A Musical Lark Belatedly Finds an Audience

 Ten Fictitious Places, No Explanation

1: Flotsam’s Mistake, New Jersey

2: Lake Wobegone

3: Cloggoscoggin, Maine

4: No-Man’s Park, Ducktown

5: Wossamatta U.

6: Camazotz

7: The Great Ohio Desert

8: Eseldorf

9: Bifröst

10: Merlingrad

Musicians are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, they face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every note, they stretch themselves, emotionally and physically, risking criticism and judgment. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life— the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because musicians are willing to give their entire lives to a moment—to that melody, that lyric, that chord, or that interpretation that will stir the audience’s soul. Musicians are beings who have tasted life’s nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another’s heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.
— David Ackert, LA Times (Mr Ackert consistently used the phrase “singers and musicians,” which I have simplified to “musicians.”

To my undeniable delight, a new fan of Henningmusick, having watched/listened on YouTube, has found that the platform’s algorithm furnishes him even more. Thus it was that he came to be introduced to my jeu d’esprit after Pachelbel, and has shared it around. Imagine my gratified surprise when this came to be a topic for conversation yestermorn. I posted on this here, but I might add what I was telling my new friends yesterday: that my excellent friends flutist Peter H. Bloom and harpist Mary Jane Rupert played a number of weddings, and over time they played the Pachelbel Canon often enough that at the last the only pleasure they derived from the piece was the reflection that they were being paid to play it. My imaginative re-scoring was in some wise a desire to see if I could make the piece fresh for Peter again. In more timely news, I have finished two of the four sax quartet arrangements I wrote of yesterday.