Henning's Headquarters

[Karl Henning]

Hah!  Good morning, and happy Friday!

[Karl Henning]

Okay: the piece I conducted:

http://www.youtube.com/v/JRpoz1nHfxg

[Karl Henning]

And my own piece:

http://www.youtube.com/v/xcGj8e6yw44

[Karl Henning]

Good heavens, Lenny foretells GMG, half a century earlier:

But what is the true tempo? No two conductors agree; and if you should listen to six different performances of the same piece by six different conductors,  you are likely to hear six different tempi. And yet, each one of these conductors is convinced that his tempo is the only true one. So we are left with a situation where conductors are become mortal enemies over a tempo, and where music-lovers wrangle endlessly about their favorite conductors.

My emendation would be, that a conductor needn't be convinced that his tempo is the only true one. But certainly a conductor must settle on a tempo which he feels is perfectly right.

Now, the wonderful thing about conducting a piece and having the composer part of the ensemble, is the composer embracing the rehearsal process as part of discovering his or her sense of his or her own piece. For weeks, I rehearsed Sarah Riskind's Hariyu with a fellow composer's respect for her metronome marking. But before the last full rehearsal (which is to say, only a week and a half before the concert) she told me that she felt she wanted the bulk of the piece to go a little faster. Now, I completely understood that. I understood that the tempo as she originally conceived it was the ideal tempo which she might expect to achieve with the musical forces of the first performance. And here with Triad, we have a group of singers for whom that tempo was not (after a month and a half of rehearsal) any challenge;  Sarah was starting to miss an edgy excitement which she wanted in the piece. If this is starting to sound like the difference of opinion between myself and others about how the Emerson Quartet play Bartók & Shostakovich, it is no accident. There is nothing wrong with that "ease": it means that the performers have chops.

Well, just as I am a composer in the group who would want to the conductor of my piece to do as I wish with my music, if Sarah tells me she would like a faster tempo, I am there to serve her musical purpose. and, certain it is, that are singers were capable of fulfilling that demand.

All this to say that as a conductor, my search for "the one true tempo," as our Lenny put it, was necessarily modulated by the desire of the composer. Even when that desire proved at variance with the score.

And if this serves to illustrate how The Score is a work-in-progress, rather than engraved in marble, so much the better.

[Karl Henning]

Op.11 #3 (last of the five to be engraved)

I originally composed the "source piece" when at Wooster;  I never notated it down then, just played it whenever I sat down to a piano (maybe).  So I am certain I never showed it to Jack (or Paul Schwartz, as I may indeed have started/finished the piece the year of Jack's sabbatical).  I only troubled to notate it as many as 10 years later when I was in Petersburg, and figured on using it in the (as I at first schemed it) 11-piece suite, Little Towns, Low Countries.  We might say that I never notated it purely as I originally composed it, for as soon as I decided to make it part of this larger suite, I made an effort (and maybe I worked it too hard) to make it more "pianistic";  originally, I always played the "A" material throughout the piece in the block-chord chorale form in which it appears at m.45 (the recapitulation).  The subsequent coy lapse into Satie, I discovered only in those days in Petersburg;  Lord help me, I still think it about works.


I am even more seriously considering "re-storing" the original 11-movement Suite as a permissible alternative, since in my MS. from Petersburg, this number ends with an attacca marking to another piece entirely, To Melt From a Distance, a peculiar piece which I remember being very proud and fond of back when I first wrote it . . . so it must be time to revisit and engrave that one . . . .


A "permissible alternative," because the five pieces make up quite a nice little Op.11, although (per my old doubt that the lot worked all together) the Petersburg Nocturne alone is longer than the first four pieces all together.  But . . . I do not think that has ever bothered me . . ..

[Karl Henning]

The MIDI extrusions of the entire suite are now a Playlist on YouTube, for those who dare.

[Sean]

Hi Karl, your Out in the sun has some interesting thought and counterpoint, and I like the open air Copland overtones. All very impressive, even if as you know I have issues with any such efforts.

[Karl Henning]

I appreciate it, thanks, Sean.

[North Star]

And my own piece:

http://www.youtube.com/v/xcGj8e6yw44

Listened to the whole concert, very well done indeed. I enjoyed the Henning, Riskind, Siegfried & Turner pieces in particular.

[Karl Henning]

Thanks!  O miei dolci animali is perhaps the best piece of Charles's I've heard yet, delicious harmonies.

[North Star]

Thanks!  O miei dolci animali is perhaps the best piece of Charles's I've heard yet, delicious harmonies.

Yes!

BTW, enjoyed that Satie jab in your Op. 11 no. 3 (I think, not sure if I remember the number correctly).

E: And, looking at your previous post now, I see that I remembered the number right. Didn't need to read that post to spot it, though. 

Op.11 #3 (last of the five to be engraved)

The subsequent coy lapse into Satie, I discovered only in those days in Petersburg;  Lord help me, I still think it about works.

[Karl Henning]

Thanks! 

[Sean]

I can't comment in compositional terms too much but it's attractive and clear thinking stuff! I did composition as a teenager and found it far too much like hard work... At least for my disposition.

Also applied for a US universities PhD programs years ago but my masters grades messed all that up, much lower than my bachelors; I'd have liked to have been in your sort of position or with your connections, as it seems to me.

[Florestan]

Out in the Sun
Pendulum New Music
https://www.youtube.com/v/n-95rYkIbmE

My favorite Henning work (well, together with an a capella piece based on a Coptic Marianic hymn whose name I can´t remember right now). 

[North Star]

My favorite Henning work (well, together with an a capella piece based on a Coptic Marianic hymn whose name I can´t remember right now). 

You could always refresh your memory here.

[Karl Henning]

My favorite Henning work (well, together with an a capella piece based on a Coptic Marianic hymn whose name I can´t remember right now). 

Nuhro?  I'm hoping we might do that with Triad.

[Karl Henning]

Well, I've managed to engrave To Melt From a Distance.  I have no distance from this one, which is astonishing, as it's more than 20 years since I wrote it, and it must be almost 20 years since I played through it last.  At the time I wrote it, I lived with it a lot, played it through at the piano many times.  The idea was to "stress-test" the piece, see if there were anything that bothered me with the repetition.  But I just liked it better and better, but whether that as the successful result of the test, or defiance of the test, I may never know.

In the back of my mind, I've wanted to revisit the piece, and here I have done at last.  And this is the no distance part—I still love it.  I almost have a feeling that half the pianists I know would think it irredeemable rubbish, but I am not sure I care.


Now . . . to play it in immediate succession after The Myth of Movement I: Chorale, to see if I like that combination well enough to reconsider a full Little Towns, Low Countries . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Well, the The Myth of Movement I: Chorale attacca into To Melt From a Distance works all right, but I do feel that its place in the middle of the Op.11 Pictures Only I Can See is notably stronger.

[Karl Henning]

This morning, looking through my papers (such as I still have with me) from the Tallinn/St Petersburg epoch, I found a one-page MS. of a finished piano piece, of whose existence I had entirely forgot.  I am not claiming that it is The Great Piano Piece of My Generation (the fact that the composer himself lost sight of the piece entirely, would probably make such a claim a non-starter);  but it is reasonably lovely, and not quite like any of my other short piano pieces . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Well, so here it is: