02 January 2025

Good News the New Year Brought In

Take the Listerine for Clarksville
Il y avait un médecin de Limousin
Doc Brown in surgery?—Back to the Suture.
Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Strange spaghetti in this silent city.
— Adrian Belew, “Neil and Jack and Me”/King Crimson
 
The piece I wrote (as this blog doth attest) as something of an afterthought, and partly in response to a dream, the brass choir fanfare, Lord of the Things, has been accepted for performance in Phoenix, AZ on 22 Feb 2025. This marks, in fact, the first time I’ve had a positive result from a call which I found on the American Composers Forum Opportunities Page. Then let me be no cynic. I needed to write back for clarification, as the message didn’t specify whether Crazy in a Bottle or Lord had been accepted. I also resisted the urge to ask, What was wrong with the low clarinet choir piece?  But the experience demonstrates the wisdom of having gone on to write the brass piece. This looks to be the first performance of Henningmusick in 2025.


01 January 2025

What the Dickens

 

Thanks to my phone not liking (apparently) the Italian word for Vespers, I discovered a startling new Monteverdi manuscript, the Velcro della beata Vergine. Weirdly percussive.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

"Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"
“I have none to give,” the Ghost replied. “It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge,
and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men.”

— Chas Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I doubt very much, now, that I ever actually read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol before. I don’t have any misguided memory nagging me, “you’ve read it.” The one certain memory I do have of long ago is seeing an illustration with Scrooge quashing the Ghost of Christmas Past with his cap. Cinematically, for some few years I have been practically exclusively a fan of the 1951 production with Alastair Sim as Scrooge, and while I have since come to accept and enjoy other actors in the role, I don’t feel that Sim is in any substantial sense surpassed. In the past couple of years, I have come firmly to revel also in the film versions headed by Geo. C. Scott and Patrick Stewart. The wiseacre in me cannot help feeling that, for the latter, it was a lost opportunity, not to cast Brent Spiner as Bob Cratchit. Not surprisingly, the first thing I noticed was the absence of “favorite bits” I’ve long known in the 1951 version from the recenter productions. With, I think, admirably adroit emotional adaptability, I made immediate mental allowance for the fact that different productions would bring out different details. And then, inspired by a virtual acquaintance’s resolve to reread the Ur-text, methought, “me, too!” I was therefore pleased to find that Sim’s Scrooge addressing his sister as “Fan” was true to the original, and mildly surprised that he was “wrong” in addressing the girl who breaks off their engagement as “Alice.” It’s a good job that I didn’t allow the absence of certain scenes from 1951 to interfere with my assessment of the later productions because, as suited as they are to the story, they are liberties, though artfully designed to illustrate (mostly) Scrooge’s character, and the partnership with Marley: young Scrooge and Marley meeting when the former has left Fezziwig to work for a Mr Jorkin the aversion of scandal on the exposure of Jorkin’s embezzlement. Fan’s death-bed request of her brother that he take care of her boy, the actual death of Marley (separately, one of many things to like about the Patrick Stewart version is, it opens with Marley’s funeral) and a poignant scene in which Peter Cratchit reads from Psalm 91 at the time of Tiny Tim’s death. Against the “omission” of these narrative liberties, the later versions brought more details from the source whereof I had been ignorant. It is perhaps obvious, but I’ll go ahead and say that reading the Dickens original is an entirely rewarding activity.



30 December 2024

The Incidental Unearthing of the Forgotten

 

Countess Candice can’t diss the contest
The Endodontist Denies his tendonitis
Cindi in Sydney keeps her chameleon in quarantine
The final fun tier.
Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Never having seen Verdi’s “Falstaff,” it would have been my first time and, like sex, the first time doesn’t count.

