To Form a More Perfect Neuron (State of the Brain)

 I have no pet peeves. I let them all remain wild.

— Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Ingrid Bergman: Why won’t you let me be happy?

Cary Grant: No one’s stopping you.

An exchange in Hitchcock’s Notorious, Cary Grant being rather an ass.

In the Before Times, which is to say (I realize I ought to clarify) prior to my stroke. I worked at composition A Lot. I don’t say I worked absolutely every day—which would be a self-flattering exaggeration—but there were in fact substantial stretches of time when I did some composing each and every day. Moreover, it was a comparatively rare time when I was not at work on more than one score. In remarking thus I disregard whole months when I left White Nights in practically complete neglect. Since my stroke in November of 2018 things have been otherwise and far from consistent. So here am I thinking out loud in the latest self-diagnosis/evaluation/discovery which is What Is This Thing Called the Henning Musical Brain?

Since my stroke, my experience has varied from ‘reasonably on-form’ solid productivity to ‘do I even want to compose anymore?’ Even in spells of the latter darkness I did not worry that it was any permanent condition, but I simply accepted the question mark as a welcome guest, so there was no note of aught like despair in the condition. more than once—including recently—I simply did not know what I might want to write. And while that niche genre of Ignorance was something almost completely unknown to me before my stroke, I have learnt that it is simply periodically The Way It Is, and I embrace it as part of myself. Composition has not become in any way ‘more dificult’ for me, indeed I find that if I am ‘in the composing vein,’ more often than not the pieces come to write themselves. There, now: enough about my brain.

I do not yet care enough about the Op. 192 chamber orchestra piece to resume work on it. And although (as remarked earlier) there is already enough Henningmusick for the Grand Sextet, Two thoughts occurred to me between swaths of sleep t’other day, around 05:00. To borrow the passacaglia theme from Plotting for the next piece for the Sextet, The Texas Chainsaw Passacaglia (which won’t be needed until 2027) and basing the concertante piece for clarinet and band on The Mask I Wore Before.