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!

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.

@karl-henning-1

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.

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.

Not the Very End Just Yet, But Its Unmistakable Sign

 

Remembering when (22 Dec 2019) a radio announcer praised the early music ensemble “Steely Antico:" When Black Death Friday comes, I’ll collect everything I’m owed, And before my liege finds out, I’ll be on the road....
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.

— Kahlil Gibran

The President of Triad (which has been inactive since our March 2022 concerts) sent this yesterday to the Board:
I think it’s time to dissolve Triad. Before we go ahead and do that, I’d like to hear if anyone thinks differently.
Otherwise, we’ll try to find a lawyer who can help us do this legally and properly.
I replied:
It pains me to say so, but I don’t see viability in the group at this point. I was one of the group’s founding members, and I’m enormously musically proud of the music we made during the ensemble’s substantially healthy run. There was always (or always-ish) some degree of attrition as divers members left the Boston area to pursue opportunities elsewhere. And at the last, our difficulty was one of recruitment. This being Boston, there was no difficulty (apart from tenors) in finding talented singers, but the group's model was decentralized leadership and the health of the organization depended on members’ willingness to assume part of the responsibility of the administrative tasks. The fundamental challenge for each of us as individuals was always the balance between the natural demands of our “outside," keep-earning and musical activities and demands, and time/energy to bestow on Triad. And the newer members proved not to have sufficient investment in the endeavor. And the rest is silence.

Sun and Done

Seen at the supermarket: “Make Grilled Cheese Easy.” I’ll go on record as having been ignorant of any challenge to making grilled cheese.
This is what Morning TV has aspired to: “Top emojis that make you look old.“
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The enemy of Art is the absence of limitation

— Orson Welles

Although mentally I was allowing myself until New Year’s Day to finish Dark Side of the Sun, there is a cosmically serendipitous rightness to completing it on the Winter Solstice. I appeared to reach the end yesterday, but I suffered some doubts: is this really an ending, the ending? It needed less “repair” this morning than I had feared. I fine-tuned the ending this morning, went out on a couple of errands, and did some more tweaking throughout the piece later this afternoon and into the evening. As noted earlier, I borrowed some material from both the low-clarinet choir piece, Crazy in a Bottle, and the brass choir fanfare, Lord of the Things. And, of course, cannibalized Not in any particular hurry, which I did not ever hide was always the intention. Not at all surprisingly, the process was never a simple/lazy copy-&-paste affair, which would have been less interesting to the composer even than to the listener. The demo of the piece runs almost literally the eight minutes I had always intended. And that, Gentle Reader, is a wrap on the Opus 193. Well, I need to add rehearsal marks, and prep the parts. What’s next? I was planning to write a new piece for a Chamber Orchestra call. And I may, at that, though the waggish thought of adapting (expanding the scoring of) Dark Side is tempting me.

@karl-henning-1

Recent Basking

When I read someone (anyone, but in this case, a friend) write “this composer manages to make these ‘conservative’ works sound fresh, with purpose.” (he was writing of a symphony by Julius Röntgen (1855-1932) I think, it’s the content that matters, of course, not the idiom. Chances are good it’s an ideologue who would wish to make it a matter of the idiom, instead.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

You’re crazy if you don’t learn from others.

— Chas. M. Jones

I have been faithfully chipping away at Dark Side of the Sun. Progress is not racing, as was the case with Crazy in a Bottle or Lord of the Things, but I find the pace satisfactory. After today’s work, I have six minutes of music, so my working estimate that it end up running eight minutes seems entirely to be tracking.

Six Years Ago Today

Be fair: Who can fault Peter Cetera for cashing in? Doesn't mean I have to listen to it.
You’re on the list of aliens that Riker kissed, you’re on the list of lips the Commander can’t resist....
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

the less they deserve ... the more merit in your bounty.