— Oscar Levant, from the first chapter (“Total Recoil”) of his autobiography, Memoirs of an Amnesiac

I have occasion this week to refresh my List of Representative Works, the collateral benefit of this exercise is the rediscovery of a couple of pieces which had dropped out of my consciousness. I originally composed A Snootful of Hooch for a husband and wife (vibraphone and flute.) As with a number of other pieces, the folks I wrote it for never returned to me. I later rescored/arranged the piece for flute, violin and cello, but no, the piece still went nowhere. Maybe I should prepare a new version for Aubade? Let me take that idle thought under advisement. Below is the Opus 122, Le Tombeau de W.A.G. which I composed for the memorial service of Bill Goodwin, an occasion from which I was ultimately excluded. I don’t have all the answers and what little information I have does not reflect well on certain parties, and there let the matter rest. I used the piece as a sort of solemn introduction to a concert which included Sweetest Ancient Cradle Song, which Bill had commissioned me to write.

26 December 2024

Thinking Ahead

 

I know it would have been a distraction from plot development, so I’m not proposing any change to the movie, but am I the only one to wonder, on seeing the self-driving cars in Minority Report, if they still run on gasoline?
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

“This very complete little kitchen of ours,” said Mortimer, "in which nothing will ever be cooked—” “My dear, dear Mortimer," returned his friend, lazily lifting his head a little to look at him, “how often have I told you that its moral influence is the important thing?”
Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Still not concerning myself with the next composition, but what I’m thinking for our 8 April King’s Chapel date is:

Sunshade and Earthquake

Henning, Music for the Un-Hip Hop, Op. 178 (première) 6:30
Alan Westby, The Quiet Girl (revised version) 7:00
Henning, Surfing an Earthquake, Op. 190 (première) 6:30
Henning, Dark Side of the Sun, Op. 193 (première) 8:30

Of the photo, taken by a fellow conductor here in Boston, who borrowed some octavos. She writes: this is one reason I always go through and erase them!



25 December 2024

Christ Is Born Today

I guess I have to agree with Sir Paul: children who practice a Christmas song all year long are ding dong ding dongs....
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

So, then, as the darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end [...] So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.

— Geo. MacDonald Phantastes

In late 2003, enormously pleased with both the accomplishment of having composed Nuhro (Op. 74) and with the St Paul’s choir’s creation of its première, as part of the “Karl Henning Evensong” on 16 November (a marvelous opportunity afforded me by then-M.D. Mark Engelhardt) I put the musical lesson of Nuhro to further use in my Opus 76, Hodie Christus natus est, including a clarinet obbligato tailored to myself, as both a thank-you and a Christmas gift to Mark and the choir. I composed the piece in a white heat, and while the piece was certainly ready for that Christmas, preparation of such a novel score in so tight a time frame was obviously impractical. Mark did program the piece with gratifying speed, though, choosing to program it as part of a Mothers Day concert, whose date happened to coincide with my mom-in-law’s birthday, so there was a lovely rightnes to it all.

24 December 2024

Sixteen Years Ago, This Very Day

 

Last Christmas, I gave you mixed nuts,
The very next day, you gave ’em away,
This year, I won’t be a putz,
I’ll give them to someone special.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.

— Sophocles

I’ve just had a time-capsule kind of experience, revisiting posts from December of the blog’s inaugural year, 2008. I admit that this morning it look me a long few seconds to parse out the doggerel in the Christmas Eve post.



23 December 2024

Launch of the Twin

 

Euripides’ striptease
Venus, the Batter of Eyelashes
Pandora’s fuse box
If everyone were a panda, none of us would be cute.
Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.

— Albert Einstein

Somehow, what I should probably never have predicted, this month my favorite Stravinsky score appears to be the Cantata. Today I finished massaging the re-scored Dark Side of the Sun, Op, 193a (flute, clarinet, bassoon and double-bass.) And submitted it to the Call for which I prepared it. As a result, I also added rehearsal letters to and extracted parts for, the original. Now, on the one hand, I don’t just yet know what I might write next, but on t’other, I’m prepared now simply to enjoy Christmas.

The photo is the festive seasonal decor for my parents’ gravesite. This is only my second Christmas with my mom joining the choirs of angels on high.