What Next?

It’s not “daylight savings time.” That’s imprecise speech. Also, while we’re at it: Daylight saving time does not really save daylight. It should be called daylight shifting time.
— Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I tried to arrive at an intellectual concept of Lurch. Actually I think [The Addams Family] is a plea for tolerance. here is a family that has lived in peace and love, but they’re different, they’re misunderstood and feared. But the Addamses try to be kind to those who are frightened by them. We’re trying to show that it is misshapen motives which produce violence, not misshapen forms.
— Ted Cassidy

At first the answer is easy: what’s next is prep for the 21 April concert at King’s Chapel (first rehearsal this Monday.)

No, the question is really What do I compose next? Now that the Opus 207 Pavane & Giguette are done, a project which lay more or less out of mind long enough, it had been tempting to consider it abandoned, almost. The Pavane has been done some little while, a salvage job, redeeming a short clavichord piece, A Sigh for Arni, which I had composed for a 15 Minutes of Fame call (one of numerous pieces so composed which ultimately failed to tickle the fancy of the performers who initiated the call ... and I harbor no ill will there; I just resent, quite impartially, the circumstance of my writing music I believe in, only to see it orphaned.) Hence, my eagerness to find viable environments for my neglected sonic offspring. So, half the Op. 207 has kind of been done forever, and I found I had no real plan for the second piece. Perhaps my first thought was gigue-ish, but I did nothing at whatever time that thought tripped along my neurons. Then I had the thought of cannibalizing a clarinet/piano piece whose score I can visualize, but I'm jiggered if I remember either the opus number or the title I attached to it. Even this thought, however, was fundamentally mistaken: I had the idea of reassigning the clarinet line to the pedals — which notion lost sight of the fact that the piece is to be for manuals only. I did return (as is clear from the title) to the idea of a Gigue. I made a good start on it Saturday the 7th, and pretty much chopped it out Sunday the 8th. The dedicatee is pleased, writing Karl Henning thanks so much, Karl! I really like its upbeatness! So the Op. 207 went from near dead letter to satisfactorily wrapped up with gratifying rapidity.

So, no nearer an answer to What’s next? just yet.

Now, my default compositional priority tends to be imminent prospect of execution. All music for the April concert is already on the stands. And both the concert(s) of the full sextet and the fall King’s Chapel date (all dates t/b/d) have a full complement of Henningmusick already. I will have parts to lay out, but I shall leave that task for later. I shall wait until the March CRWE concert to evaluate the need to lay out parts for the Op. 200.

I have two unfinished projects I might see to: the Op. 192 chamber orchestra piece, for which the Universe may have no more use than it has thus far had for Opus 179, For You, Fuchsia. And a start (as yet only just a start) on a piece for my friend Ahmad. But there has arisen a third option, or the notion of a third option, anyway: another Symphony, this one in two movements. I know that I have posted to the effect of (i.e. plainly asserted) No more symphonies until one of those I’ve already written is performed. And, well, I’ll stipulate the emotional verity of that exhalation at the time. But I wonder if sometimes I write/state such things as a kind of marker, that at some time should find itself tested as to whether it was a genuinely binding decree, or only a momentary musical pique. I’m already musing another symphony for band, this one more compact than the Opus 148. Welp, we shall see, shan’t we?