— Hamlet

While I was yet in Rehab following my stroke, I wrote: I am not yet back to genuinely composing, of course, but I have already started to think about four new pieces, so the wheels are turning.

Waste Not, Want Not

As Bing Crosby sings it, I’m not hearing any real hunger for the figgy pudding. Just saying.
Believe in The Wonder of Retail
Fireball Whiskey: no better way to keep your Chevy’s battery terminals clean.

– Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

There is, in the perspicuous flow of your pure English, a subtle delicacy of expression which always pleases me—except when you tomahawk people.

— Thomas Holley Chivers, writing to E.A. Poe

Most of the pieces I write for the Fifteen Minutes of Fame calls remain un-famous. Yet I often produce material that I like a ton and whereof I therefore resent the Universe’s indifference. Hence, I re-purposed sand dance (originally written in 2016 for flute and harp) as the coda of one of my pieces for Ensemble Aubade, Bicycling Into the Sun (Feel the burn), Op. 163. So, in September of 2023 I wrote a saxophone quartet, Thinking of Rahsaan. This was apparently one of those instances when I heard bupkis from the musicians asking for the pieces. but again: too good a piece to let it get swallowed up in the Void. I will cannibalize it for Dark Side.I do not remember just why, just when or just for whom, but at some point I swapped a clarinet for the flute in sand dance. I don’t think I did it for myself, since at the time there was no harpist I might have collaborated with. I did a little work on Dark Side today, but the most important accomplishment today was setting a date for the 30^th Henning Ensemble concert on 8 April 2025 at King’s Chapel.

@karl-henning-1

Basking in the Dark Side

Just overheard: “...it was literally a nightmare.”
This was literally wrong.
What if the mind I am freely speaking...is someone else’s mind?...
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

People don’t compose for a livelihood, especially in the United States.

— Frank Zappa, 10.x.1967

I have freely adapted part of a point of imitation from Crazy in a Bottle for Dark Side of the Sun, which now runs to about a minute and a quarter. I’m content with the day’s work and will let it cure overnight. As for O singer, bashful and tender, I hear your tender notes, I am content for the nonce to let it rest in the Non-Penalty Box. I don’t yet know just what I wish to do with it, but I trust to make that discovery sometime next year. My only likely plan in which O singer.... figures is, I am inclined to sidestep it and compose an entirely different piece for a call with a February deadline. I am planning to finish Dark Side first. I’m going to pretend thar my compositional life has returned to normal, and plan to write a bit each day. Indeed to plan to have the piece done by New Year’s Day. Madness? Perhaps. Also, I have the vague notion of letting the piece run to eight minutes, which will make it the most nearly substantial piece I shall have composed since the Opus 175 Third Symphony. Time will show if this is real, or just smoke escaping my ears.

Not Entirely About Music

 One of the disruptions of the year was the termination of my position at Holy Trinity Church, and the resulting loss of income. I've been trying to find practically any suitable part-time employment to make up that lost income since June. I've interviewed at various places, but haven't gotten anywhere as yet. I'm not going to belabor the point, but only wanted to report the matter here.

New listening today is a Grateful Dead album I've been curious about forever: Aoxomoxoa. Separately, this may be an album which it is impossible to successfully ask an Amazon Echo device to play. I do not qualify by any means as a Deadhead. I enjoy but am not overwhelmingly enthusiastic over American Beauty and Workingman's Dead. And, against the grain of the true fandom for the band, the two tracks I play most frequently are "Touch of Gray" and "Alabama Getaway." Of my initial encounter with the famous palindromic album, I can report that I find it interesting more than enjoyable, per se, which of course does not rule out revision in the future. My biggest takeaway today was that, if I felt any artistic discomfort about my writing very brief pieces of late, here were several short songs which, if at the moment I'm not sure I'm crazy about, Jerry Garcia felt that he owned them sufficiently for publication.

Another Piece I Didn't Realize I Wanted to Write

Okay, he's been singing for 2-3 minutes, then pulls our leg by singing, “Mostly I’m silent,” and then emphasizes his non-silence by singing a bunch of la-la’s.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Everybody’s doing something, I heard it in a dream....

— Bob Dylan, “Too Much of Nothing”

Let me start by repeating and reaffirming how much I like Misapprehension, Op. 112, both in its original clarinet choir version and the 15 solo strings adaptation. Also, that while I completely understand why the piece was never performed by the group for whom I composed it (it was a poor match) I think the Universe is a ass for continuing to ignore the piece. That’s settled then. No wonder that when I recently saw a call for scores for clarinet choir, a kind of hope on behalf of the Op. 112 fluttered in the Henning breast. I’ve already written of how that crushed hope ultimately resulted in Crazy in a Bottle, Op. 194. Now, that very same call which elicited pieces for low clarinet choir also requested pieces for brass choir. I wasn’t particularly planning to do anything about that. However. In part of a dream I began working on a piece for brass choir. It is many years since last I wrote for brass. Long since, when I collaborated with the late Bill Goodwin, I wrote pieces for choir, brass and organ twice yearly. Later, in Danvers I was very gratified to revive the Sweetest Ancient Cradle Song, of which Pastor Larry Wimmer spoke with touching appreciation. To revert (so to say) to the present, the time was short, but did I want to try to chop out a short brass piece in two days? Well, it turned out that yes, I did, thank you very much. The musical consequence is one possible result when the composer asks himself, Well, why shouldn’t a fanfare open with a minor ninth? In some ways, after a false start (I had to rehabilitate a point of imitation quite severely) the piece wrote itself. "Is that even a thing?" This novel usage at first, well, at first I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it. Soon I reminded myself that this reaction is perhaps something to note but not actionable. Language and usage change all the time, so get the hell over it. Out of the note I took in this case, though, has come a title which tickles me inordinately: Lord of the Things, Op. 195.

@karl-henning-1

No Particular Place to Go (or, The Up Side of Vexation)

What if the Think Tanks were Thin Tanks?
Cathartic Karaoke
Boomerang meringue
Facebook is offering to translate "hiya" for me.

– Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Bugs Bunny, voiced by Mel Blanc: “Aren't you ashamed of yourself?!—roasting children!”
Witch Hazel, voiced by June Foray (coyly): “Call it a weakness.”

I noted yesterday that I have a current work-in-progress for the Henning Ensemble, Dark Side of the Sun. But what you do not yet know, Gentle Reader, since my blogging has been so unreliable and desultory, is that this is now the second work-in-progress presently on my desk. Back in September I began a new chamber orchestra piece, O singer, bashful and tender, I hear your tender notes. My first piece for chamber orchestra, For You, Fuchsia, having as yet gone nowhere, I thought I’d add a companion for the portfolio. Why? Well, that’s undeniably a question, and a q. with as yet more substance, almost, than the piece. I wrote a kind of beginning, and I've also written some material for somewhere in the middle. But the piece has suffered from the author’s as yet insufficient investment in where it ought to go, and what its character ought to be. The good news is that Dark Side does not labor under these deficiencies. Either that, or it matters less in this case that the question dangles. I seem to see myself applying myself further to Dark Side next week. If I should, you’ll read about it here.

One peculiar wrinkle in my present experience is that, having expressed here how little compositional motivation 2024 has seen, compared to the past, I allowed a call for pieces for low clarinet choir and brass choir to provoke me to write two short, punchy pieces, both of which I like a great deal: Crazy in a Bottle, Op. 194 and Lord of the Things, Op. 195. Crazy in a Bottle was born out of a very slight disappointment. I had seen a call for pieces for clarinet choir, and my first thought was: "Great, now I’ve somewhere to send Misapprehension." But then, looking closer at the call, the scoring (Basset Horn, Alto Clarinet, Bass Clarinet [up to 8 separate parts] Contralto clarinet, Contrabass clarinet) was completely incompatible with Misapprehension. Out of the annoyance that there was still no home for the Opus 112, I set to writing something new. Some material from C. in a B. may just find its way into Dark Side, and why not? Also, it is not strictly true to suggest that Fuchsia has as yet gone nowhere, since we have presented Fuchsia Minor at King’s.

