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.