Henningmusick Première Approaching

 Owner of a previously-owned lonely heart.

NPR News: “A Brief Tour of the Alimentary Canal, From Spit to You Know What.” They had to go there, didn’t they?

Even if he sins, I never kick a Finn’s shins!

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

His face was a mask of woeful bone, but his eyes twinkled like the eyes of old giggling sages of China, over that little goatee, to offset the rough look of his handsome face.

— Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

On the theme of You never know unless you ask, tody my friend Paul Carson told me that he’s including my St Petersburg Nocturne on his June program. It is a powerful rare thing for any piano music of mine to be performed (indeed, at a guess, it has never happened since before the launch of this blog) so it is next door to redundant to point out that this is the world première. It’s one of the piano pieces I’m fondest of, the sound of the piece instantly bringing me back to the apartment in Petersburg, where I often noodled at the upright piano, which must have been something of a non-precious antique, and related memories of feeding ducks at a pond in a nearby pond with my then soon-to-be fiancée, a time when it felt like all the world lay before us.

Separately: whether we chalk this up to human carelessness, or to the shortcomings of AI, I have too little information to adjudge, but I was tickled, on seeing “The Gumbo Variations” from the Zappa album Hot Rats topping a list of “Longest prog songs,” when of course this track’s provenance is overwhelmingly the blues, Go Figure.

A (Very Incomplete) Chronology of Upbeat and Commercial

 In the Next Century, We're Still Working on It Department:

In Hitchcock's I Confess (1953), one line spoken by a lawmaker goes,

“Equal salary for female school teachers would bring disaster to our whole economy.”

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Monty Python predicts Social Media—

Jn Cleese: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.

Mike Palin: But that isn’t just saying, “No, it isn’t.”

Cleese: Yes, it is....

1955: Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black man, is lynched in Mississippi. Rod Serling writes a screenplay which is not produced, as TV censors try to compel Serling to change the script so that it wouldn’t make certain white people uncomfortable about White Supremacism. In his desire to address such social ills, Serling realizes that such issues can be made abstract via science-fiction, and he develops the anthology television series, The Twilight Zone.

1980: Woody Allen releases Stardust Memories, in which he plays filmmaker Sandy Bates, the ending of whose movie studio suits, insisting that the movie be “upbeat and commercial” intend changing to an incongruous arrival at “Jazz Heaven.”

1982: The Ladd Company releases Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott having been coerced into both making the ending a romantic escape, and adding voice-overs which are roughly equal parts intrusive and baldly expository.

1985: Brazil is released as the film Terry Gilliam wished, the director having at last prevailed against the suits at Universal, who wanted the film cut down to a sanitized “Love Conquers All” version.

A Very Curious, Very Boston Story

E.A. Poe Apparel) Demon Denim

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The Nile Crocodile and the Salt-Water Crocodile have reduced the problem of mankind to its simplest terms. They think that some specimens of mankind are a little tougher than others, and that is all there is to it. Mind you, I’m not saying they’re right. The ancient Egyptians regarded the Crocodile as a sacred animal and the symbol of the sunrise. This seems to have been a mistake. It was just one of those ideas people get now and then. In his spare time the Crocodile propagates his kind.

— Will Cuppy, How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes

An old schoolmate was planning to come to Boston to see the MFA Van Gogh exhibition. She’ll be heading to Provence in a couple of months, making a kind of Van Gogh Journey. Regrettably, she needed to cancel the Boston trip. She kindly made the ticket available to yours truly. My rideshare vehicle bringing me in to the museum picked up another passenger. We struck up a conversation. When he asked, I told him that I’m a composer and was a clarinetist prior to my stroke. Well, it turns out that this young man is designing a robotic hand as a therapy for hand deficiencies. It is a fascinating conversation to spring from a chance meeting. In this video he discusses his initial project.

Almost a Day of Mourning

 Just a friendly advisory.

All in all, I like the idea of e-books. More than that, I do read them. I only wish they didn't hyphenate one-syllable words. Looks dumb.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

O cursèd Fate! Certain thoughts are better left unthunk!

— Woody Allen, The Mighty Aphrodite

Of the new choral music collective which came to be known as Triad, I first blogged here. I forbore to post sooner while it was yet to be born and yet to be christened. As a composer and conductor, I was deeply invested in the endeavor and I grew to love a number of my fellows. Over the years as divers founding members left the Boston area, we managed to recruit some replacements, but over time the attrition became a greater challenge to counteract. And at last, we reached a kind of tipping point at which newer recruits did not develop the attachment to/investment in the endeavor. I write this with no blame to any. It is a great challenge to get on as a musician, and each individual must perforce weigh their own values, make their own decisions, and allocate their energies as they deem best fit. One of our illustrious alumnæ is now a practicing attorney, and I know how it pained her to send today’s necessary e-mail message headed Dissolving Triad. At least oversight of this unavoidable rite of passage is “in the family.” Composing this post has me near tears. Mostly I am grateful for the music-making,

An Exercise Considered, Then Discarded

 Dear businesspeople,

We all wait on hold at times. But “If It Takes Forever, I Will Wait for You” is a poor choice for on-hold music.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Minnows try to act like larger fishes, but the results are not the same.

— Will Cuppy, How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes

I’m not even sure why the idea of this particular thought experiment crosses my mind now but here goes:

What would you say to your 18-year-old self, if you could? At the risk of appearing to think that, as it is, I’ve always done the best I might (I think no such thing) I’m not convinced that anything I might have advised myself then (apart from practice more) could have made a difference of net better. What would I say? “Get into a different school, so that your opportunities are better?” “Marry into wealth so that you do not lack resources?” Firstly, telling myself those things would not change the fact that such opportunities did not arise for me. Secondly, no other path brings me to just this place musically as a composer. In one of the hour-long episodes of the fourth season of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s “No Time Like the Past,” one Paul Driscoll goes back in time, first to seek to convince the Hiroshima police to evacuate the city; second, to attempt to assassinate Hitler; and third, to plead with the captain of the Lusitania. Failing in all these altruistic attempts to improve the 20th century, he goes back a fourth time to the 19th, to “retire” to a quiet Midwestern town.  He falls for the town’s schoolteacher, but he comes to learn that she will perish in a fire. If this sounds familiar, there is a bit of an echo in Back to the Future III. Serling’s cautionary tale does not end so well for Driscoll as it does for Doc Brown, and indeed Driscoll finds himself serving as the unwitting catalyst of the conflagration. Let me not chide myself for any lack of imagination, if I cannot think of anything efficacious to say to mine 18-year-old self which might have improved the arc of my career.

Ten Years Ago Today

 Friend in Oz: Okay, so actually encountering a platypus isn’t easy.

Me: It’s no picnic for the platypus, either.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

You boogied all night in a cheesy bar…

— Zappa, “You’re Probably Wondering Why I’m Here”
Spam du jour: “Last Minute Mothers Day Gifts” — from Staples. What all are they thinking? “Happy Mothers Day, Mom! Enjoy your Sharpies!”

A bittersweet moment, as Triad is nae more, but highly satisfied that the Agnus Dei featured in that inaugural outing ten years since.

Not About Me, Either (Brazil)

 All you who are to mirth inclined,

We hope our minor mode ye do not mynde.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

... Somehow this is the key, the only key we can have to the mystery of a great artist: that for reasons unknown to him—or to anybody else, for that matter—he will give away his life and his energies, just to make sure that one note follows another with complete inevitability. It seems rather an odd way to spend one’s life; but it isn’t so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that checks throughout, something that follows its own law consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down.

