Henning's Headquarters

[Mirror Image]

In October, Frank Grimes and I will play The Mousetrap ... so we ought to start rehearsing, come to think on it.

Sounds good, Karl. Will this be recorded?

[Karl Henning]

Sounds good, Karl. Will this be recorded?

Yes, indeed.

[Karl Henning]

Last night was a WOIR event.  A loose cartel of musicians here in Boston, with a subset of some good musical friends of mine, established this tradition of a "festival" of various parties/events for Labor Day Weekend, the Weekend of Ill Repute.  Last night marks the second occasion in as many years that I made a point of accepting Dan and Bobbie's invitation to a Saturday evening barbecue in their backyard.  (Dan and Bobbie, you may recall, together saved last year's performance of the Op.129.)

I caught up a bit with Alastair, who works at a music distribution shop here in Somerville, and he asked about my publisher.  The shop, Yesterday Service, likes to keep the music of local Boston composers on hand (Alastair said).  So I am going to introduce Lux Nova and Alastair via e-mail, and Let the Good Times Roll!


And I am giddy with nostalgic delight, as I seem to have found on Facebook my fellow clarinetist from Wooster, John Washam.

[Cato]

Last night was a WOIR event.  A loose cartel of musicians here in Boston, with a subset of some good musical friends of mine, established this tradition of a "festival" of various parties/events for Labor Day Weekend, the Weekend of Ill Repute.  Last night marks the second occasion in as many years that I made a point of accepting Dan and Bobbie's invitation to a Saturday evening barbecue in their backyard.  (Dan and Bobbie, you may recall, together saved last year's performance of the Op.129.)

I caught up a bit with Alastair, who works at a music distribution shop here in Somerville, and he asked about my publisher.  The shop, Yesterday Service, likes to keep the music of local Boston composers on hand (Alastair said).  So I am going to introduce Lux Nova and Alastair via e-mail, and Let the Good Times Roll!


And I am giddy with nostalgic delight, as I seem to have found on Facebook my fellow clarinetist from Wooster, John Washam.

Let the Good Times Roll indeed!  Is WOIR a classical radio station?  I could not find a website about it!  If so, do they broadcast concerts by Boston composers?

[Karl Henning]

No, no, it's the acronym for "Weekend of Ill Repute," which these wild ones have applied to the Labor Day weekend.

[Cato]

No, no, it's the acronym for "Weekend of Ill Repute," which these wild ones have applied to the Labor Day weekend.

Well, that would still not be a bad acronym/broadcast logo for a classical music station!  0:)

"W-O-I-R, your all-Schoenberg, all-Carter all-Xenakis station all the time!" 

[Karl Henning]

Makes me a little nostalgic . . . the first I ever heard the Berg Kammerkonzert, it was a radio broadcast.  I wonder if you'd ever hear that piece over the radio again.

Separately: got a very nice e-mail message from a former teacher about Oxygen Footprint.  And just this morning, e-mail from Peter in San Diego informing me that he has good friends in the Symphony who have formed just such a trio, too.

So . . . maybe!

[Cato]

Great news above!

And I need to express publicly that Karl has been very generously spending some of his time on creating a nice score from a manuscript of mine from the early 1970's.  He has donated his time and effort to create a "Sibelius" file with a MIDI realization of the work.

Late last year I came across in the vast Cato Archives    a sketch of a choral work which had survived my manuscript purge of the 1990's.  Although I had not formally composed anything on paper in c. 30 years, (outside of an adaptation for organ of a March from Joachim Raff's Symphony #5 for a wedding), I wondered whether I should try my hand again and turn the sketch into a full composition.  It is therefore something of a hybrid: although some sections were complete, others were indications of what to do, rather than actual pages of music, so who knows what I would have created from the same material 45 years ago?

One of the reasons why I decided to do so was that the work was a choral work (Exaudi me, O Domine  - Hearken unto me, O Lord), and that it might therefore interest Karl. 

No, it is NOT in a 19-tone quarter-tone system! 

Karl has found the work to be worthwhile, and although there is still no guarantee that any group will perform it, I am happy with the finished product.  That he likes it is - in one sense - enough verification that my instincts are still competent, and so I am quite content.

Again, my public thanks to Karl for all of his efforts: I thought everyone should know about his generosity!

[Karl Henning]

(* blush *)

The key to getting a choir (not only Triad, but the Crossing in Philadelphia, e.g.) to consider the piece seriously was to have a rehearsal reduction of the piece.  The textures of the Exaudi Me are delightfully rich and supple, and it would be impossible to reduce most of it for two hands, so the only time-consuming work on my part has been making a visually clear reduction for two pianos.  (Even if perhaps there is only a single accompanist, he/she might pick or choose, but all the notes to be sung ought to be represented in the rehearsal reduction.)

Nor do I mean to suggest that I have been hard at work all this while;  fact is, I shelved this task for a couple of weeks while I attended (or, thought about attending) to the completion of Oxygen Footprint for Ensemble Aubade.  I did not hope to be completely done with the Exaudi Me reduction this weekend past, but was content with getting to within sight of the goal.  So now I have printed off hard copy of the present state of the score, and will give it a relaxed and thorough proofing.

[Ghost Sonata]

...I need to express publicly that Karl has been very generously spending some of his time on creating a nice score from a manuscript of mine from the early 1970's.  He has donated his time and effort to create a "Sibelius" file with a MIDI realization of the work...

...Again, my public thanks to Karl for all of his efforts: I thought everyone should know about his generosity!

Karl's a divo! (sure hope I spelled that right)...    

[Karl Henning]

Correctly spelled, and I thank you.

