Henning's Headquarters

[Karl Henning]

My composition teacher from Wooster has had some very nice remarks about Ear Buds.

[Scion7]

Students will never fail to give you the "face-palm" effect, but this one was particularly sad.
In the student union, they were playing the Julie Christie/Warren Beatty comedy-film, Heaven Can Wait.

During one of the football practice scenes, Beatty's character is always soundtracked with a clarinet (he plays.)

A girl sitting on one of the audience cushions, who I am assuming is in one of the larger classes, asked me as I was walking by, "what is that funny noise?" (she meant "sound")   "Bagpipes," says I, and moved on.

Sigh. 

I think this upcoming generation is so ignorant of anything that isn't video-game/hip-hop related that a real catastrophe is looming culturally.

[Karl Henning]

Well, every generation has a substantial subset of the mentally lazy . . . cannot judge the whole from a disappointing individual.

We had a great Triad rehearsal last night . . . and why that is pertinent here is, many of my fellow members are delightfully talented, intelligent, and musical youngsters.  Coming out of a rehearsal like that, I have no inclination to fear for the future.  I mean, any more than I fear for my own generation   

[Cato]

The following is a little musical analysis I have done in preparation for the premiere of Karl Henning's From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud.

For the score:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,92.msg920216.html#msg920216

Karl Henning's chamber song From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud is a poem based upon a "soliloquy" in my novel From the Caves of the Cloud.  I believe the poem stands alone, but since Karl has read the novel, he has a deeper understanding of the narrator.

Karl also knows that I have a theory that the music for a text can become the text's unconscious, a symbolic maelstrom of the text's secrets and drives. Whether he agrees with this idea or not, his brilliant music acts as much more than an accompaniment to the singer's melodies and an elucidation of the text's emotional content.

As an example of the richness of Karl's conception, listen to the very first bar, where the bass flute and the soprano recorder have motifs which almost mirror each other.  Keeping in mind the exotic, faraway desert story in the text, these motifs, and others to come, have a melismata-like aspect to evoke that atmosphere.  Their 5-for-4 figures will be very important throughout the work.  The quasi-A minor aspect of these motifs is accompanied by a quasi-D minor in the flute and horn. The flute offers its own melismatic quality with a 7:8 figure, itself a variation on the bass flute's opening 5:4 figure.  With all the instruments in counterpoint, the effect is idiosyncratic: if one took away the flute, one would have a nearly neo-classical opening, but with the addition of the flute, we have instead something quite original and even combative, in keeping with the unsettling nature of what is to come.

In the soprano's opening line (bars 5-8), listen to how the note D dominates the melody, and with the longest notes given to C, Bb, and Eb, the latter note creating a kind of "double minor" effect.  The flute and recorder offer a variation of the opening bar: the slower rhythmic irregularities in the soprano's line mirror the ones in these instruments, and thereby one senses the tension in this instrumental "unconscious," which was emphasized earlier in bars 2-4 by the horn's refusal to form an octave or perfect fifth with the others, until, after the silence, it and the bass flute play the fifth G-D on the word "Transformed," as if the silence had caused a transformation of consonance from the dissonant chord in bar 4.  This consonant transformation will prove to be fleeting.  Also note how the instrumental music mirrors the soprano's motif for "Transformed, Novembering the bells of God's soul."

A diminished fifth is heard in the voice several times on key words: "cocoons" (bars 11-12), "vile days" (bar 13), "dictatormenting" (bars 20-21), and "vile ways" (bars 29-30, 33-34).  Perhaps the most striking, gasp-inducing effect is in bars 39-40, where the soprano's 5:4 16th-notes on "strife" offer a connection back to the bass flute's opening 5:4 8th notes.  Strife, we realize now, began the song, and promises to continue through it.

Keep in mind that the diminished fifth, or tritone, was once referred to as "diabolus in musica" (i.e. the devil in music) by theorists.  The interval continues to be seen e.g. in the bass-flute line (bars 41-47).  In Letter C, listen to how the tenor recorder and voice echo the opening bar, but in a rhythmic variation, and how the quasi D minor is back.  Note also the tension in pausing on the word "future" in bar 49, and then starting with "future" on bar 52, the 3:2 figure and the figure on "gray" in bar 54 both echoing the tenor recorder's forte comment in bar 49.  Such devices give the music a self-referential and very tight structure.  One might be singing of "future dreams" which can seem vague and amorphous, but their music has a definite map!

Another fine example of how tonality is not completely forsaken is heard in bars 63-67 in the bass flute, where E major triplets contrast with G minor ones, an F# minor grouping interrupts in bar 66, until the singer's line "Do you know her?" ends on G minor, the flattened A giving the effect of a "double minor" sound as with the Eb in the earlier pages.

In Letter D, the text describes the arrival of "the desert men" and their violence, and so the horn and the tenor recorder begin an odd kind of march in 8th notes, often in descending triplets.  This downward marching idea is later heard in key phrases from the soprano: bar 78 has the notes Eb-C-A (note the tritone!) for "in the an-(cient)," bar 82 has "for killing" using C#-Bb-A, and bar 83 uses the same notes for the words "and murdered."  The faraway nature of the desert is exemplified by the melismatas which often use triplets, e.g. bars 78-79 for "ancient robes," bar 84 on again "ancient," bars 85-86 on "modern" (N.B. the same Eb-C-A for "whose mo-dern"), and again 94-96 for "in an ancient robe."

But the vocal line contains some marvelous subtleties! It attempts to stay in a quasi- A minor, but now C# and D# often invade, joining the Bb (e.g. bars 83-84). The horn in fact began Letter D on C# (Ab=Db=C#) in bar 72, and its first triplet in bar 75 uses D#-C#-Bb.  So when the soprano sings bars 78-80, 83-84, and 87-88, the C# and D# are tense and exotic additions to the score.  The flute and piccolo offer echoes, presages, and variations in their lines, as well as punctuating C# and D# (e.g. bars 83-84, 87-88).  The singer has an echo herself in bars 87-88, an echo of the opening (bars 6-7): listen to those three notes C#-Bb-A in "fools were willing to believe," with the voice rising a tritone from A to D#, complete with a melismata on the last syllable of "believe."  Perfection!

And then the vocal line becomes ever more chromatic, with slithery minor seconds emphasized, until a long melismata, again on the word "believe" (bar 105), leads to the dissonant climax on "mercy" (bar 110).  The dissonant background in Letters H and I properly lend unpleasant color to an unpleasant part of the story.  In Letter J, the unyielding character of the "maiden of the north" is symbolized by a chanting adherence to the note B, and then rising in tension to D# in bars 128-141.  And listen to how the vocal line keeps the maiden's stubbornness symbolized by tightly hovering around one note in bars 152-162, which will be heard again in bars 185-193.  The tonality is now in the area of G minor, and we hear this, complete with a tritone, in bars 164-167, and 169-172.

The flute's figurations in Letter P remind one of the earlier dialogue between the horn and the recorder in Letters E and F.  Of interest is how the figurations stop on the words "her spirit to uncurl," and how the word "uncurl" is placed on B (bars 213-214), the note symbolizing the girl's refusal to surrender.  The nervously happy triplets return, and, in a great mark of irony, the note B returns in a B major ending to the section in bars 236-238 on the words "and the world is right."

The world is not right, however, despite the desert master's hopes, and the Flutterzunge effect (Letters S and T) for his demise between the girl's legs is highly unsettling, even weird, as if the execution is being observed by birds from another planet.  Music from earlier returns in Letter U, compare bars 75 ff. with bars 262 ff., and the word "evil" is emphasized in a variation of earlier motifs (e.g. compare "with soul" bars 102-103).  I was particularly struck by the descending motif for the words "Purpose is born from freedom" in a quasi-G minor in bars 268-269, which contrasts with the ascending motif for "I knew the purpose of my life" in bars 14-16.  There is also in bars 268-269 a disturbing reference to bars 80-82 and the words "with modern tools for killing" (q.v.), for the new-found freedom from the slavers will not be used to escape far away, but to execute the slavers for their crimes.  And again, in a marvelous bit of aural symbolism, listen to the notes for the word "hands" in bar 275 ("the hands of the slavers") with the notes for "evil" in bar 265. 

These examples show what I meant by the music creating an "unconscious" for the text.

Bars 284-286 bring back our death-dealing friends C#-Bb-A (see bars 82-83) for the words "for vengeance" and "with the ax" and again in bars 290-291 for "girl did break the bands..."  And now, with the slaves freed, the horn calls in Letters Y and Z announce that vengeance is on the march, an ironic reminder of the slavers on the march in bars 111-113.

A Totentanz is the hallmark of the next section, as the poem's Great Protector performs her grim duty of slaying "the devils killing around her."(bars 344-347).  But in a skeptical turn, the music punctuates this Totentanz with an off-kilter dance in Letter BB with rhythmical irregularities, as the narrator wonders "Did she save and cleanse herself?"

And so we return to the opening music in the Adagio, bar 358, but not quite.  A transformation has happened, for the opening music is now played in much lower registers, and on the word "transformed," the music is in fact in a modality known as E Phrygian (i.e. a scale of E using only white keys on the piano) bars 363 to the end: scarcely does an accidental occur (a Bb for the "worms of vile ways" bars 391-392).  The choice of scale is brilliant, for it allows the dominant note B, which earlier was used to symbolize the girl's unyielding character, to return in an almost hypnotic chant, e.g. "Novembering the bells of God's soul..." bars 364-373, "Life" bars 378-379, "Evil" bar 381, "Soul..." bars 387-391), The flute, soprano recorder, and the bass flute sweep upward and occasionally downward in this finale, but gradually make their way to higher notes, as the voice descends to its lowest E for the word "soul" (bar 398).  With the word "soul" again sung on B, the experience fades away on open fifths (E-B).  The effect is both mysterious and mind-tingling.



 

[Scion7]

unfortunately, that single individual is representative of 90% of the student body ...

[Karl Henning]

The following is a little musical analysis I have done in preparation for the premiere of Karl Henning's From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud.

The day being itself, it will be this evening before I can read through to the end.  But I owe you thanks, and a more extended response.  To start with, there is a thing or two which reading your essay taught me about my own piece.

[Karl Henning]

Separately . . . I am thinking of setting Act II Scene ii of Macbeth.  Is that crazy?

Will I do it, even if I think it crazy?  I expect I will.

[Karl Henning]

Students will never fail to give you the "face-palm" effect, but this one was particularly sad.
In the student union, they were playing the Julie Christie/Warren Beatty comedy-film, Heaven Can Wait.

During one of the football practice scenes, Beatty's character is always soundtracked with a clarinet (he plays.)

A girl sitting on one of the audience cushions, who I am assuming is in one of the larger classes, asked me as I was walking by, "what is that funny noise?" (she meant "sound")   "Bagpipes," says I, and moved on.

Sigh. 

I think this upcoming generation is so ignorant of anything that isn't video-game/hip-hop related that a real catastrophe is looming culturally.

unfortunately, that single individual is representative of 90% of the student body ...

Coincidentally, what should I re-read at my lunch hour but this:

"Oh no, not at all, my recalcitrant rhododendron!  For one thing, every generation has a considerable percentage of mediocrities ...."

[Cato]

Coincidentally, what should I re-read at my lunch hour but this:

"Oh no, not at all, my recalcitrant rhododendron!  For one thing, every generation has a considerable percentage of mediocrities ...."

What a curious line!   0:)

To start with, there is a thing or two which reading your essay taught me about my own piece.

Then the effort was worth it! 

I should mention that I controlled myself: I will start to micro-analyze every hemidemisemiquaver if I am not careful!  Karl's score is so rich, that there are still a good number of things which I did not mention.

[Karl Henning]

Well, the composer's life is not dull!  Today (two weeks to the day before the concert) the singer emotionally informed me that she cannot sing the text.  She was perhaps equally upset at backing out of an engagement to which she had pledged herself.

In haste to form a Plan B.  In two and a half weeks, I shall chuckle about this . . . .

[Cato]

Well, the composer's life is not dull!  Today (two weeks to the day before the concert) the singer emotionally informed me that she cannot sing the text.  She was perhaps equally upset at backing out of an engagement to which she had pledged herself.

In haste to form a Plan B.  In two and a half weeks, I shall chuckle about this . . . .

I hope so, and I hope I will also be chuckling!  As the poet, I feel somehow at fault, even though I know the feeling is unwarranted.

[Karl Henning]

Separately . . . I am thinking of setting Act II Scene ii of Macbeth.  Is that crazy?

Will I do it, even if I think it crazy?  I expect I will.

Gosh ... would the present singer bombshell not have fallen, if I had referred instead to the Scottish play?...

[Karl Henning]

Potentially good news is, three of the Triad singers got right back to me to ask to look at the score.  Also, the recorder player Dan's wife is a smashing singer, and she would do a great job with it (if, miracolosamente, she be available).

[Sergeant Rock]

Gosh ... would the present singer bombshell not have fallen, if I had referred instead to the Scottish play?...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that reference to the curse... Hope you find a replacement singer.

Sarge

[Karl Henning]

I don't whether to laugh or cry at that reference to the curse... Hope you find a replacement singer.

Sarge

Thanks, dear fellow!

[Cato]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that reference to the curse...

Sarge

Aye, laddie!  The curse, the curse!  Nary a soul has e'er outgunned, and nary a star has e'er outsunned, the curse, the curse!

Except for this time!    

[Karl Henning]

Yet another Triad soprano is having a look!

[North Star]

Yet another Triad soprano is having a look!