— Lenny, having discussed the first movement of the Beethoven c minor symphony

Last night, largely as a consequence of this post, I slipped Brazil into the tray. Hadn’t watched it in a while. When I watched Blade Runner the other night, I remembered how, when I saw it in the theater, that original release had explanatory voiceovers which Ridley Scott thankfully scrapped from the final cut. That recollection put me in mind also of Brazil since the studio added a happy ending resulting in what Terry Gilliam sarcastically referred to as the Love Conquers All version. Aggravated rather than caused by the world around us going haywire, I find that this visual fable gets more bitter with each viewing. I mean, I have always known that it ends badly for Sam Lowry, but the very first time I saw it, not only was I beguiled by the enormously inventive dream sequences but, for instance, one hopes, and is led on to hope, that Sam Lowry will somehow muddle through it all. Living with this brilliant movie over time becomes a matter, in part, of finding the point where it is clear that Sam’s rescue is raw delusion, and that therefore his “necrophilia” with Jill is his only moment of genuine happiness in the movie, but that Sam is not merely a victim of the machine, but something of an instrument of his own downfall. Was it Beauty that killed him? His need to pursue Jill which pries him out of the safe mediocrity of a mere functionary in a lower office of the Ministry of information, so that he begs Mr Helpmann to refresh the offer of a promotion? Yet, since he had been dreaming of Jill, how could he have done otherwise? But character is Destiny, and what with the young vandals’ destruction of the Personal Transport, Sam’s cocking up of the Buttle check, and his juvenile glee in running Jill’s truck through the gate and on: Sam sowed the seeds of his own immolation by bureaucracy. As to his friend Jack, the very fact that Michael Palin is so brilliant a comedian makes him chilling as Information Retrieval’s chief Retriever.

Not About Me (Blade Runners and Beatles)

 “Alternative Facts,” No!

Dada Data, Yes!

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

On 28 Apr 2020 Chris Voss at WCRB informed us of the program for that night’s instalment of “Festival 1750” [The broadcast festival featured music created immediately before and after the pivotal year of 1750, when the elaborate vibrancy of Baroque masters Bach and Handel began to give way to the grace and proportions of composers like Haydn and Mozart.]

But did not explain why the program includes the Beethoven 7th Symphony (composed in 1813) nor even the Mozart Clarinet Concerto (composed in 1791) . . . not that it is Chris’s fault.

Tuesday night I rewatched Blade Runner 2049. When it came out I gave it a wide miss. My prejudice was not deeply ingrained nor was it especially strong, but it was completely ill-founded. At last, however,  my native curiosity prevailed and I did actually watch it,.I find it an excellent slowburn and as beautiful to watch as the original. The score plugs into the Vangelis vibe, too. Entirely predictably, I love Edward James Olmos’ return as Gaff, and I am delighted that this screenplay also is by Hampton Fancher.  I don’t believe I had previously made the connection that this was the same director (Denis Villeneuve) who is doing the new Dune movies. As to the latter, I enjoyed Part I without being besotted with it. I suppose that my not being a great fan of Herbert’s source novel is related to my not finding anything greatly disappointing in the old David Lynch movie. I haven’t yet watched Part II, but neither am I strenuously avoiding it. I’m walking to the Library today, perhaps I’ll check Pt II out.

And so last night I revisited Ridley Scott’s original, still gorgeous to the eye. Probably unsurprising: the new movie imparts an interesting “pre-echo” to the final scenes of Deckard finding Rachael in his apartment and leaving with her. These days I speak exclusively in terms of Ridley Scott’s Final Cut, for which I am richly grateful. Back when there still a Borders on Washington Street in Boston (that used to be a bookstore chain, by the way) I bought a discounted DVD of Blade Runner. I wound up returning it unopened as my subconscious was pricked to do some investigating, and I learnt that the Final Cut edition was imminent. I found the Dangerous Days documentary on YouTube (it seems to have dropped off since) and my Blade Runner Fever was really pitched up. To shift gears only slightly, Terry Gilliam’s brilliant Brazil (another dystopian classic) fell afoul of the Studio, which edited it into what Gilliam wrily dubbed a Love Conquers All version. Gilliam waged a PR war and won. To return to Blade Runner, Scott was compelled to make similarly-motivated modifications. Deckard eloped with Rachael and we see outtake landscapes from Stanley Kubrick’s helicopter shoot for The Shining, and we have grandfatherly voice-overs not only “explaining” that romantic escape, but upstaging Rutger Hauer’s touching rooftop soliloquy which concludes the film’s drama. Decades had passed since I watched the film in the cinema but I recalled (notwithstanding my overall white-hot enthusiasm for the movie) rolling my eyes, albeit only to myself. The Final Cut restores Deckard’s dream of a unicorn. The origami unicorn that Gaff left outside Deckard’s apartment thus suggests not only that Deckard is himself a replicant, but that Gaff is aware of that fact, and that his LAPD colleagues are leaving him and Rachael be. Deckard thus has the question he had posed to Tyrell (How can it not know what it is?!) turned back upon himself. Atop the discovery which astonished those in the BR 2049 lab, that a replicant could bear a child) we have the related puzzle that Deckard was created capable of inseminating a partner, and Tyrell (apparently) so designed them (Deckard and Rachael both.)

The novelty of returning to Scott’s original last night was having the following sink in: Deckard asks Zhora for leave to check her dressing room for “Little, uh, dirty holes they uh, drill in the wall so they can watch a lady undress.” And then we see Joanna Cassidy in the shower. The echo of Hitchcock’s Psycho impressed itself on me so strongly last night, I near wondered I had missed it before. Deliberate on Ridley Scott’s part or serendipity?

Entirely separarely, I am slow-reading The Beatles Anthology. The experience is reminding me that at the time of my first descent into the Beatles rabbithole, I did read two books dedicated to them so, as with the DVD Anthology, it is a mix of some few factoids of which I was already aware, and a wealth of new info.

Five Out of Six

 Not that you wondered, but the eyes in my head see the world spinning ’round.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

If you’re voting for a court-established rapist who is on trial for trying to buy off the porn star he cheated on his third wife with in order to hide his efforts to steal an election—just give up the “I’m a Christian” shit, already.

— Jn Pavlovitz

The Henning Ensemble rehearsed this afternoon, and the sounds were pretty exciting. We had initial readings of the Rahsaan Roland Kirk Fantasia and Dark Side of the Sun. The quest for potential concert dates is ongoing, but we’ve pinned down the next rehearsal, this time of the full sextet.

Some Tidying

 Paradisal fungi: Les champignons-Élysées

Pirates of the Carbonara

He may not be the sharpest ginger in the stir-fry.

Annie’s anise?

The story Harlan Ellison never wrote: “I have no mouth and look! There’s ice cream!”

— Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

I'd always suspected that there was a God, even when I thought I was an atheist. Just in case. I believe it, so I am full of compassion, but you can still dislike things. I just hate things less strenuously than I did. I haven't got as big a chip about it because maybe I've escaped it a bit. I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives.

— Jn Lennon

A footnote to Jazz for Nostalgic Squirrels: One discovery we made when we revived the piece in 2023 ... through mis-handling the mouse, I gave Peter an erroneous cue in his alto flute part. And in case you were wondering, yes, an erroneous cue (in this case, a measure off) is indeed worse than no cue at all. And I failed to remember this when exporting the Alto Flute part from the newly expanded score. So, yesterday afternoon I cleared out the stale cues and inserted fresh cues. Even though we shall be missing Todd I am eagerly looking forward to today’s rehearsal.

A Landmark of the Before Time

 Saying that something is a thing has become a thing.

(Thing. Thing a thong.)

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb:

Maybe get a blister on your little finger, maybe get a blister on your thumb.

— Mark Knopfler, “Money for Nothing”

Even though neither of the pieces I submitted was selected, I very much enjoyed twice participating in the Rapido! competition, because (especially prior to my stroke, when my stamina was perforce greater) I exulted in the exercise of composing to a short deadline. In both cases I wrote music I could take pride in having created. For the first of the two contests in which I contested, I wrote the Dances of Exhilaration and Nonchalance, which are the subject of this post. I see in another post that at first I dubbed them Dances Defiant. As the point of the contest is not knowing the instrumentation until the starting gun goes off, there is no direct preparation for the contest, per se, but to prepare generally, I decided I would compose a piece for myself in rapid order, and the result, dedicated to my artist wife, was Deep Breath, a piece for clarinet solo accompanied by strings. My hope was to perform it myself, collaborating with a local group. While my stroke has dramatically interfered with that intention, I do hope both to play it myself someday, and that the première of the piece may not wait upon my own rapprochement with the clarinet. I certainly wrote it to be just the sort of piece I should enjoy playing particularly as it is a sort of musical love letter. I promised Maria long ago that I would write her a piece. My first thought was a piece for piano trio, but I have never yet made the acquaintance of a trio with whom I might collaborate, and I didn’t want the piece written for my wife to sit on the shelf. Well, to be sure, Deep Breath has rested a good while on the shelf itself, but as I composed the piece, my hope was better. It is worth pointing out that the inherent musical inadequacies of the MIDI export are in a couple of cases aggravated in this piece (not only the actual sound of a passage of string tremolo but passages of rhythmic freedom in the solo part which the machine is incapable of handling artfully.)

Before wrapping this post up, the only major loose end would be, the second piece I wrote for the Rapido! contest, The Mask I Wore Before.

On the Opp. 138, 161 and 163

 Folkloric cauliflower

Les légumes de Limoges

A koala keeps Kahlúa in a coal-colored cooler

Pumpkin Spice Laddie

— Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Bach taught me to recognise the truth, namely that a good, great, universal work of music remains the same no matter through what means it is made to sound.

— Ferruccio Busoni, Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst, Leipzig, 1916

As I’m basically taking the week off, and as this recent post set me to thinking of the time of my stroke, I have recalled a touching incident whose memory is dear to me. To begin at the beginning, though, in what I feel certain must have been April of 2016, while riding the Red Line with Becky and Peter Bloom back from a recital at King’s Chapel, Peter invited me to write a piece for Ensemble Aubade, so a piece for flute, viola & harp, and since they often toured the harp part should also be suited to piano, since Mary Jane Rupert could not travel far with her concert harp.  If I do not misremember, It was Peter, as we were rolling along the track somewhere between Harvard and Porter Squares, who originated the thought that such a piece might be the first of a set of three. It appears that I first posted of this project in August of that year. The Ensemble have been big fans of the resulting piece, Oxygen Footprint, Op. 138 from the start, and when possible, they take the piece on tour with them. The first extra-Massachusetts performance of the Footprint appears to have been in Jacksonville, Illinois in April of 2017.

A few days after the November 2018 Triad concerts (on which Sudie Marcuse and I performed my Mystic Trumpeter ... one of a number of Triad performances for which I wish recordings had been furnished to me) I suffered my severe stroke. When Becky & Peter came to visit me in rehab, they reported that Aubade had included the Footprint on their November tour and that the piece was well received by audiences. My musical brain was by then beginning to re-awaken, and my friends were a great encouragement. Peter lent me a portable CD player and also brought me some manuscript paper. I greatly appreciated the moral and emotional support. The first use I made of the MS. paper was actually to write a toy piano piece for my friend, David Bohn, Penny Candy. Before long, though, I also made the first sketches for a new piece for Aubade, which I would continue in earnest when I was discharged from rehab, the piece which became Swiss Skis, Op. 161. Before long, Bicycling Into the Sun (Feel the Burn), Op. 163 followed. The latter trios have not as yet burrowed their way into the Ensemble's affections, but I hope their fortunes may improve. One reason I am especially fond of the Burn is, for the coda, I salvaged a lovely bit of music I had originally nominated sand dance. I had composed sand dance for a Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame call from a flute/harp duo. I see this pertinent post. My incorporation of that unloved submission into the Op. 163 may thus be a flagship salvage operation, lest some music of which I thought highly had lapsed forever into obscurity.

Ah, Yes—Knew I Was Forgetting Something

 He speaks his mind. It’s just not much of a mind.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I’m the son of a sea cook!

And I’m not a cab driver: I’m a coffee pot!

— The closing lines of Arsenic and Old Lace

My post yesterday ran to sufficient length that I do not greatly bemoan having left some business yet unfinished. I noted that the next thing is to rehearse and present two concerts here in Woburn by our fresh new sextet. But then what, eh? When I am ready for more creative work, there is the third Opus 178 flute duet, Janky Juke Joint, on which I have made a highly satisfactory albeit brief start. The Opus 200 band piece which I have begun scheming. Why, there is even the habitually neglected O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, on which, if as yet I still feel no burning motivation to resume work, I feel an easeful confidence that when I do at last turn attention back upon it, the work will move quickly. For me a more nearly urgent item of unfinished business (although this waiteth entirely upon the grace of others) is the limbo into which the two new pieces for Ensemble Aubade (Swiss Skis and Bicycling Into the Sun) have somehow fallen. I am seriously entertaining the idea of creating an organ solo version of the former for Robt Jan August. Lastly, I should report that I have sent ther recording of the Viola Sonata to, yes, a violist who is a recent acquaintance, and I have sent A Dance Floor for the Introverted to my friend Orlando Cela.