Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[karlhenning]

Very interesting read, Luke.

Ditto.

[lukeottevanger]

Don't know what compelled me to do this, but this afternoon I scanned in and made a PDF of my first large orchestral piece, Ophruoeis, from 1996. It's full of the most cringemaking things, but if you've got a spare 69 MB hanging around, ( ) you're welcome to download a copy. Let me know if the link doesn't work for you. 

[lukeottevanger]

Two other things today:

1) I decided to re-look at some songs setting ancient Egyptian poems which I first wrote about 4 years ago (edit, for clarity - I wrote the songs, not the poems!  ). Whilst unearthing them...

2) I rediscovered the score to a solo cello piece - Guido, take note! - which I wrote on New Year's Day 2001. It's a curiosity, perhaps, no more I suspect. I'll typeset it into Sibelius and post it up here as soon as I can get to it. And at some point I'll have to decide if I'll accept it into my 'official list'

[lukeottevanger]

No response to my score of Ophruoeis yet, though I think a few people have downloaded it. Perhaps it would help people get a handle on what is quite a large piece if I uploaded my notes to the piece. I wrote them a long time ago, so I'm not sure how coherent they are.   

[lukeottevanger]

If you're reading those notes, please remember that I wrote the piece 10 years before I ever knew of Poju's existence.  You'll see what I mean....

[greg]

too bad you don't have any sound files......

the only thing i can say after looking through it is that it looks very modern, and it looks like what i'd expect a Norgard score to look like if I ever had a chance to read an entire one.

[lukeottevanger]

Thanks for downloading, Greg!

Modern? Well, certainly - it's quite complex, uses some quite unusual orchestral techniques, some strange compositional techniques too. But the musical material it draws on includes music with very direct, melodious writing, and because of that much of the music has some kind of rootedness in tonality, at a greater or (much) lesser distance.

[greg]

But the musical material it draws on includes music with very direct, melodious writing, and because of that much of the music has some kind of rootedness in tonality, at a greater or (much) lesser distance.

is this what you mean by the 'strange compositional techniques'? or something else?
i see a few unusual orchestral techniques- lots of glissandos going on, in one bar i think you tune the bass string up and down for a few seconds and then have the alto flute enter again. Seems like a nice sonority.

[lukeottevanger]

is this what you mean by the 'strange compositional techniques'? or something else?

No, or only part of it. Read the 'notes' file - they say most of what is to be said about this piece. All a bit bizarre! But in addition to what is mentioned there there are also some areas of improvisation in the music which are a bit strange....and odd notations like that in the centre of page 16 (page 19 of the PDF)

i see a few unusual orchestral techniques- lots of glissandos going on, in one bar i think you tune the bass string up and down for a few seconds and then have the alto flute enter again. Seems like a nice sonority.

There's all sorts of weird stuff going on* if you look carefully, though I'm not sure that's a good idea! Some of it probably wouldn't work, I realise now, but I'm not going to change anything in this piece - just let it stand as a monument both to youthful folly and youthful idealism!

*harp played with plectrum....or with pedal in between positions a la Varese....woodwind players asked to produce 'breath only' sounds.....and so on and on....

[karlhenning]

No response to my score of Ophruoeis yet, though I think a few people have downloaded it.

I have not, yet, but will.

[greg]

didn't read the notes yet, but did catch the bottom, which i have to laugh at! 

Ophruoeis won the 1997 Cambridge University Musical Society Composition Competition - although as I have no
idea how many other entries there were to the competition that year (if any!) the prestige of this award seems dubious.
It had been composed with no thought to entering the competition, and so its orchestral demands, particularly in the
percussion department, were not geared to the CUMS orchestra - this fact made the performance which usually comes
with a win in this competition impossible.

[lukeottevanger]

Yes, funny that - but for all the uncertainty about whether or not the nearly-award actually means anything, the whole thing is still quite important for me, in that it led to memorable conversations with Robin Holloway which did a lot to give me confidence.

I'm uploading the score to Ophruoeis's sister work, Processional, as I type. The two pieces were inspired by the same place in France, the latter one being darker than the glinting earlier work. Processional is more advanced than Ophruoeis, I suppose - but it's no less a crazy folly full of idiocies, I realised as I looked through the score again whilst scanning. Link soon. In the meanwhile, for your delectation, here's a very posed photo taken of me whilst I was composing the final pages of Processional  :

[lukeottevanger]

Here you are - the score to Processional

[greg]

Wow: now i know what you mean when you said you often go do the orchestration first. 

[lukeottevanger]

  Although that should be understood in the past tense - hasn't been the case recently, of course, and won't be with the piece I'm planning.

[Maciek]

Love the photo, Luke. Absolutely love it - it should be on the flap of your collected works' sleeve! Heck - it should be on the cover of volume I (yes, "The Youthful Follies")!

[lukeottevanger]

It's a good photo, but not dark enough for my liking.

[lukeottevanger]

...today was the first time since October that I have set pencil to paper, during an unexpected spare hour at work. Just a short-ish piano piece, modal, much in the vein of some of the other pieces I've written in the last year or so, though a little more extended than those to which it is otherwise most similar. I'm in the process of inputting it into Sibelius; once I have, and once I've recorded a version of it, and if I'm still happy with it, I'll put it up here, though it's nothing to get excited about. 

Well, obviously I didn't get excited about it either, since I did nothing about putting a version of it up here. But I have a few minutes now, so here we go, my vernal, spring-like piece which probably sounds much the same as everything else :

Quiverings - score

Quiverings - mp3

as I say, nothing new, just another bit of typically Ottevangeresque 'pointless modal noodling' (to quote someone re. Hovhaness on the 'what are you listening to' thread recently). Three things I am all for, though - pointlessness, modality, and noodles.

[karlhenning]

Ottevangeresque . . . bring it on!

[lukeottevanger]

Or is it Ottevangerian? Ottevangerine? Or, indeed, Ottevangeroid? Whatever, consider it brought on.