Here's hoping!

[Karl Henning]

Thanks!

[Cato]

Given the hubbub, I thought I would try this again, especially for the composers here at GMG, but not just for them.  I have attempted not to be too technical.

Also I did not attach the poem, so below it is attached, which should help in grasping the excellence of Karl's musical conception, since it provides a deeper experience of the story.



The following is a little musical analysis I have done in preparation for the premiere of Karl Henning's From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud.

For the score:

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,92.msg920216.html#msg920216

Karl Henning's chamber song From the Pit of a Cave in the Cloud is a poem based upon a "soliloquy" in my novel From the Caves of the Cloud.  I believe the poem stands alone, but since Karl has read the novel, he has a deeper understanding of the narrator.

Karl also knows that I have a theory that the music for a text can become the text's unconscious, a symbolic maelstrom of the text's secrets and drives. Whether he agrees with this idea or not, his brilliant music acts as much more than an accompaniment to the singer's melodies and an elucidation of the text's emotional content.

As an example of the richness of Karl's conception, listen to the very first bar, where the bass flute and the soprano recorder have motifs which almost mirror each other.  Keeping in mind the exotic, faraway desert story in the text, these motifs, and others to come, have a melismata-like aspect to evoke that atmosphere.  Their 5-for-4 figures will be very important throughout the work.  The quasi-A minor aspect of these motifs is accompanied by a quasi-D minor in the flute and horn. The flute offers its own melismatic quality with a 7:8 figure, itself a variation on the bass flute's opening 5:4 figure.  With all the instruments in counterpoint, the effect is idiosyncratic: if one took away the flute, one would have a nearly neo-classical opening, but with the addition of the flute, we have instead something quite original and even combative, in keeping with the unsettling nature of what is to come.

In the soprano's opening line (bars 5-8), listen to how the note D dominates the melody, and with the longest notes given to C, Bb, and Eb, the latter note creating a kind of "double minor" effect.  The flute and recorder offer a variation of the opening bar: the slower rhythmic irregularities in the soprano's line mirror the ones in these instruments, and thereby one senses the tension in this instrumental "unconscious," which was emphasized earlier in bars 2-4 by the horn's refusal to form an octave or perfect fifth with the others, until, after the silence, it and the bass flute play the fifth G-D on the word "Transformed," as if the silence had caused a transformation of consonance from the dissonant chord in bar 4.  This consonant transformation will prove to be fleeting.  Also note how the instrumental music mirrors the soprano's motif for "Transformed, Novembering the bells of God's soul."

A diminished fifth is heard in the voice several times on key words: "cocoons" (bars 11-12), "vile days" (bar 13), "dictatormenting" (bars 20-21), and "vile ways" (bars 29-30, 33-34).  Perhaps the most striking, gasp-inducing effect is in bars 39-40, where the soprano's 5:4 16th-notes on "strife" offer a connection back to the bass flute's opening 5:4 8th notes.  Strife, we realize now, began the song, and promises to continue through it.

Keep in mind that the diminished fifth, or tritone, was once referred to as "diabolus in musica" (i.e. the devil in music) by theorists.  The interval continues to be seen e.g. in the bass-flute line (bars 41-47).  In Letter C, listen to how the tenor recorder and voice echo the opening bar, but in a rhythmic variation, and how the quasi D minor is back.  Note also the tension in pausing on the word "future" in bar 49, and then starting with "future" on bar 52, the 3:2 figure and the figure on "gray" in bar 54 both echoing the tenor recorder's forte comment in bar 49.  Such devices give the music a self-referential and very tight structure.  One might be singing of "future dreams" which can seem vague and amorphous, but their music has a definite map!

Another fine example of how tonality is not completely forsaken is heard in bars 63-67 in the bass flute, where E major triplets contrast with G minor ones, an F# minor grouping interrupts in bar 66, until the singer's line "Do you know her?" ends on G minor, the flattened A giving the effect of a "double minor" sound as with the Eb in the earlier pages.

In Letter D, the text describes the arrival of "the desert men" and their violence, and so the horn and the tenor recorder begin an odd kind of march in 8th notes, often in descending triplets.  This downward marching idea is later heard in key phrases from the soprano: bar 78 has the notes Eb-C-A (note the tritone!) for "in the an-(cient)," bar 82 has "for killing" using C#-Bb-A, and bar 83 uses the same notes for the words "and murdered."  The faraway nature of the desert is exemplified by the melismatas which often use triplets, e.g. bars 78-79 for "ancient robes," bar 84 on again "ancient," bars 85-86 on "modern" (N.B. the same Eb-C-A for "whose mo-dern"), and again 94-96 for "in an ancient robe."

But the vocal line contains some marvelous subtleties! It attempts to stay in a quasi- A minor, but now C# and D# often invade, joining the Bb (e.g. bars 83-84). The horn in fact began Letter D on C# (Ab=Db=C#) in bar 72, and its first triplet in bar 75 uses D#-C#-Bb.  So when the soprano sings bars 78-80, 83-84, and 87-88, the C# and D# are tense and exotic additions to the score.  The flute and piccolo offer echoes, presages, and variations in their lines, as well as punctuating C# and D# (e.g. bars 83-84, 87-88).  The singer has an echo herself in bars 87-88, an echo of the opening (bars 6-7): listen to those three notes C#-Bb-A in "fools were willing to believe," with the voice rising a tritone from A to D#, complete with a melismata on the last syllable of "believe."  Perfection!

And then the vocal line becomes ever more chromatic, with slithery minor seconds emphasized, until a long melismata, again on the word "believe" (bar 105), leads to the dissonant climax on "mercy" (bar 110).  The dissonant background in Letters H and I properly lend unpleasant color to an unpleasant part of the story.  In Letter J, the unyielding character of the "maiden of the north" is symbolized by a chanting adherence to the note B, and then rising in tension to D# in bars 128-141.  And listen to how the vocal line keeps the maiden's stubbornness symbolized by tightly hovering around one note in bars 152-162, which will be heard again in bars 185-193.  The tonality is now in the area of G minor, and we hear this, complete with a tritone, in bars 164-167, and 169-172.

The flute's figurations in Letter P remind one of the earlier dialogue between the horn and the recorder in Letters E and F.  Of interest is how the figurations stop on the words "her spirit to uncurl," and how the word "uncurl" is placed on B (bars 213-214), the note symbolizing the girl's refusal to surrender.  The nervously happy triplets return, and, in a great mark of irony, the note B returns in a B major ending to the section in bars 236-238 on the words "and the world is right."

The world is not right, however, despite the desert master's hopes, and the Flutterzunge effect (Letters S and T) for his demise between the girl's legs is highly unsettling, even weird, as if the execution is being observed by birds from another planet.  Music from earlier returns in Letter U, compare bars 75 ff. with bars 262 ff., and the word "evil" is emphasized in a variation of earlier motifs (e.g. compare "with soul" bars 102-103).  I was particularly struck by the descending motif for the words "Purpose is born from freedom" in a quasi-G minor in bars 268-269, which contrasts with the ascending motif for "I knew the purpose of my life" in bars 14-16.  There is also in bars 268-269 a disturbing reference to bars 80-82 and the words "with modern tools for killing" (q.v.), for the new-found freedom from the slavers will not be used to escape far away, but to execute the slavers for their crimes.  And again, in a marvelous bit of aural symbolism, listen to the notes for the word "hands" in bar 275 ("the hands of the slavers") with the notes for "evil" in bar 265. 

These examples show what I meant by the music creating an "unconscious" for the text.

Bars 284-286 bring back our death-dealing friends C#-Bb-A (see bars 82-83) for the words "for vengeance" and "with the ax" and again in bars 290-291 for "girl did break the bands..."  And now, with the slaves freed, the horn calls in Letters Y and Z announce that vengeance is on the march, an ironic reminder of the slavers on the march in bars 111-113.

A Totentanz is the hallmark of the next section, as the poem's Great Protector performs her grim duty of slaying "the devils killing around her."(bars 344-347).  But in a skeptical turn, the music punctuates this Totentanz with an off-kilter dance in Letter BB with rhythmical irregularities, as the narrator wonders "Did she save and cleanse herself?"

And so we return to the opening music in the Adagio, bar 358, but not quite.  A transformation has happened, for the opening music is now played in much lower registers, and on the word "transformed," the music is in fact in a modality known as E Phrygian (i.e. a scale of E using only white keys on the piano) bars 363 to the end: scarcely does an accidental occur (a Bb for the "worms of vile ways" bars 391-392).  The choice of scale is brilliant, for it allows the dominant note B, which earlier was used to symbolize the girl's unyielding character, to return in an almost hypnotic chant, e.g. "Novembering the bells of God's soul..." bars 364-373, "Life" bars 378-379, "Evil" bar 381, "Soul..." bars 387-391), The flute, soprano recorder, and the bass flute sweep upward and occasionally downward in this finale, but gradually make their way to higher notes, as the voice descends to its lowest E for the word "soul" (bar 398).  With the word "soul" again sung on B, the experience fades away on open fifths (E-B).  The effect is both mysterious and mind-tingling.