Henning's Headquarters

[kishnevi]

PDF not downloading....

[Karl Henning]

Might be the odd character in the title.  Let me fix that . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Might be the odd character in the title.  Let me fix that . . . .

Done.

[jochanaan]

Might be the odd character in the title. . . .

As opposed to the odd character writing the symphony?

[Karl Henning]

Not the very oddest, perhaps.

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[kishnevi]

Downloaded now. I perceive you eschew short score format and prefer to go long from the start.

[Karl Henning]

On paper, I (usually) sketch in reduction, but do have specific instruments in mind.

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[Karl Henning]

I need to do some ancillary writing, program notes for both Oxygen Footprint and The Young Lady Holding a Phone in Her Teeth.  Hm, probably for A Song of Remembrance, as well.

I've also been thinking about the fixed media for Olivia's piece, Mistaken for the Sacred.  The past few nights my "pre-pillow" listening has been the tail end of The Beatles (a/k/a "The White Album") and "Revolution 9" has been given me ideas.

The really amusing aside about listening to "Revolution 9" is, how I remember (and to what degree this was pre-conditioned by what others said about the track, who can say?) finding it disturbing.  Like many other listeners, I suppose that (after that inaugural hearing) whenever I listened to the album, I would just skip that track (and possibly "Good Night," since that was the only remaining track).  I listen to it now, and for the life of me I cannot recreate anything like a feeling of disturbance, of the sort which my mind tells me was my experience back then.  Anyway, at this remove in time I practically entirely enjoy the track . . . I don't know that I could argue that it is "a great piece" of its type, and I allow that a large component of my enjoyment is sentimental, and giving John Lennon as a greatly revered pop figure a good bit of slack, and also a little self-deprecating puzzlement at why I once thought it diabolically disturbing.  And that final sequence of three tracks – "Cry, Baby, Cry," "Revolution 9," "Good Night" – I find marvelous, highly artistic, and witty.  I am also hearing all kinds of detail which I did not hear before, though if (as I seem to have just now recollected) I made a practice of avoiding the track, that is hardly to be wondered at.

Anyway, as to my own present piece:  it is not so much that I mean to do things as they are done in "Revolution 9," as that it has given me some textural ideas.  So probably side by side with chipping away at the first movement of the symphony, I am ready to tinker with sonic objects for the fixed media of Liv's piece.

[jochanaan]

...has been given me ideas....

Catowould skewer you for that grammatical slip!

As I recall Revolution #9, one thing it has plenty of is texture.

[Karl Henning]

Catowould skewer you for that grammatical slip!

Well, he'd grumble a bit, and I accede.

[Karl Henning]

I plead typo! 

[North Star]

I plead typo! 

Doesn't seem very plausible. 

[Karl Henning]

Curses! Pinned by the very expectations I have set up!

[Cato]

Curses! Pinned by the very expectations I have set up!

Recently my 8th-Grade students were on a field trip to a university laboratory on Lake Erie, where graduate students gave them mini-courses in fish dissection, testing water for pollution, etc.

One of the graduate students had a horrible habit of "emphasizing" comparatives: "more greater," more easier," etc.

One of my best students raised her hand and corrected him: "Don't you mean 'easier'?" 

He responded with some embarrassment: "Yeah, but I'm a Science major, not language." 

[Karl Henning]

Well, the first movement nearly doubled this morning. For a week or so, I've had in mind what I wanted to do at [ D ], so the work this morning was 'mere execution' in a sense.  That said, I find myself very pleased with the musical result . . . and I went back to make some minor alterations at two or three cadences.


With this leap of progress this morning, I am approaching the half-done stage with the movement.  I am not done working on it today, though it remains to be seen whether the work is solely mentation, or bringing notation to the page.

A DropBox update seems to have made sharing a link to the soundfile . . . unclear.  So, what the heck, here is the piece so far up at YouTube.  Be safe.

[ old video deleted ]

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[Karl Henning]

Well, as it has turned out, I have made yet more progress.

[Karl Henning]

Well, when you're hot, you're hot.  Development-ish variants, collisions, and apparent novelties, all continued to become apparent to me.  The movement is rather more than half-finished now.


[ old video deleted ]

[Karl Henning]

I've added two minutes and a quarter to the first movement, so that it is now at the 06:30 mark, and there is only one minute more to lay down, and that region of the composition is already charted in mine head.  Chances are mighty good that the first movement will be at least some kind of finished tomorrow evening.

[Karl Henning]

I have also finally gotten wise to the staff size being unnecessarily small on my legal-size page (hasn't been a problem on screen, since one just blows it up;  and although it's impractical for a conductor's use, the fewer pages have saved paper when I have printed out hard copy).

Edit :: old version deleted

[Karl Henning]

http://www.youtube.com/v/NbHAZwSnFQw