[Ghost Sonata]

Though you might had fun in Devo...

[Karl Henning]

It's a beautiful world.

For you . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Well, Frank is busy, and there will be no Mousetrap this October.  Perhaps if I had reached out to him in August?—but then it was summertime, and I am doubtful I would have had his ear then, either.  I should have guessed from the exchange back in the spring that, well, the planets need to be in a specific alignment, I think, for Frank and me to coordinate to prepare the piece.

No hard feelings, for after all, Frank is in the trio for Oxygen Footprint—and he will need to practice that part heavily      0:)   

Nevertheless, now I need to start from scratch on the program for King's Chapel on 18 October.  I should try Sylvie again, just in case she has capacity to put just what everyone was expecting together.

[Karl Henning]

The much-esteemed Peter H. Bloom has my back yet again, and we are building a new program for 18 October.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[Cato]

The much-esteemed Peter H. Bloom has my back yet again, and we are building a new program for 18 October.

Excellent news!

To tide people over...

https://www.youtube.com/v/tN3aMOrzEb8

[Karl Henning]

New for the solemn anniversary (though it's still only MIDI):

http://www.youtube.com/v/als-l2BI0xs

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

[Cato]

New for the solemn anniversary (though it's still only MIDI):

http://www.youtube.com/v/als-l2BI0xs

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

Many thanks!  Excellent choices!

[Karl Henning]

As at-times-quirky as it is (the clarinet trills at [ K ], e.g.) this fresh MIDI of The Wind, the Sky, & the Wheeling Stars is generally a significant improvement on the sound file I had from March 2015.  I might yet have been using Sibelius 7 then, and I definitely had the old Dell laptop, so whether it is the new HP machine or the Sibelius 8 upgrade (or both), this soundfile is rather more listenable (for them what find MIDI endurable at all).

[Karl Henning]

So, part of the story of The Wind, the Sky, & the Wheeling Stars . . . in the days when Columbia Management was a subsidiary of Bank of America, I knew a chap named Wendell (still with BofA, I believe) and he was taking part in a sort of external workshop or seminar, and another participant was Yoichi Udagawa, who conducts the Quincy Symphony.  Wendell brought us two in contact, and Yoichi asked me to write a piece for the Quincy Symphony;  I still remember meeting Yoichi in a Dunkin Donuts in Cambridge, not far from Alewife station.  (No, there are not many Dunkin Donuts visits which stand out in my memory.)   This must have been in the fall of 1999;  the concert would be February of 2000.  I should emphasize the kindly confidence that Yoichi placed in me;  or, how kind it was of him to adopt the self-confidence which I projected.  At that time, I had only wished to write for orchestra, had never actually done it;  so this was my baptism by fire.

The work went reasonably quickly, as I recall;  certainly well within the timeframe discussed with Yoichi.  When the piece was finished, I was happy to own it all compositionally;  there was a passage or two where (as it turned out) I needed to write what I wanted better for the instruments, but this did not reach my attention until some while after the first performance.  I also remember delivering hard copy of the score to Yoichi's apartment one windswept evening in (probably) October;  I remember this all the more readily because it accorded so nicely with the piece's title.

Details of why elude me now, many years later, but there was a passage of which Yoichi was unconvinced, and a cut was required.  Even though (then, no less than now) I believed completely in the music to be cut, I complied, and recomposed a measure or two to accommodate the requested excision. (That cut did not coincide with the material I mentioned above, which needed repair.)  In writing about this now, I do not mean to seem to rail against any artistic injustice;  I am only recording the history.  So the full piece is 12 minutes in duration, and maybe with the cut, the piece ran ten minutes and a half (let us guess).

At the time, I was working in Finale (perhaps Finale 1998? No knowing, now), and the endgame of cleaning up the layout of extracted parts for a large score was nightmarish.  (I'd like to mitigate this by proposing that the problem lay in its being the first large score I needed to perform this operation;  but in the following years, with other large scores and more flight time logged with Finale, it always remained dogsbody work, and eventually that was why at last I tried Sibelius, which after very a surprisingly brief learning curve proved much easier to work with, and with better-looking results.)  So as a performer myself, I was a little nervous about what the players' experience in working on the piece would be.  I was highly interested in attending rehearsals, to see (for instance) if there were any changes I might need to make.  But everyone was a little nervous about having the composer present when there were still notes to be learnt;  and (not at all unusually for the Boston area) at least one weekly rehearsal was lost to a snowstorm.

In the event, then, it was only the dress rehearsal which I was able to attend, and although there were some rough aspects, it would not at all have been the time for me to make suggestions.  The performance, I am pleased to report, was a good advance upon the dress rehearsal.  I do not recall if I received a recording;  it would have been a cassette tape, and it is now more than a decade since I listened to (or had the gear to listen to) a cassette.  What I suspect is that, since the performance was of a cut version which I would not endorse for any subsequent performance, if I did have a recording, it was not one which I was apt to make generally available.

Sometime later, more than a year, less than ten years, later . . . I was looking at the score, and realized that there were some passages (i.e., a passage in the exposition, and which was largely repeated in a recapitulation) where the writing for the low strings was impossibly busy.  And my first thought was, this must have been problematic in the rehearsals for the first performance, but I heard nothing about it, and so could not offer the composer's sanctioned solution to the problem.  It was both impossibly busy, and unnecessarily busy, so I found an easier and a playable way to get what I wanted from the low strings in those passages.  Those changes were reflected in the March 2015 Sibelius version of the score;  and I have now just made some minor adjustments here and there (most notably, improving the writing for the optional harp part).