@karl-henning-1

The particular hurry I've not been in

Every year, they sing it as though it were some special virtue on Santa's part. But be fair: don't we all check our lists twice?
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Je ne sais pas où nous nous sommes trompés, mais le sentiment š'est enfuit et nous ne pouvons pas tout simplement le récupérer.

— Gordon Pied-Léger

The call was for an organ piece, manuals only, playing one minute. By the time I addressed myself to this task, the Henning Ensemble had played our 29^th concert, and I had made a start (ca. 3 Dec) on a new piece for a spring concert (whose date we have yet to set) to be titled Dark Side of the Sun (Opus 193) a piece which may or may not to some degree reflect my recent re-acquaintance with Scelsi's Natura renovatur. The two thoughts which came to me for the organ piece were, on one hand, a largely two-part invention with a lot of parallel writing and, on t'other, material which I shall fold into Dark Side. Thus, I dubbed the organ snippet Not in any particular hurry, Op.193a. I finished the piece, brief as it is, on 4 Dec.

@karl-henning-1

What Is Now?

The Idiosyncratic Ascetic
The Lavender Avenger
The Ornery Coroner
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

People disagreeing everywhere you look,
Makes you wanna stop and read a book.
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
That was really shook.
But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though ....

— Bob Dylan

Gentle Reader, as told by the fact that I have posted to the blog so seldom, my compositional activity was significantly down in 2024. (Historically, when I have set to work on a piece, I litter the blog with divers thoughts. Heck, there was a period when I would even note when I would get any actual work done on White Nights, my eternal erstwhile work-in-progress.) The unsurprising fact behind that is that my motivation to do creative work was correspondingly down.  I do not have a lot of insight there. That said, I have just written two short pieces: a four-minute bagatelle for low clarinets, Crazy in a Bottle, Op. 194, which I chopped out for a call. The scoring is Basset horn, alto clarinet, eight bass clarinets, contralto and contrabass clarinet. When I first saw a call for clarinet choir, my thoughts turned immediately (of course) to Misapprehension, but the scoring was not suited to the call. My friend David Bohn also had a fresh Fifteen Minutes of Fame call for an organ piece (manuals only, hence the one-minute Not in any particular hurry, Op. 193a. 193a, because I shall fold it into the new piece I have started for the Henning Ensemble, Dark Side of the Sun, Op. 193. David has been enormously supportive over the years, and as noted here, when I was fresh out of rehab after my stroke, the toy piano piece, Penny Candy was the first piece I composed in my new life.

Catching up, Rather

Do you remember when your self was other than it is?
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

What is the guy so upset about? You'd think nobody was ever compared to Mussolini before....

— Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors

Gentle Reader, to state the obvious, I post too seldom to this blog. This forms the dilemma of determining the degree I should try to address posting info which is no longer news. Well, in any event, weeks late I here report that the Henning Ensemble (Peter H. Bloom & Carol Epple, flutes, Dan Zupan, alto saxophone and bass clarinet and Dave Zox, double-bass) performed at King's Chapel on Thanksgiving week. The program:

Nostalgia Trips

Karl Henning (1960): Jazz for Nostalgic Squirrels, Op. 117a

Alan Westby (1961): The Quiet Girl (Première)

Henning: Down Along the Canal to Minerva Road, Op. 149a

Pamela Marshall (1954): Carvoeiro Clifftop Walk (Première)

Henning: Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used to Be, Op. 191 (Première)

I was supposed to conduct, but a chest cold kept me at home, and the band felt sufficiently well prepared to plays sans dirigeur.