Henning's Headquarters

[North Star]

And, YHM, Karlo!

Cheers, looks & sounds good. 

[Karl Henning]

Henningmusick imminent!

[Karl Henning]

Dratted Tapatalk! Sideways photo ....

[Cato]

Dratted Tapatalk! Sideways photo ....

So is that Johann Friedrich Henning? 

[Karl Henning]

I must post, though it break James's heart . . .

So is that Johann Friedrich Henning? 

No!  Frederick Bruce Henning 

The quartet sang beautifully (the Stravinsky The Dove descending breaks the air was especially delightful).  They performed my Annabel Lee even better than the première performance, but you must take my word for it, as I do not expect there was a recording.  (I originally intended to bring my device . . . I did not so much modify my intention, as allow the day's extra demands to distract me.) (There is rather a long-shot of a chance that Carola's husband recorded the concert;  but I saw him with children, not with his laptop.)

It was a warm day, not unpleasantly so out of doors, but the atmosphere inside the historic Loring-Greenough house was rather stifling;  it must have been taxing to sing with as much energy as they did!

I was asked to stand to acknowledge applause after my piece;  at least three members of the audience separately made a point of telling me how much they liked the piece.  One gentleman particularly told me that I had managed to get into the heart of the poem.

It was a bittersweet occasion;  it was the tenth anniversary of the Libella Quartet . . . but Carola's family are moving to London soon, so it is more or less the break-up of the group for the foreseeable future.  I did tell Carola that, should she have any trouble finding a marimbist in London, there is a piano version of The Mysterious Fruit.

[Karl Henning]

Tonight is our Where do we go from here? Triad meeting.  Whatever else happens, supporters have already exceeded our Kickstarter goal (and there are 14 days yet in the campaign).

[Luke]

Well, it is done. I have not actually changed even a note, but it looks different notationally than my Ur-text, because I have finally formally recognized in the notation what I had always done when playing through the piece.  Is it any good?  I certainly still like it;  but I do wonder if I am not simply too wound up in the piece, not to like it, to care for it.  Why?  The partial answers include:  My formal schooling was done, and I was able again to do some musical things which some, at least, of my instructors would have challenged, and I should not have had any answer better than, "Well, I think I like it."  The beauty of St Petersburg, especially at the time of the White Nights.  The overwhelming charm and command of my wife's artwork, and exulting in her talent.  The agreeable haze of being newly wed, which (again) has an extra magical element in the city of the White Nights.

So, whether or not it is really any good, here is my Just-Another-I-IV-V Tune.

Downloaded, printed and played through as my last act at school today, after an long, long afternoon of rehearsing, to prepare me for the equally long, long drive home. Really beautiful, the calm yet intriguing harmonic journey judged with such expertise - just the tonic required! Resonant and gorgeous sonority, too...

[Karl Henning]

Downloaded, printed and played through as my last act at school today, after an long, long afternoon of rehearsing, to prepare me for the equally long, long drive home. Really beautiful, the calm yet intriguing harmonic journey judged with such expertise - just the tonic required! Resonant and gorgeous sonority, too...

Many thanks!  I've sent it to the pianist who accompanied Dana in the Viola Sonata, too.

[Karl Henning]

My most estimable colleague Peter H. Bloom has put me in touch with a student of his who (a) performs as part of a fl/cl/pf trio (hence my reaching out to her to purchase that version of the Fragments of « Morning Has Broken »), and (b) leads (and/or performs in) a double woodwind quintet, so I have offered to write something . . . .

This was a ball I dropped, after an initial exchange of e-mail messages.  I've reached out anew today.

I have heard again from the flutist!  Hope is alive!

[Karl Henning]

On a roll here . . . this one I wrote while yet in Buffalo/Rochester.


I originally titled it Half-Information (Innocence), but I later considered the title too cynical by half, and unsuited to the music.

[Karl Henning]

Revisiting Spring in Her Step, I am puzzled at my own history with it.  I certainly liked it, believed in it as I was writing it (and in some ways, I was 'stretching' compositionally with it).  But at some point soon after, I wasn't sure I liked it much at all . . . and that was sort of my mental default for decades (not that I actively thought of the piece much, if at all).  Brushing it up now in Sibelius, I think it charming (as I meant, underneath the overachieving working-title), and I am smacking myself (only figuratively) for poo-pooing the piece all these years.

[Karl Henning]

Thinking about the Petersburg Nocturne ... at both UVa (where my instructors were helpful and mindful of my development, of my need to acquire the tools) and UB (where the flogging of New Music had its undeniably toxic aspects) I was encouraged to stretch my compositional technique.  In Petersburg, after my formal schooling was done (but I was still composing a large piece which would need to serve for a doctoral dissertation), I was mentally and artistically refreshed by the thought that I was now free to write something quite simple. But that reflection was also stimulating, as I now had an awareness of just what a challenge it is to write something both simple, and good.

So even as I made gradual progress on the dissertation (and amused my artistically accomplished wife & mom-in-law with my charts, schemata, and tables of numbers), I wrote and shaped the occasional short, simple piano piece, generally keeping the music more or less within my undeniably modest keyboard technique.

At this remove in time, it relieves me, rather, to find that I managed to write these simple things which, I think, yet breathe life, where I find myself in serious doubt whether any of the music of the dissertation is salvageable. Which suggests to me that these innocuous and apparently trivial piano pieces are in fact (in some ways) the most important things I've written, since they were the work through whose making I learnt to be at ease, by being my musical self, without needing to mold myself to some external demand.

[Luke]

Very interesting, that, Karl. I have had similar feelings about some of my music - in my case that the most important pieces (important for my subsequent development more than in their own right, perhaps) have perhaps been the ones where I've just allowed things to happen without constraints and without too much planning.They allowed me to be my own 'musical self' and thus, after a while, to discover exactly what that actually is. Interesting to see that something vaguely similar happened in your much more accomplished and productive case.

[Karl Henning]

I appreciate your kind reception of my ramblings!

I haven't quite fathomed my "learnt disaffection" for Spring in Her Step . . . but maybe that will become illumined for me as I finish the fresh edition.  Or, I may content myself with the fact that, now, I just enjoy it again.

[Cato]

Which suggests to me that these innocuous and apparently trivial piano pieces are in fact (in some ways) the most important things I've written, since they were the work through whose making I learnt to be at ease, by being my musical self, without needing to mold myself to some external demand.

Very interesting, that, Karl. I have had similar feelings about some of my music - in my case that the most important pieces (important for my subsequent development more than in their own right, perhaps) have perhaps been the ones where I've just allowed things to happen without constraints and without too much planning.They allowed me to be my own 'musical self' and thus, after a while, to discover exactly what that actually is. Interesting to see that something vaguely similar happened in your much more accomplished and productive case.

Such are the creative journeys of the artist: not only do you discover what you are as a composer, in conjunction with what you want to become, you also discover by definition what you are not, and what you do not want to become.

And following the inner intuition - assuming that the gift has been well nurtured - is invariably the correct way.

I appreciate your kind reception of my ramblings!

I haven't quite fathomed my "learnt disaffection" for Spring in Her Step . . .

This is a not unknown phenomenon: the artist views early things as "juvenilia" unworthy of sharing space with the later works.  And then, decades later, the creator wonders why he had ever rejected these earlier accomplishments, as if God could disdain the miracle of atoms and only appreciate their later accretions.

[Karl Henning]

May it have been that I needed to write the Passion and the Viola Sonata, in order to give Spring in Her Step leave to be itself, perhaps?

[Karl Henning]

Well, and now I wonder if part of it is . . . I wrote it, liking the sound, and how it feels in the hands, but — and I am thinking of Luke's fascination with manuscript — did I dislike the look of it on my manuscript page?

Is that just hopelessly bizarre?

[Cato]

May it have been that I needed to write the Passion and the Viola Sonata, in order to give Spring in Her Step leave

Well, and now I wonder if part of it is . . . I wrote it, liking the sound, and how it feels in the hands, but — and I am thinking of Luke's fascination with manuscript — did I dislike the look of it on my manuscript page?

I think, yes, the later accomplishments shine their own light upon the earlier ones.

And quite possibly "yes" for the "look of the manuscript."  Teachers will tell you that one must beware of a paper where the handwriting is beautiful, but the content is lacking, and avoid being biased by execrable penmanship, whose content - perversely almost - is most excellent.   0:)

[Luke]

This is all fascinating reading - the sort of thing I've mused on wrt to my own compositions many a time.

I have to admit there are plenty of pieces of mine which I've fallen out of love with. In fact I'm often rather ashamed of them, I don't recognise the person who wrote them, or even think much of him, either... sometimes I do come round to them, but by no means all the time. In fact in some respects I'd rather draw a veil over most of what I wrote before about 2006/7 and some of what I've written subsequently, too. Awful, isn't it?

Re the question of being influenced by the look of the manuscript - in my case I do tend to find that my best music also looks best, but I think that's because my orthography is more expressive, excited and free when the ideas are flowing most freely. Even the feel of creating the music on paper, physically, is involved here. I suspect that Sibelius has really hampered my composing, actually, because it tempts me away from that initial pen-on-paper exploration too soon, and that is something I need to remedy. No time to talk more about it now, unfortunately...

[Karl Henning]

On a roll here . . . this one I wrote while yet in Buffalo/Rochester.

I originally titled it Half-Information (Innocence), but I later considered the title too cynical by half, and unsuited to the music.

Here 'tis done.