again for all your love and support during these last 5 years!

credits

released August 30, 2018

license

all rights reserved

tags

If you like Riley Koenig, you may also like: