The Un-Hip Hop Warn’t the End of It

 Methyl Ermine

Hank Aaron’s hankerin’s

Baron von Unchosen

—Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

— Edith Sitwell

All through the weeks that Carol and Peter were preparing Music for the Un-Hip Hop for the concert Tuesday last at King’s Chapel, they repeatedly offered me two assurances. Firstly, that it isn’t easy and secondly, that they find it fun to play. This is the sweet spot: to write music which accomplished musicians will find a fair (not extreme) challenge, and which they find sufficiently rewarding to repay the effort to learn it. That alone was (so to say) music to mine ears, but atop that they encouraged me (again—more than once, so they were in earnest) to write two more pieces so that the Hop would be the first in a set of three. (In a delightful intstance of the Universe cooperating with itself, my publisher also likes the marketability prospects of a set of three.) Practically immediately upon returning home from Tuesday’s concert I set to work on Opus 178 № 2, A Dance Floor for the Introverted. And lo! I did complete it yesterday. Furthermore, both Carol and Peter like it already, And now, while I am deferring actual work upon the piece until tomorrow, I have decided on the title of the Opus 178 № 3—Janky Juke Joint.

A couple items in addition.

I have had very nice feedback from several listeners who have listened to Tuesday’s concert either live or since it was “finalized” on YouTube. So the Henningmusick audience groweth.

My old friend Greta Rosen is game to play bassoon in the Henning Ensemble, so our lower register choir is strengthening.

And my friend the superb clarinetist Todd Brunel has taken a great fancy to the Op. 197 Fantasia, so he will come play it with us. I believe this will require the addition of a bass clarinet part for Dan so that he not be bumped from the lineup.

Hot New Music From Oz

 They can speak as breezily as they please about “the unmistakable thrill”; I know some who have mistaken the unmistakable thrill, and they’ll never be the same.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.
— Benjamin Franklin

As my old friend and fellow composer, Houston Dunleavy and I caught up via texting, he shared this fine recording of a fairly recent piece. I like it.

Opus 197 Done

 I don’t know what it is, but a game titled Bricks Ball Crusher has zero appeal for me....
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I fear and dislike the music of Arnold Schoenberg... Schoenberg is the cruelest of all composers for he mingles with his music sharp daggers at white heat, with which he pares away tiny slices of his victim’s flesh
— A critic for The New York Times, not taking Pierrot Lunaire at all well (19 Jan 1913)

I was, perhaps predictably, jazzed by the supremely positive experience of Tuesday’s concert at King’s Chapel, and so yesterday I pert near sprinted to the finish of the Fantasia on a Theme by Rahsaan Roland Kirk. As befits the notion of conceptual continuity (expounded by a well-known—perhaps even notorious—20th-c. American musical figure, the Fantasia makes use of a point of imitation which first appeared in Crazy in a Bottle. Also, as to whether I honored my original concept of a piece to serve dual duty for the Redeemer Recorder, and Karl Henning Ensembles, or instead wrote distinct pieces suited to each particular outfit: Yes to both, as the Op. 197 absorbs passages of the Op. 198 in places.

We Came, We Saw, We Hopped

 Deus ex ocarina.

We are the champignons, my friend.

— Postcards From Red Squirrel Trail

Courtesy of my friend Joe Barron:

There’s a story about a concert in Los Angeles that included one of Copland’s more progressive pieces. Among the Hollywood notables in attendance was Groucho Marx, who told Copland he was surprised the piece sounded nothing like the scores the composer was writing for MGM.”I have a split personality,” Copland said, to which Groucho replied, “As long as you split it with Mr. Goldwyn.”

Hooch at the Hop?, the thirtieth performance by the Karl Henning Ensemble,  was a great musical success yesterday and therefore a highly gratifying experience. It is fitting that the composer note his profound gratitude both to those of his colleagues who not only performed the music so well, but have repeatedly expressed how highly they regard the work, and to Heinrich Christensen for the warm welcome he has extended to Henningmusick dating back to 2009.

Ready for Tomorrow

All-day breakfast, and other interminable meals ....

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

The world moves on a woman’s hips

The world moves and it swivels and bops

The world moves on a woman’s hips

The world moves and it bounces and hops

— The Talking Heads, “The Great Curve”

Our dress rehearsal today was excellent. Highly gratifying both in the wonderful talent of the players, and in the composer’s having effectively “written into” their abilities. And now, to Show Up.

Decimetring Along

 That old playground rhyme notwithstanding, I don’t recall even a single time that any of my teachers gave me a dirty look.

Quite possibly a failing of my own.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

I thought, “Robert Fripp’s a good guitarist. Maybe we could do something.”

— Andy Summers of The Police

The duration of Music for the Un-Hip Hop is about six minutes and a half, so that is my goal for A Dance Floor for the Introverted. I have composed just a shade above two minutes thus far. At present the Fantasia on a Theme by Rahsaan Roland Kirk is at just about five minutes. I think I want to make it an eight-minute piece. We shall see. Good progress on both pieces today, and now they’ll rest for a couple of days.

Inching Along

Hearing that song from 1981 set me to thinking that the utter lack of imagination in the saxophone playing does not at all suggest a man at work.
Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

What was once regarded as roaring, blaring dissonance coupled with incoherent rhythmic and formal patterns has become accepted today as one of the great musical creations of the age.
—David Hall, from notes to the 1951 LP of the BSO playing Le sacre du printemps under Pierre Monteux’s direction.

It occurs to me, as I have begun composing the Opus 178 № 2, A Dance Floor for the Introverted, that I have unwittingly sidled into a kind of landmark. As I used routinely to do before my stroke, I am at work on more than one piece simultaneously. Both the Dance Floor and the Op. 197 Fantasia are at about the one-minute mark, as I have tweaked the latter and expanded it slightly.