Henning's Headquarters

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

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J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: lukeottevanger on August 26, 2008, 02:43:05 PM
I've just had the immense pleasure of listening to Karl's Passion and I'm simply staggered by it. I've just overloaded Karl's PM box with a series of missives as I ponder on just some of the many and various striking qualities of the  piece, but essentially I think it is a consummately realised, perfectly paced, and above all hauntingly beautiful piece which Karl must be immensely proud of. The large-scale structure is underpinned with the most wonderful sense of harmony and harmonic type, and an ability to slip between these types completely naturally. The spellbinding chorus during the crucifixion is almost unbearable, with its aching augmented intervals, its melismas, its softly droning lower voices - I expected it would be when I first saw the score a few months ago. The restrained and sonorous beauty of the closing pages, though, really only comes home listening to a recording, and again it's bursting with subtle touches - like the soprano/alto doubling on the last page - which passed me by when I read the score but which seem inspired now I hear the music in the flesh. Which puts me to shame somewhat, I feel.

Thanks for sharing this piece, Karl - it's one of the very very few 'pieces-by-a-bloke-I-know-off-the-internet' that I've acquired which is worthy of a much, much greater hearing. Most of the others are by Henning too, FWIW.....  ;D

After listening to the piece a second time with the score I cannot but agree with your excellent 'review', Luke. What a wonderful piece. Can't get it out of my head... A good performance = not a dry eye in the house.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

Lilas Pastia

#581
I listened to the Henning works once and wanted to share my views with Karl privately, but his PM box is full. So, for the benefit of ell, here's the message he'll never get:

I'll listen a second time this weekend. I have very litlle listening time, there always seems to be some errand to do, most of them for others, but I'll sit down and concentrate. First impression is :

Doodles sounds both sophisticated and saucy, with a "messiaenesque influence" which I like). I also like its length.

Mousetrap
surprised me. I didn't hear most of the quotations (the Lanner-Petrushka pretty much leaps out though, with spendid effect).  But its length is one of its most intriguing aspects. I never for a moment felt any fuzziness of structure, no aimless rambling. I really liked the piece.

The Passion proved tougher, at least for the first 20 minutes. I was puzzled by all the seemingly identical 'secco' repetitions of the same short quasi-gregorian phrase. It creates an impression of monotony and gradually instils a sense of pain and resignation. Then with the crucifixion, there's a subtle change of atmosphere. The men's droning tones create a 'heaviness' that carries resignation and pain to much deeper levels. But I don't want to say more at this point because these are just first impressions.

Be patient with me my friend, I don't laud or criticize lightly. I have to live with the works some more to get at the 'communication', or 'reviewing' stage.  ;)

Edit to correct typos and the spellin in Karl's name, which I had written without its proper capital H :D

karlhenning

No worries, André, take your time (and thank you, for taking the time!)

I am delighted that The Mousetrap has found such a simpatico audience!  A number of occasions, I've listened to it several times in a row, at first to sort of pick the performance apart, so that I know what to repair for next time (if I can find another violist bold enough to undertake the work, or, perhaps more likely, to play again with Pete when he visits Boston).  So it started as intensive diagnostics . . . but I do keep listening to the piece.  I do think that the music works, and that I am not merely indulging in a proprietary fondness for the piece.

(That's my hope, anyway!)

Wanderer

Karl, I haven't listened to your new pieces with the concentration I'd like, but, even so, my first impressions are very positive. I reserve further comments for later on. Thanks again for making these available to us.  :)

karlhenning

Thanks, Tasos!

Separately . . . tonight I found a MS. piano piece which I have been missing . . . for years, really.

Cheers!

J.Z. Herrenberg

Latest statistics:

Irreplaceable Doodles, downloaded 35 times

The Mousetrap, downloaded 45 times

The Passion according to St John, downloaded 63 times
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

karlhenning

A few listeners have asked after the version of the text used in the Passion;  it was a 'given', and not the version I should have selected on my own.  (One old friend responded, "Do I hear you singing police? Puh-leeeeze.")

Barbarisms and all, here is the text which was given me to set.

karlhenning

Thanks to a friend's kind inquiry, I rooted through papers last night and at last scared up a piano solo MS. which I'd been missing for years.  It's an easy-ish piece, and I wanted (actually) to play it, when there was a need for Plan B for a recital in the spring of last year.  (Couldn't find it at the time, and thus was born Plan C  ;))

lukeottevanger

Quote from: karlhenning on September 09, 2008, 04:31:03 AM
Thanks to a friend's kind inquiry, I rooted through papers last night and at last scared up a piano solo MS. which I'd been missing for years.  It's an easy-ish piece, and I wanted (actually) to play it, when there was a need for Plan B for a recital in the spring of last year.  (Couldn't find it at the time, and thus was born Plan C  ;))

Interesting...

Lilas Pastia

I found that listening with the text enhanced my response to the music. The verse by verse chanted narrative, seemingly simple and predictable during the first few minutes becomes poignant as the story progresses and prepares the ground for a crucifixion/entombment that is almost wrenching. The tessitura widens markedly, modulations and vocal effects (droning voices ) are introduced for the first time to quite dramatic effect. All the while keeping an almost distantiated stance. Very moving. I certainly wish it will be taken up by professional ensembles.

karlhenning


karlhenning

Quite an old piano piece in MS:

The Sleep-Pavane at the Foot of Frozen Niagara, Opus 11/4

Catison

Quote from: karlhenning on September 10, 2008, 04:47:37 AM
Quite an old piano piece in MS:

The Sleep-Pavane at the Foot of Frozen Niagara, Opus 11/4

You should add, "To be played 897 times".
-Brett

karlhenning

Oh, that would be vexatious, wouldn't it?

karlhenning

Hmm, revisiting old piano pieces . . . Sitting down to the task of scanning these pages, is the first I've sat still in the company of these pieces for, well, some years.  I'm relieved to say that it got me to thinking.  The distance in time from the actual creation of the pieces may help me see some things more clearly, or it may indulge me in some fictionilization.  Whichever the case, this is what I've been thinking . . . .

When I went first to Tallinn (and thence to St Petersburg), I had finished my coursework and my doctoral qualification exams at Buffalo.  To wrap up the doctorate, the only task remaining was to finish composing my dissertation (a large piece for three soli voices and symphonic band, some 40 minutes of music, on five texts of my own writing, some of them even presentable to some degree).  Before going abroad, I had finished composing two of the middle movements, setting the briefest of the five texts.  I had a start on the actual work, I had a plan for the entire piece, I was confident, I was not in any worry or urgency;  and I had the confidence of a very patient and 'hands-off' dissertation advisor, who was content to let me write what I pleased, how I pleased.

There I found myself, suddenly in an invigoratingly different day-to-day culture (and in St Petersburg, in one of the artistic and cultural marvels of the world).  I gradually realized (what my head knew to some degree as I physically left Buffalo) that my days in composition studios were done;  that I no longer needed to write at all under the consideration of how this or that instructor wished me to write (though that was never an entirely bad thing, to be sure), but that I now suddenly had the freedom to write however and whatever I liked, for whatever reasons I found personally plausible and applicable.

Now, it is possible that the practically negligible volume of composing I did during my first year in Tallinn was a matter of laziness;  or a matter of just sitting, absorbing and observing the foreign environment in which I was delighted to have found myself.  Both these must be true to a degree.

But another dynamic at work was:  all through my higher schooling, there was in my composition tutelage some degree of tension (seldom a "negative" sort of tension, just what it was) between the instructor's encouragement that I write more quickly, and write more;  and my own desire, not simply to absorb indiscriminately the various bits of musical information, but to work a little deliberately, and to find out what I wanted to do with it all (or even, to decide if with some of it I did not want to have much to do).  I don't have any quarrel with that tension;  I learnt a lot through those years.

But now I was discovering that I was in a changed state;  that there was not this tension referring to anyone outside;  and musically I felt I was 'settling' a bit.

In general, then . . . I was writing these piano pieces (and the "Barbara Allen" variations, Gaze Transfixt) at a time when I ought to have been finishing my dissertation;  and eventually I reached a point where I set aside some incomplete piano sketches, when I understood that it had stopped being an 'orientation exercise', and had perhaps become a 'distraction'.  (And apart from it being the first large piece I had attempted, and therefore my 'workday' was a little tentative, I think I remember the continuing work on the dissertation going at a reasonable speed, and with reasonable efficiency . . . I don't remember tossing out many sketches.)

I continue to be musically fond of these pieces.  It was a time when I wrote most of them to fall more or less under my own fingers (limited though my piano technique has always been . . . and "limited" may well be putting it charitably).  Most of these pieces I have never managed to interest a proper pianist in;  perhaps for the very reason that they must offer scarcely any technical challenge.  One exception is Lutosławski's Lullaby, which was once played in San Diego, though before I knew anyone there (I think).  And that is partly why I wound up undertaking composition of the "Barbara Allen" variations . . . and yet, not all that unlike my much later organ Toccata, I seem to have overshot technically, and written a piece — not at all impossible, of course — but requiring enough application and practice, that no proper pianist has embraced it, either.

karlhenning

Quote from: Catison on September 10, 2008, 05:04:55 AM
You should add, "To be played 897 times".

Here's another aspect of that time in my musical life which I haven't thought about for years . . . but I had to teach myself how to use repeat signs.  I don't mean notationally, but compositionally.  Much though I learnt in my years in the composition studio, I do not remember being encouraged to use repeat-signs  ;)

karlhenning

Okay, the dead past is dead.  At last I feel I am over the mourning period for St Paul's having slapped me silly.  I can get back to work.

I'm starting to sketch music to get to finishing the ballet.  And a trumpeter has re-established contact, and asked me for an unaccompanied piece.

J.Z. Herrenberg

Latest statistics:

Irreplaceable Doodles, downloaded 35 times

The Mousetrap, downloaded 47 times

The Passion according to St John, downloaded 66 times
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

karlhenning

mahler10 has likely tried a second time on the Passion;  it seems that his earlier download cut the file off before the end.

I wonder if anyone else had trouble?

And Sara seemed to have some click issues (did I send you a bad disc, Johan?)

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: karlhenning on September 17, 2008, 06:12:55 AM
mahler10 has likely tried a second time on the Passion;  it seems that his earlier download cut the file off before the end.

I wonder if anyone else had trouble?

And Sara seemed to have some click issues (did I send you a bad disc, Johan?)

No, the disc is fine, I haven't had any 'click issues'... Which piece(s)?
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato