Always Fresh Notions

 If anyone has Mahler on the celestial hotline, let him know I’ve got his Fifth Symphony playing as Music to Fold Laundry By

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

One of life’s great dilemmas is, you can’t get a job if you have no experience, and you can’t get experience without a job. God creates things like that, I think, to build our character and teach us frustration.

— Lewis Grizzard, If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground

The process of creating Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail has been fascinating for me. Partly, it has been a matter of composing fresh material in line with a verbal schema I drew up. Partly, as Bach, Handel, Beethoven and Shostakovich did before me, of including/adapting material from other works in the Henning catalogue. To a degree, then, the experience of creating the piece is a kind of you’re there already vibe. One of the results of (A) having composed a fair bit of music (some of it—a considerable quantity of it, really) completely neglected by potential performers plus (B) having cast a fair amount of it onto YouTube is: that streaming platform sometimes reminds me of music of my very own which I had forgot. Thus while I’ve been working on the Opus 200, I was revisited by I see people walking around like trees, Op. 120. Now, the fact is that I cannot regard this piece as in any sense unfairly neglected. The scoring (Flute, Clarinet, Frame Drum and Double-Bass) that there cannot be many other groups on the planet for whom it could be suitable. Not even the least sympathetic critic could fault me for drawing from its material, in the first place, and since I’m working on a score for symphonic band, I have built the material out, which I have borrowed. As I was at work on this assimilation, it occurred to me to incorporate the brass choir fanfare, Lord of the Things, Op. 195. Well for a precedent in the literature, there is Aaron Copland’s much-celebrated Fanfare for the Common Man, which he incorporated into the final movement of his Third Symphony. So I feel entirely happy with my own roughly comparable adaptation/infusion. In between these “appropriations” I have a kind of theme, as indicated in my outline, and then, after Lord of the Things, that theme against an inversion of itself. As of today, the Opus 200 thus runs nearly nine minutes. Since I have planned on a 12-minute piece, I am close to the end, then. I have another “borrowing” in mind for a coda. This will not prevent me from approaching that final pilfering with fresh material in accord with a line (or two) in my schema.

Also, twelve years ago today:

Pleased to announce that I have been appointed Music Director at Holy Trinity United Methodist Church in Danvers, MA. Let the singing begin! [1 Oct 2013]