Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[Cato]

Oh my goodness, Guido, how lovely to see you here, what a nice surprise! How are you??

And Karl phoned me earlier, and we had a good chat, and Cato has sent me another of his wonderful emails which I am so bad at replying to.... I promised Karl I'd come over to GMG and post something here just to explain where I have been recently, because no sooner had I made a tentative return to GMG after months and years away then I was gone again: barring something re the Rach 3 I haven't posted here for weeks.

Unfortunately at the end of June my wife Philippa was diagnosed with breast cancer, and we've been spending the last very difficult few weeks together, with little time to do much other than the necessary. It has been a frightening time indeed. Chemotherapy started two days ago, so we're out of the agony of waiting and worrying and into the lengthy next phase.

Ironically, I had intended to finish my ridiculously wordy novel this summer, and to start the piece which I'd been planning for a while. As it turns out, I've scarcely written a word of the book, and not a note of music has eked its way out of my pen for months, in fact years. In my darker hours I contemplate shutting the Outpost - but I won't, I'm sure. There is always hope!

  No, do NOT leave us!     I can always keep it going for you!  Just say the paragraph!   0:)

Again, best wishes to you and your family!  We have not forgotten you!

[Karl Henning]

The Outpost is still In!

[North Star]

The Outpost oughtn't be ousted.

[Luke]

Oh, that came out more melodramatic than I intended! I don't want to shut the Outpost down at all, and in fact I couldn't anyway, as it was started by some long-deregistered chump called lukeottevanger way back when, and only he or a mod could put it out of its misery, I assume. But last night as I lay waiting for sleep I was musing on the fact that it has been a long, long time since I composed anything at all, and at the moment I feel as dry as a dust bowl where that is concerned. And what is the point in having a thread whose central thread is my composing if I don't/can't compose again? But that was quite a dark moment, and I refuse to give up that easily!

Leo - 'Just say the paragraph!' - you know me and my verbosity too, too well! 

[Karl Henning]

. . . it begins with a single syllable . . . .

[Cato]

- 'Just say the paragraph!' - you know me and my verbosity too, too well! 

Well, as you may recall, I have two novels which, together, come in at  1,400 pages and c. 600,000 words.   0:)

So in some opinions I show symptoms of graphomania!    

[Maciek]

Luke, having read some of your recent comments on the Rach 3 thread ("recent" comments, rather, but I'm not a regular here any more either), I felt like gushing, but realized this was the appropriate location. So indulge me.

Your writing on music is always so clear, enjoyable, lively, evocative, persuasive, fair - oh, I could go on. I know you're now writing fiction but I hope that when you're done you also write a book on music (it doesn't have to be an anthology of your GMG posts - but it could be).

I hope Philippa is doing better?

[Cato]

Luke, having read some of your recent comments on the Rach 3 thread ("recent" comments, rather, but I'm not a regular here any more either), I felt like gushing, but realized this was the appropriate location. So indulge me.

Your writing on music is always so clear, enjoyable, lively, evocative, persuasive, fair - oh, I could go on. I know you're now writing fiction but I hope that when you're done you also write a book on music (it doesn't have to be an anthology of your GMG posts - but it could be).

I hope Philippa is doing better?

We need more Luke Ottevanger music, fiction, non-fiction, and anything else.   

[Karl Henning]

And so say all of us!

[Luke]

 I've been lousy at keeping in touch, and in fact, apart from things related to work and to the writing of my quasi-novel I have hardly been online in the last few months. Karl has been wonderful, though, phoning me regularly, keeping me in touch. Thank you for that, Karl. It has meant a lot.

I have continually professed my intention to get cracking on a new composition once the book is finished - and have dozens of ideas for it floating around. Well, the novel is now finished, though I'm about to start editing it, which will be a lengthy process. So maybe some music will come next. Although I have to say - already ideas for another book are taking shape!

BTW there is a 'musical note' appendix to my book which I might post here in some form or other....

Finally, to celebrate New Year, I think I will post some New Scores in one of the board's Oldest Threads... (I found a couple of beauties the other day....)

Happy New Year, everyone 

[Cato]

Luke is back!!!

Many wishes of happiness for the new year!  And best wishes to your dear wife on her recovery!

Yes, your latest literary and musical efforts will be much appreciated!

[Karl Henning]

Let 2015 be rung entirely out, and may 2016 bring you and yours all good things!

[Karl Henning]

And huzzah for the novel's completion!

[Luke]

Well, the following is a little appendix I wrote to the novel itself - I thought it might be pertinent on this board. To give a small bit of background - my novel features a composer called Edward Arundel who lives alone on the Isle of Skye. He is divorced from his wife, Natalie. In the chapter in which Edward is introduced, we see him at work, and pondering his life. He sinks into quite a low state, and for a brief moment a couple of lines from Brahms' Alto Rhapsody flit through his mind. In the novel this sort of thing happens to him fairly frequently, and to other characters too, though in their cases not necessarily in this musical way - I'm trying to portray the way in which our minds are constantly ransacking our storehouse of memories with or without our willing it; the way things connect up in this way - the novel is full of things-connecting-to-things, associations leading ever onwards... Specifically, and I think obviously, Edward's musical memories are mine - IOW I know he would think this way because it is how I would think. I wrote this appendix because I wanted to analyse in more depth than I could in the novel itself how these associations work - in this case, quite how this line of the Brahms conjures up the sensations it does....

My apologies for stating the obvious in the following - I think this stuff bears saying, but I may be wrong. 

appendix – a musical note

Within a few pages of meeting Edward we find him in his studio, lost in melancholy reminiscence. As his thoughts spiral downwards a particular piece springs unavoidable into his mind:

...The world swallowing him up.

The deep, numb, hellish void. Brahms, the Alto Rhapsody, the vulnerable, open O poised above the infinite, infernal tritonal pit: Die Öde verschlingt ihn...

Written in 1869, the op 53 Alto Rhapsody by Brahms is a setting of verses from Goethe's Harzreise im Winter (and therefore another musical Winterreise) for solo alto voice and orchestra, with a male chorus providing some heaven-sent heart's-ease in the final section. Goethe's words seem to be in some sense an allegory for depression, and for the search for spiritual (and musical) sources of relief from depression; Brahms wrote this intense and psychologically-scarred work as a wedding present for Julie Schumann, for whom he may have had romantic feelings himself. The piece is a probing study of misanthropy, then, and would seem to make for an inappropriate wedding gift. Presumably it may speak of Brahms' own emotions around Julie's marriage, and his hopes for release from them. In Darkness Visible, an account of the crippling depression which afflicted periods of his later years, William Styron movingly describes a moment when, on the very verge of suicide, the sound of the Alto Rhapsody provided exactly the 'ein Ton/seinem Ohre vernehmlich' – the 'one note his ear could hear' of which the male choir sings in its last section – which was necessary to bring him back from the brink.

Why have I decided to pursue this musical memory-image of Edward's to a deeper degree than the fleeting reference I give it in the novel itself? Because I want to try to investigate, in more musical detail than the book allows, the sort of processes, the imagined sounds, the multitude of en-cultured associations that are going on in the head of Edward, and presumably anyone else who recalls a focal moment of a piece like this (or by extension any other). The memories of music long-known and long-loved are constantly striking Edward – sometimes they help him come to terms with his issues, or (as here) to encapsulate them in a single aural image; sometimes they simply trap him in a cycle of regrets. And sometimes the odd slants of light they shed on a problem reveal its secrets to him. Surely the same sort of deeply personal musical images haunt most musicians and music-lovers, cropping up in their minds unbidden, as if written there in the foreign fonts I've used in this book, of which they are one of the themes.

When, as I wrote that passage, the first line appeared on the page – 'the world swallowing him up' – I was not yet thinking about the Brahms, only about Edward and Natalie. But the second I wrote it the haunting line from the Alto Rhapsody flooded into my mind, and I knew it would have done the same to Edward (in fact I'm sure I only wrote what I did because the Goethe/Brahms line was already there in my head, providing me with that striking image subconsciously). The subsequent quotation from and reference to the piece was therefore inevitable. But what is it about this piece, and specifically this line from it – and in fact all that follows is really only discussing three or four notes – that brought it so forcefully to my mind, and therefore to Edward's?

Here, extracted from Brahms' full score, is the passage in question – the vocal line at the top and, beneath it, the (ppp) string parts from the closing bars of the first, wandering, section of the piece:

[I've put the image at the bottom of this post, however...]

The following thoughts on a few of the extraordinary things that are happening in this brief passage contain references to associations the music may call to mind for those who are able to read it and who are acquainted with its en-cultured features. To those who are aware of them, these associations are as much a part of the experience of the music as the raw sound itself – an unfashionable thing to say in this quick-fix world where sensation is all and anything below this surface is treated as suspect, but one that is powerfully true. I stress them here because Edward experiences them in the book, but I have Edward experience them because I do, too, and because this web of associations is something that I think is hugely important in all our lives – it is not unique to music and musicians, though perhaps they are more aware of it:

1) The highlighted 'Ö,' the highest note of the passage, frail and exposed like a wound; an utterly human sound but also somehow dead in tone due to the quality of the vowel sound, a quality emphasised by its being held on a long note – as hollow and empty as the desert it depicts. The point is reinforced by the literal, visual hollowness of the letter O as printed on the page and as required of the singer's mouth (as opposed to its sound, though of course perhaps the hollow sound of 'O' and of the mouth-shape needed to produce it played a role in determining the shape of its letter-sign, somewhere way back in history – see Kipling's How The Alphabet Was Made!). The  equally empty circle of the musical semibreve note plays a similar rôle. Such visual associations may not be experienced by the general listener, but they are there for those, such as Edward, who are familiar with the music by sight as well as by sound, so they shouldn't be dismissed.

2) The void formed by the distance from the high vocal 'Ö' to the deep string cellos and basses playing at the same time, far below, is a huge nineteen-step  gap unfilled by any intervening sound – hollowness and emptiness once more, suggestive of echoing heights and depths, of vast empty distances, of an isolation that is both physical and mental. Again, this high-low dichotomy is visually present in the notes-on-paper, of course – that empty space on the page between voice and cellos, hung only with its nimbus of silent rests – and perhaps this plays a small part too.

3) A more specific analysis of the void described in 2) determines the precise size of the interval – that is, the distance in note-steps from top to bottom – formed between these two notes, high C and low F#. Technically this interval is called a diminished nineteenth, but as with all such wide-spanning intervals it can be reduced for simplicity to a smaller but analytically-equivalent interval whose dissonance type and harmonic function is exactly the same. In this case that interval is the diminished fifth, an interval which has a unique place in music theory and music history. It is also called the tritone – it is exactly half an octave (in other words halfway, say, from the C to the next C higher or lower), and in and of itself it is a most peculiar, dissonant interval. In medieval theory it was supposedly known as the diabolus in musica and it had negative, not to say infernal connotations. Naturally, its use in musical harmony was heavily proscribed. In later music it became much more common, useful, and eventually ubiquitous, though always potentially retaining its trickster character. When it is heard in such a pure, exposed form as Brahms presents here – simply the two notes, but very distant from each other, and held for a long time so that we are saturated with the harmony and the sonority – we can clearly hear its chilling quality. I would go further still, however. The traditionally hellish associations of the tritone are pervasive enough that a musician who is aware of them, as Edward would be, would very possibly, perhaps probably, on some level experience the great gulf between the high human C and the low, mysterious, inhuman F# as representing not simply an empty wilderness, or a great depth, but more specifically Man poised above the abyss of Hell. The note C itself carries its own associations, being a kind of 'zero' note (a hollow 0 sigil once again...), the note of whiteness, plainness, the note on which technical illustrations and children's elementary lesson are usually based. In this context F#, its tritonal, polar opposite, becomes opaque and alien, Other...

4) The small downwards step taken by the bass at the same time as the voice rises to its high 'Ö' – a semitone from a G (harmonising purely with its octave) to an F# (harmonising mysteriously with its tritone) – seems to expand the musical universe immeasurably. It is like taking a single step from security into a void. Because of the features already described this minimal shift seems to imply vast, inscrutable depths and this paradox itself becomes a striking feature of the passage

5) The huge leap in the vocal part from Ö- to -de again takes us into otherworldly musical realms. Like the giant gap between voices and basses, the gap between the singer's notes here is shocking, reminding us ineluctably of the vastness of this wilderness. More than that, Brahms pushes the interval here just past that natural, expected limit of the octave, a questioning, uneasy ninth, a little like stepping into the unknown, beyond the borders of the world...

Brahms could have avoided both the vocal leap of a ninth, and the giant dissonant gap of a nineteenth between voice and bass, if he had changed his harmonies slightly. Something more conventional would have resulted; it would have sounded effective. But the empty numbness of this passage would have been lost as a result. And perhaps the phrase would not have seared itself on Edward's memory to such an extent...

I stress again that harmonic analysis explains the effect here; that psychoacoustical analysis would go further in explaining the physics behind the force of the harmony; that understanding the cultural context explains the music's associative power – but that in the final analysis one does not need to know any of this to feel the force of this unearthly passage.

[Karl Henning]

Most interesting, thank you.  And welcome back!

[Luke]

Reading it back - painfully badly written    But then I did say the whole thing is still to be edited!

[Karl Henning]

Sending pianissimo to my Kindle . . . as I casually leafed through before setting to a proper read (and if I talk like a printer's son, so be it) right away my eye enjoys the loving care with the play of typography.

[Luke]

Well, I do love taking care of that sort of thing, hoping the words themselves justify it! Having said that, the typography is quite important in other ways which might reveal themselves as you read on.

[Karl Henning]

Lo! What do I find in my Luke folder, but a setting of Blake's "The Lamb" for solo voice, two-part treble choir & piano.  I think this may nicely suit the May Triad concerts . . . will pass this on to the Repertory Committee.

[Karl Henning]

Sending pianissimo to my Kindle . . . as I casually leafed through before setting to a proper read (and if I talk like a printer's son, so be it) right away my eye enjoys the loving care with the play of typography.

Edition refreshed on my Kindle!