Henning's Headquarters

Started by BachQ, April 07, 2007, 12:21:26 PM

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Harry

Quote from: karlhenning on June 01, 2008, 05:24:45 AM
How did the choir do last night, Harry?  Was the program well received?

Even better my friend, your work was a complete success, and well received, and the choir performed excellently. Voices blend well, and your music fits the voices. There was a video made, and a recording, but the video is pal of course, so I hope you have a way to switch that back to NTSC, it is possible!
This Magnificat of yours is really something very special Karl.
No doubt Nana will send you her comments, and both audio/video registrations.

karlhenning

Thank you very kindly, Harry.


mn dave

Is it going to be on Youtube?

karlhenning

Quote from: mn dave on June 04, 2008, 12:05:54 PM
Is it going to be on Youtube?

If I can find someone to man the video camera, maybe.

mn dave

Quote from: karlhenning on June 04, 2008, 12:12:32 PM
If I can find someone to man the video camera, maybe.

I'd do it, but...you know...  :-\

karlhenning

Come on over, Boston is lovely in June!

mn dave

Quote from: karlhenning on June 04, 2008, 02:22:23 PM
Come on over, Boston is lovely in June!

I've never been out East.

Though I did stop in Miami 20 years ago on my way to the Virgin Islands and my honeymoon.  8)

karlhenning

Yee-haw! The score for the Opus 93 is all laid out!

greg

Quote from: karlhenning on June 04, 2008, 04:47:43 PM
Yee-haw! The score for the Opus 93 is all laid out!
is it a bluegrass score?

karlhenning

Quote
Obsession & Digression || Duologue & Monologue
[ Listening to the Early 21st Century ]


Steve Hicken, The Rings of Saturn (2005) (cl/va duet; premiere)
Joshua Sellers, Dithyramb (1992, rev. 2008) (cl solo; premiere)
Karl Henning, Irreplaceable Doodles (2007) (cl solo)
Henning, Blue Shamrock (2002) (cl solo)
Henning, The Mousetrap (2007) (cl/va duet; premiere)

Karl Henning, clarinet
Peter Cama-Lekx, viola

Wednesday, 18 June 2008
12:15pm
The Cathedral Church of St Paul
138 Tremont Street, Boston


Rehearsal tonight with Peter
went very well; The Mousetrap will go very well indeed.

Now, if only I had time to practice my clarinet solo numbers  8)

karlhenning

Just for the record, Pete is still calling me "evil."

Few enough have earned the right to sling that adjective at me . . . .

karlhenning

Well, today is the day.

Here goes . . . .

karlhenning

In rehearsing The Mousetrap, Pete and I have found that it runs a bit longer than I'd expected earlier on. And it's a lunchtime recital, and quite a few fellow workers here at the office will turn out . . . so we can't have the concert running long. Regrettably, then, I'll strike Blue Shamrock from today's program, and figure on including it in a program later in the year.

J.Z. Herrenberg

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

DavidRoss

Wish I were there.  This reminds me that I've not listened to any Henning for awhile!
"Maybe the problem most of you have ... is that you're not listening to Barbirolli." ~Sarge

"The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money." ~Margaret Thatcher

karlhenning


karlhenning

Now it can be told:  I had a blast on Wednesday.  Pete is such a damned good player!  The performance of The Mousetrap, nothwithstanding its distance from Strict Perfection, amply justified my speculation in writing such a behemoth of a chamber work.

I hadn't thought about it in a while;  yet when I was asked the inevitable question, yesterday, about what tie-in the title has with the piece, my former thoughts had settled into something approaching coherence.

The title comes from Hamlet.  The play-within-the-play is The Murder of Gonzago, and yet when Claudius asks, Hamlet tells him the name is The Mousetrap.  Generally, in the background of the composition, were thoughts of how Shakespeare on one level, drew frankly from existing dramatic sources, but created something of excellence which is all his own;  and on another level, has a distinct dramatic event which is an organic piece of the whole.  Part of my thinking in the piece was, a new (for myself) approach to including 'found objects', and also variation in representing the object.

Now, I started writing a piece for Pete and me to play together almost exactly a year ago.  Originally it was going to be a relatively brief piece . . . and sparse and atmospheric.  But there wasn't the time to wrap up composition and get even an easy piece rehearsed in time for the recital, so I set the MS. down.

By the time I took it back up, I had decided on a somewhat grander plan.  Part of this may simply have been, that in my mind, it was a slow-sustained piece for a long time now, and compositionally I wanted to write a burst of activity to contrast.  Even in the early stages of the composition, I had included an 'organic quotation', though something pretty obscure and with sentimental value here at home, to make Maria and Irina smile . . . an allusion (though not, in The Mousetrap, in waltz-time) to a waltz used in the Gary Cooper / Audrey Hepburn movie Love in the Afternoon, called "Fascination."  Soon I was not only broadening the compositional scope, but making a game of composing an environment whose 'orbit' might capture various bits from the literature.  Part of what was going on, too, was likely the fact that in writing for viola, I had in mind Shostakovich's references elsewhere in both the Viola Sonata and the Fifteenth Symphony.  And my own fascination with enlarging the piece was partly a matter of building on the Studies in Impermanence . . . thinking that, having managed a block of 20 minutes with a solo wind instrument, it must after all be an even easier accomplishment with two instruments.

Imperfections of execution notwithstanding, response was warm, from listeners with a variety of musical background.

A friend of mine has served as a recording engineer intern at Symphony Hall this past season (and she is going to go back to school for more studies this fall).  She very graciously fetched in her gear and recorded the recital;  she sounds confident in the quality of the resulting production.  Before I actually get my own hands on the recording, she is going to clean up such things as, the rumble of the Red Line trains regularly passing underneath the Cathedral . . . .

karlhenning

Oh! And on a separate matter, while she cannot guarantee anything until she has the disc before her, there is the possibility that the recording of the premiere of the Passion that Ed gave me, might conceivably be cleaned up a bit.

karlhenning

Artist at play:



Artist at work: