Of King’s Chapel & Kammerwerke

Last week-ish, fresh word came in from Kammerwerke (double wind quintet) viz. the considered commission:

1. The reading will be Thursday, 21 July.
2. My piece is in consideration for their Winter 2017 concert.
3. I may be the one to conduct it.

But we have yet fresher word, from last night’s rehearsal of The Conquest of Emptiness, the first of the wind-quartet-plus-fixed-media (one part of a dialogue between artistic disciplines, featuring artists Maria Bablyak & Irina Pisarenko) pieces for the upcoming King’s Chapel concert.

My liaison with Kammerwerke is Carol Epple, who is in our band for 21 June, and whom I therefore saw yestereve.  One modification seems to be, that The Young Lady Holding a Phone in Her Teeth is almost certainly on the Winter 2017 concert, as at this point there seems no active, direct resistance, but only a pocket of garden-variety musical inertia;  and the expectation is in fact that I shall conduct.  When Carol and I shared the Kammerwerke news with Peter last night, I simply told him, “We went from zero to sixty.”

As, tomorrow, Peter goes up to Maine for the annual weeklong Snow Pond Composers Workshop (he is one of just two or three featured performers, and the composers write a piece for him during the course of the workshop, and then Peter plays a marathon concert at the end of the week . . . yes, a full concert of music none of which he had seen — because it hadn’t existed — a week before, and some portion of it technically plausible . . . he always has great stories to tell when he comes back to Somerville from Down East) our next k a rl h e nn i ng Ensemble rehearsal is Monday the 13^th.  Hence, my ample time to complete Contemplating the Irrepressible.

Since the King’s Chapel music must be in the can come Sunday the 12^th, I then have (let us say) the second half of June to wrap up the final 90 seconds of The Young Lady, so that for the Kammerwerke reading on 21 July, we can read through the complete piece.  So, a robust but entirely manageable Henningmusick production schedule.

(Photo by Maria Bablyak.)