Keningale's Mystery Serenade, Thomas Schuttenhelm

Kenningales Mystery Serenade, Thomas Schuttenhelm

Commissioned by Michael Nix for the New Classic Banjo Project
Premier performance, March 7, 2020
Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center
Greenfield, MA

"For all the changes, for all the increases, accessions, magnifyings, what often means most to us, and what, in great extreme, might mean most to us is just as likely as not to be some little thing like a banjo's twang." Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction / Wallace Stevens

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) was an American writer and journalist and the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his story “Ken’s Mystery” (1883) the protagonist Keningale describes his encounter with a two-hundred year old woman, Ethelind, who was “awakened from her centuries of sleep” by a song he played on his banjo. Shortly after Keningale’s serenade to Ethelind he discovered that the banjo appeared to age two-hundred years. This song-serenade is a reimagining of the mystery, music, and mutations that were enacted upon Keningale’s strange banjo.

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