Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[lukeottevanger]

Well, I've typed out my thoughts on the first few of the early pieces I rediscovered the other day. There are still at least twice this number to work through though, so hopefully I'll be able to post my thoughts about them too in the next few days.

What pleases me is that even the worst pieces here have one or two redeeming features. What pleases me even more is that I really can see trends slowly emerging in my music from the very off, even if at first they are so faint as to be hardly present, and only visible from this great distance - ten years ago I'd have been oblivious of them.

January 1990 - 'Dorian' Variations for piano
The first variation, with a 4 against 3 cross rhythm, must take that from somewhere else, but I'm not sure where; the second is a music box a la Liadov's, or the one in Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio - I knew both these pieces at this time, so either could be the source. The third, very heavy and deep in the bass, possibly derives from Liszt's Funerailles; the fourth seems relatively original; the fifth has a jerky rhythmic exchange between the hands which probably comes from the inroduction to the Finale of Beethoven op 106, no less! The last variation is just massive chords pounding away - the most striking example of the discrepancy between form, content, style, technique and tone that I now think is one of the first things a composer needs to understand.

Early 1990 - Three Preludes for piano
A bit better - Ottevanger the miniaturist already! No 1 is simplest and best, patterns of chords ascending and descending over a rocking bass in 3/8, which is nowadays my time signature of choice! They're all in triple time actually. No 2 is obviously written under the influence of a Borodin Polovtsian Dance (the famous pounding one in ¾); it evidently tries to be harmonically dramatic, with plunging confident basses - but actually they're rather unfocussed. No 3 is equally obviously under-the-influence, this time of a Gymnopedie. It has some charming moments but too much repetition and - again - a misjudgement of stylistic coherence taking the form of a mini cadenza on a dominant pedal. 

Early 1990 - Trumpet Sonata
This is the earliest of my pieces to have been performed - maybe it was the earliest concert with my music in too. This sets a standard which has become typical - all the pieces of mine which have been played, from then to now, have been from my worst pieces, with the exception of Carnus. This Sonata is trash in so many ways - tonally static in the extreme, and unadventurous in figuration (I've found these chords that I like and I'm not going to risk disturbing them!'). But it's got some nice jazzy tunes, which are positive and attractive.

May 1990 - 'Miniature Symphony'
Ha! This would be great if it wasn't for the notes...... orchestration badly-balanced throughout, BTW. First movement is best, a study in 5/8, light and dancing, quite rhythmically complex. Second movement is dire, obviously written under the influence of the Pines of the Janiculum; third movement a fast and heavy Scherzo in 7/4 (not too bad); last movement for strings only (possibly under the spell of Ravel's Fairy Garden) reducing in numbers until only a quartet is left, playing simple quasi-classical tonic and dominant stuff (was I being 'knowing' here??). This work is the first to show my tedious early reliance on triads-expanded-to-tenths in the left hand/bass register - used pretty heavily from here on for quite a while.

July 1990 - Concerto Grosso (flute, clarinet, sax and strings)
In one movement only. Some nice ideas floating around - I seem to have had conviction in what I was doing and more of an ability to plough on than I do now, seized as I am with self-doubt etc.

September 1990 - Improvisation for piano trio
Continuing the trend of my worst pieces getting played - this one is just terrible, the only piece I can't find a redeeming feature in. I was obviously relishing luscious sevenths, but as in the Trumpet Sonata once I find them I can't vary the ways in which I deploy them. All sorts of terrible things here, I shudder to think of it, even though the surface sounds pretty from moment to moment. This piece was played at the BAFTA centre in London in front of the Geoffrey Howe or Douglas Hurd (I always got them confused!). I can't imagine why now, but I obviously came out alive....

October 1990 - Prelude and Canon for piano
The Prelude is nice - it sounds quite Janacekian in places, especially the restrained closing cadence which is rather like one in 'Come With Us' from On an Overgrown Path. That's a piece that I learnt for my ABRSM grade 7, possibly around this time, so maybe it rubbed off, though I don't remember things that way. (It's also in a Janacekian flat key). The Canon, in contrast, is rubbish, just a silly whimsy. I knocked off a quick recording of the Prelude and copied out the score - here they are:

[edit - corrected version of score appears a few posts down, so the one attached here has been deleted]

[lukeottevanger]

October 1990 - Piano Sonata
This one was looked over by the professor of music at Leicester University who thought it the best of the pieces he saw - very complementary actually. Still, though it has some striking ideas and is verging on being quite effective, there are still countless ill-judged moments: a 'rhetorical' dominant seventh in an inappropriate place; a peroration in B major whose power and triumph seems unjustified in context; a scherzando section in the slow movement which is ungainly and too hard for its material. Finally, the last movement, which could have been the best, is too short - a simple ABA over three pages. Ah well....

