Henning's Headquarters

[karlhenning]

Hah! Yes, I got the complimentary copy at the office yesterday.

[karlhenning]

Violist Peter Lekx (with whom I've played The Mousetrap, among other pieces) is back in town for the BEMF; we've tentatively scheduled a lunch on Wednesday for catching up.

[karlhenning]

Alas, the week's come and gone, Peter had to reschedule because of a conflicting rehearsal, and the reschedule never clicked.

[karlhenning]

My electric guitarist co-worker says it will be August before we can sit together for a composer's tutorial on e-guitar.

Since I have no deadline, that suits fine.

[Cato]

Resolved: Karl Henning shall now be known officially and for posterity as Karl "Two Hats" Henning! 

Check him out:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,2112.2060.html

[karlhenning]

A Cato sighting!

[Cato]

For those who did not understand the reference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLjS3gzHetA

[DavidW]

Karl did you write any of your music while wearing your hat?

[karlhenning]

I'm thinking of buying a third hat...

[karlhenning]

I've been caught up in Seventh Re-Tagging Heaven . . . but the (separate, &) hot news is that we should have the recording of How to Tell very soon . . . .

[karlhenning]

No burning news.  Busy enough when at home, that I haven't yet downloaded How to Tell myself (shocking state of affairs, really).

Here's a story for you:

Thursday, I'm on the train coming home after an evening at the MFA.  Or, actually, off the train, and approaching my car.  A fellow former-passenger asks me for a ride to the next stop (he had made the mistake of getting off one stop early). "Sure," I said. "I understand completely; I only just caught myself to get off the train here at this stop."

Turns out this chap is a clarinetist, teaches at Berklee, and has a clarinet choir.  Small world, says I; I'm a clarinetist and composer . . . .

"Do you have anything for clarinet choir?"

So, this morning, I've found the Finale files for the clarinet choir version of the Canticle of St Nicholas.  Something I hadn't touched since probably 1998.  I had prepared it for a Dutch clarinet choir, but honestly, I never heard back from them.  So, of course, I expect nothing : )

[karlhenning]

. . . Here's a story for you:

Thursday, I'm on the train coming home after an evening at the MFA.  Or, actually, off the train, and approaching my car.  A fellow former-passenger asks me for a ride to the next stop (he had made the mistake of getting off one stop early). "Sure," I said. "I understand completely; I only just caught myself to get off the train here at this stop."

Turns out this chap is a clarinetist, teaches at Berklee, and has a clarinet choir.  Small world, says I; I'm a clarinetist and composer . . . .

"Do you have anything for clarinet choir?"

So, this morning, I've found the Finale files for the clarinet choir version of the Canticle of St Nicholas.  Something I hadn't touched since probably 1998.  I had prepared it for a Dutch clarinet choir, but honestly, I never heard back from them.  So, of course, I expect nothing : )

Gosh, it's almost like a sort of diary entry.  These Finale files (score and parts) may well be my earliest efforts at a chamber piece in the software . . . I see that I had problems with the lower auxiliary clarinet parts (they're still in bass clef, somehow, for one thing) . . . so if I heard nothing back from the clarinet choir in the Netherlands, it may well be because the parts I sent gave no indication that I was a serious, professional composer.

As to the present task . . . the easiest thing would be to export XML from the Finale, and send that (and pdfs) to my publisher.  But my Finale seems to have gotten buggy, and the XML export is failing. (I suppose I may need to reinstall Finale in order to mend that function, which is sort of a funny thought, really.)  But, on the lines of this score being one of my first efforts, notation-software-wise, my use of slurs with tied notes in the Finale Ur-text is wrong, and wants correcting, anyway.  So in all respects, the best thing is to rebuild the score in Sibelius.  I started that last night, got some more work done this morning . . . should have it ready this evening after I return from the Museum.

For all its being such an old piece of mine (composed the A section material at an upright piano in the apartment in St Petersburg, long ago) . . . I am gratified to say that I still like the Canticle.

Really, that is not narcissism, but artistic relief . . . it's a great feeling not to be artistically embarrassed by a "student" work . . . .

[Sergeant Rock]

Turns out this chap is a clarinetist, teaches at Berklee, and has a clarinet choir.  Small world, says I; I'm a clarinetist and composer . . . .

Fascinating. I love "novelistic" coincidences. Reminds me of this:

"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
                                                                                                    --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

[karlhenning]

Yes, I remember enjoying the film, and only afterwards (I think) I read the book itself.

Thanks, Sarge!

And . . . al que quiere . . . .

Edit :: wrong pdf removed

[karlhenning]

I may have said this before, but it would have been a while ago, and so it may not be strictly redundant:

When I started writing the piece that would become the Canticle of St Nicholas, I set out writing a piece for four-part choir; this is what is now the A material of the finished Canticle.  I wrote it quite "abstractly," didn't have any text in mind, and I was concentrated purely on "managing notes." As work progressed, the thought of a text (or, strictly speaking, the thought that, the more definite the shape the music was taking, the less probable it would prove that I would "find" a text to go with it) began to nag more and more.  I sloughed off these naggings with the vague idea of just setting the word Alleluia (an idea I wound up abandoning for this piece, though I took the idea back up later).

Anyway, at the time that I returned to the states from Petersburg, this sketch for-choir-but-it-wouldn't-really-be was among the musical papers I brought along with me.  Not long after arriving in Massachusetts, I got to know Bill Goodwin, organist and choir director at First Church in Woburn.  At some point, there was a service for which he was going to engage a brass quintet, and he made me welcome to furnish some suitable piece or two.  The idea crossed my mind (and liked me well) of taking this it-isn't-going-to-be-a-choir-piece,-anyway sketch and adapting it for brass quintet (and even if I had made the sketch into a choral piece, Bill's choir wouldn't have been able to manage it, God bless them).  But I should need to finish it properly.

I had found a few Vaughan Williams hymns in the Congregational Hymnal at Bill's church, and one idle evening I had taken the tune from one of these (I must have made note of it at some point, but right now, it entirely eludes me which) and I wrote my own quasi-RVW modal harmonization of it for a musical exercise.  This hymn tune (and my new harmonization) was in four, but my nascent brass piece was in three . . . so I used some of Procrustes' methods to fit that harmonization into a B section of the piece, made my way back to a brief sort-of-recap, and . . . probably I was a few days tinkering with the ending, I shouldn't be surprised.

Since I had started the piece thinking (a little too vaguely, as it turned out) of a sacred choral work, I decided to christen the final piece a Canticle.  And since I had written the original sketch in St Petersburg (and may very well have started thinking the notes while visiting the lovely Baroque church of St Nicholas), voilà.

The quintet took quite flatteringly to the piece;  they played it nicely for the service . . . they're a group which basically play for hire, and play what they're hired to, so I had no expectations that they would "own" the piece.  I forget why exactly I took the effort to arrange it for organ;  not sure that version has ever actually been played (though it is available at Lux Nova Press).  Andrew Levin, who commissioned me for the orchestral winds piece I Sang to the Sky, and Day Broke, later wanted a piece for string orchestra, so I adapted the Canticle quite readily (which was the occasion for Lux Nova contracting the piece); I must have a recording of that string performance somewhere (not sure if I managed to include it in The Henning Box).

This clarinet choir version (as mentioned) I sort of only half baked; it's only fully ready now.

[karlhenning]

And . . . al que quiere . . . .

Bah! This was the old Finale score . . . I meant to attach the spiffy new Sibelius score (which reflects a couple of enhancements to the arrangement).

Will see to that tonight . . . .

[karlhenning]

I do prefer Sibelius, a great deal. And I resisted changing for years, because of all the 'flight-time' I'd invested in Finale . . . .

[Cato]

I listened mentally to the score last night, down to letter "D" and believe it should sound quite nice for "Saint Nicholas" !    0:)

Occasional open fourths/fifths and 6/4 chords hint at a "long-ago" atmosphere.  Of special note is the piquant melancholy found in bars 31-38: note the double open fifths A-E-Ab-Eb played in a decrescendo. 

Very nice touch there!

[karlhenning]

Although I do not think that the symphony was at all uppermost in my thinking at the time I was generating the material . . . mulling the Canticle now has me thinking that I could never have written the piece in quite this way, before I became so taken with the Sibelius Sixth.

[Cato]

Although I do not think that the symphony was at all uppermost in my thinking at the time I was generating the material . . . mulling the Canticle now has me thinking that I could never have written the piece in quite this way, before I became so taken with the Sibelius Sixth.

That is interesting, since I detected a kind of modality in the opening pages.