The Music of Les Hennessey

Orpheus

Pagoda

Slingshot

Solana

About Me

Orpheus
Variations on a Theme of Bob McFarland. The opening four bars play the sequence I borrowed (with permission) from Bob McFarland. It features clarinet and oboe (and pan flute). Hope you like it.
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Pagoda
This piece is several years old. I originally did it on a SoundChaser system from Mountain Software, transferred (and changed) it to an Alesis MMT-8, then transferred it to Cakewalk - this version.
I wrote it for a young and very talented asian girl (who received an art scholarship to work in Venice) so made the flavor oriental.
However, she didn't like it and was more in tune with REM and others, so there you are. My friends all like the original (10 changes back) rather than this one, so if you don't like it you're not alone.
This is my personal life's trial, I think, and will probably change it again to make it sound more like the SoundChaser version. (and again, and again). So have a listen. It's probably the last chance you have to hear this version.
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Slingshot
This is an upbeat piece which features a hot trumpet, after a long guitar intro. My second attempt at an uptempo piece. The drums were a combination of Jammer and myself, but a less complex pattern would probably sound better.
I live near a Marine military base, and the name is a military term used for ground manovers when advancing on the enemy.
Hopefully, no enemies on the Net.
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Solana
This piece started off as someting else and ended up as this (??). It's the second piece I composed using Cakewalk, and was a good exercise in learning the software. (The first was/is a funk piece using Jammer, which I'll fix up and submit later).
Don't know what else to say about this one, except that it was a dickens of a job not to drown out the guitar with the orchestra. I still managed to do it though in some spots, but it turned out OK in the long run.
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About Les Hennessey
Born (1942) and raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Earned two degrees from St. Francis Xavier Univ in Nova Scotia, then taught high school music for a number of years in Canada. Studied composition at Indiana State Univ under Jon Polifrone, a former pupil of J. Nadia Boulanger, (Jon, are you out there?), and eventually earned a masters degree in music (composition). Joined IBM as a mainframe programmer (go figure) in 1973, and have working in the systems development area ever since.
Currently I'm taking a sabbatical for a few months to spend some time writing music in beautiful San Diego - sort of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. (Eat your hearts out). So I'll bang away on my keyboard and get a few other pieces I have in my head out of the way.
lph
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