Oh, That Dismal Science!

 To give you an idea of his character: when he popped the question, the enraged question popped right back.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I also discovered something else about my nose. It didn’t like smelling formaldehyde and dead frogs. Before I finished my dissection, I did have to be excused while I went to the boys’ room and threw up. I also swore to myself I’d never eat frog legs, which brought up another question: What do they do with the rest of the frog when they take off his legs for frying? I was a deep thinker as a young man.

— Lewis Grizzard, If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground.

Per a discussion yesterday-ish which touched upon Music as Commodity: If Music be a subsidiary discipline to Economics, there is no question that the supply of Henningmusick easily outpaces demand.

And, twelve years ago today, I tweeted: Does the world need a piece for soprano and clarinet in A? To hell with what the world does, or does not, need—I’m writing it.

White Nights Update, Eleven Years Ago

 Moby Dick was the Jaws of its day.

Incomparably better source document, though.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

“In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.”

“So I have been informed, sir.”

“Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I’m going into the park to do pastoral dances.”

“Very good, sir.”

— The immortal PG Wodehouse

II.vii progress report (2) ... and later that day I posted:

Night the Second, Scene 7, Nastenka’s Story Begun, is finished.

A Ten-Year Anniversary

 Seen on the Internet: “downloaded 1 times.” How many time are that?

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

“‘... I’ve hardly any possessions, and almost no friends.’

‘I’m a friend,’ said Russell cheerfully.

‘No, Russell, you aren’t a friend. You have an interesting mind, despite being English, but I wouldn’t say that you were my friend. On the whole I find you vain and frivolous.’ Russell reminded himself quietly that candour was a virtue."

— Terry Eagleton, Saints and Scholars

Ten years ago today, I wrote:

Only a minor ripple in the musical word, but fairly large news for me: I’ve finished a suite of 20 short-short pieces for piano solo, Visions fugitives de nouveau, Op. 131. Thanks go out first of all to [the late] Scott Tinney for asking all his composer mates for 15-second pieces, as many as they felt like sending. Thanks, too, to Stephen Barnwell (and, secondarily, to Peter M J Hess), to Kay Patterson and Peter Lekx for indirectly suggesting titles for some of the numbers.
In interesting ways, the piece was an engaging challenge. 20 pieces which are only 15 seconds in duration . . . well, it’s only five minutes of music all told, so it’s hardly The Major Piano Work of My Generation™. Yet it was more of a challenge than to write simply a single five-minute piece of music, as I wanted the suite to consist of 20 distinct musical utterances. The ink is only just dry, so I do not pretend to have succeeded, necessarily; but that was the aim.

№ 1: One Leaf
№ 2: Versuch eines Milonga
№ 3: Beneath the Clear Sky
№ 4: That Tickles!
№ 5: Stephen Goes to California
№ 6: Kay’s Blue Crabs
№ 7: Questionable Insistence
№ 8: Morning Prayer
№ 9: Bunny Keeping Still
№ 10: Gamboling Squirrels
№ 11: The Street Musician
№ 12: The Shade of an Oak
№ 13: “Could you change one more thing?”
№ 14: Waiting
№ 15: Bicycling in Boston Common
№ 16: Mist on the Harbor
№ 17: Peter Moves to Montréal
№ 18: Seeing a Long-Since-Cancelled Stamp
№ 19: ... but his mind is elsewhere
№ 20: Starless Summer Night

I think I do like all 20 pieces as they are; I am wondering if I may want to tinker with the order just a little. But this is the sequence as of today. [11 July 2025]

To return to the present, I’ve sent follow-up messages to two cellists from whom I’ve not heard in a while, invited fellow composer Robert Gross to write a piece for our 14 October concert at King’s Chapel, and reached out to Kevin Scott to refresh that same invitation, with a scoring change.

New Waves of Unknowing

 Mine is Dramamine without Drama.

Maybe I am mistaken, in thinking that I left my brain somewhere. Perhaps I’ve never actually had a brain,
but only imagined that I had.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Hugh Laurie: Jeeves, how could I ever doubt you?

Stephen Fry: :I could not say, sir.

Not all that long ago, I reported a date set for our concert in the Library. Quoth the Universe: Not so fast! Turns out we need to find another date. Watch This Space. Separately, I have generally been “better” at checking the Opportunities page of the American Composers Forum with some frequency. Lately, there is less than ever for a composer of my non-youth. Should I complain about this? Why, since practically nothing has ever come of my submitting scores to various “opportunities” in the past? The marvel is that I still bother. At. All.

Preoccupations on 7 July 2010 (unlikely pairing though they seem) were Schoenberg & Get Smart. Wouldja believe, transposition down a major third?

Another train ride, some more composing, another hop on a bicycle: hello, Monday morning!
[8 July 2013] I would have been working on The Mystic Trumpeter.

Remembering Scott

 Twelve years ago today

My buddy Brian: “Did Neil Diamond just sing ‘Our freedom isn’t free’? God this song is terrible.”

Me: “Sorry this is how you had to find out, on 7/4”

Reviled and acclaimed,

Your voice wild and simple,

You’re untranslatable

Into any language.

You will walk into oblivion

Like people into a temple.

I bless you for this.

— Anna Akhmatova, 1963

 tr. D.M. Thomas)

Scott Tinney and I were graduate students together at that musically highly peculiar place, the University at Buffalo. He was a piano student of Yvar Mikhashoff’s. Scott’s bravura performance of Gaspard de la nuit is one of the most impressive and pleasant recollections of that peculiar epoch in my life. Decades passed and somehow we reconnected on Facebook. He wound up in Peru (I never did learn just how or why.) He would give impromptu performances on pianos here or there. He expressed a wish for a hyper-short piece (15 seconds long) to serve as a curt curtain line for such a performance en plein air. Once I got rolling (it seeming next-door to pointless to write just one such fleeting piece) I decided to make it a set of 20, Les visions fugitives de nouveau. Though I am alive to the degree to which this post is about what I don't know, the last thing I learnt about Scott is, grossly sadly, that he passed away, far away from the land of his birth, and if not friendless, insufficiently appointed with friends. 
Celebrated Independence Day morning by drawing up a 15-second piano piece (the third, so far) for our Scott Tinney, “Beneath the Clear Sky.” [4 July 2015]

Remembering the sand dance That Was

 Name for a night club: The Purple Gerbil

Just a city boy,/Born and raised in south Hanoi....

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The heart of a Codfish is made of cartilage and contains only one auricle and one ventricle. His blood is no colder than that of other fishes, it just seems colder. Codfish have no vices, but their virtues are awful. The Codfish family is millions of years old and some of them look it [...]

The female Codfish lays ten million eggs but most of them never hatch. They are better off. Some fishes are brilliant in spring, but the Codfish is never brilliant. If there is a Codfish around, you know it. If there are two, you move away.

— Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct

So, today, I wrote the one-minute duo for flute & harp, sand dance. [2 July 2016]

Considering how often I have neglected to post here in a timely fashion, it is mildly unusual that, nine years ago I did in fact post regarding the sand dance, perhaps indicative of just how proud I was of the piece. My pride in the musical accomplishment notwithstanding, neither the sand dance nor Out From the Unattended Baggage would turn them on for whom the pieces were composed. Tough noogies.

Genuinely current news is: our 8 August concert at the Woburn Public Library will be livestreamed. Watch This Space!

Simple Music?

 The Ministry of No Sense of Time

— Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Nothing much happened after the doings at Susa. Hephæstion died a few months later of drink and fever. Alexander passed away in Babylon from the same causes in the following year, 324 B.C. He was not quite thirty-three, and he had been away from home eleven years. He might have lived longer if he had not crucified his physician for failing to cure Hephæstion. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

— Will Cuppy, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Over the past week I logged the most time spent listening to cover bands in decades. I don’t say it was thoroughly tedious (it was not.) The best take-aways were that  I had never before realized just how much I liked Three Dog Night’s “Momma Told Me (Not to Come.)” Also, I never knew that Randy Newman wrote the song for Eric Burdon. So, albeit obliquely, an educational experience. Closer to musical home,  I began mulling ideas for something (for the Henning Ensemble?) by the tentative working title of Simple Music. We shall see if I actually come to do something with these ideas. I’m posting basically as a potential reminder.

Excellent rehearsal of the Henning Ensemble yesterday, working on Down Along the Canal. Dark Side of the Sun, the Rahsaan Roland Kirk Fantasia and especially Jazz for Nostalgic Squirrels, which last we had neglected in prior rehearsals. I am so marvelously lucky to be able to work with these musicians!

Also, eight years ago today:

Some of you know that I am at work on Scene 8 of the ballet, a bit more than half done with it. I just now got a crazy, crazy idea. Absolutely a crazy-good, crazy idea. [1 July 2017]