October 1990 - Nocturne for piano
For years I've been saying that this is the only one of my early pieces which I consider wholly successful - it always featured on my 'list of works' even long after all its contemporaries were happily shedded. In fact, it was the first piece I ever posted at the Outpost, and you can see score and hear mp3 via links on page one of this thread. It's a very short, empirically composed thing . This is significant, I think: it was composed in a very short time, exactly as my Improvisations were nearly 13 years later - and they, too, are not only among my better pieces but also were a significant stage in my 'finding myself' musically speaking. The contrast between cold tolling basses/icy treble glints and warm harmony in the middle of the keyboard is simple and affecting, to my ears. It's essentially atonal too, and in that was a first for me.

January 1991 - violin piece (looks like a Habanera) - violin and piano
Doesn't just look like one - this seems heavily influenced by Ravel's Vocalise-Habanera. I learnt a cello arrangement of that, possibly around this time, which would explain things..... This might have been destined for a girl at school, an excellent violinist and pianist and general musician. I thought I was enamoured of her at the time. From this vantage point, however, I know that I wasn't, I just thought that I ought to be and remember trying to convince myself that I was: after all, we were the two most advanced musicians in the school, surely we ought to...... Ridiculous things, teenagers! 

February 1991 - 'Rhythm Study' - piano
I remember writing this one - it's connected to that same girl. I didn't really like her, and she didn't really like me, so obviously things weren't meant to be, but I recall trying to fabricate some kind of rage about this failure and pouring it into some violent bashing of the piano, which turned into this piece. And it's a piece with its own merits, perhaps. Here's a very rough mp3...

[lukeottevanger]

...and a score

[lukeottevanger]

March 1991 - Music for Strings
An odd one - possibly Bach's Brandenburg 3 lies behind it somewhere, in that it is laid out for instruments in sets of three. It's also quite imitative and vaguely contrapuntal. It is also an attempt to be light-hearted and humorous. Not sure it succeeds, but I'll look at it in more detail soon...

May 1991 - Piano Sonata
Something in my mind connects this obscurely with Chopin's second sonata - perhaps I was playing that at this time (very possible, actually). But all it shares that I can see now is a five-flats key signature. I thought this was great at the time - I'm rather under whelmed now. The slow movement is very short but quite effective - it's rather jazzy, but with a wide-leaping and almost atonal melody line which I remember being rather proud of. The last movement is jazzy again, and like the first sonata's finale it's a too-short ABA (though slightly longer).

June 1991 - Two Pieces - piano
First one isn't too great - a kind of two-chord blues. Second is more interesting. It opens with a sequence of chords and a recitative-like line which a  played backwards to finish the piece (and it works too!). In between is a rather RVW-like line over those ubiquitous 10ths (a certain vein of RVW certainly linked back to his piano piece The Lake in the Mountains, which I loved to play at this time, is often discernible in my music at this time).


That's enough for now. More as I get through them/record them/set them into Sibelius.

[Guido]

Wow, thanks Luke!
So in 1990 you would have been 14? I love the feeling of nostalgia that things like these can evoke. It always represents so much more than just the notes or the music.

[karlhenning]

Delighted to read your annotations, Luke; and I look forward to checking out the scores and mp3s.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

The sentiment's the same in Delft - fascinating comments, Luke! And thanks for those uploads.

[lukeottevanger]

Wow, thanks Luke!
So in 1990 you would have been 14? I love the feeling of nostalgia that things like these can evoke. It always represents so much more than just the notes or the music.

Yes, and Yes. My birthday's towards the end of the year, so for most of 1990 I was 14, yes.

I'm feeling very indulgent towards all these pieces at the moment - it's so interesting to be reminded that even back then, I was best, freshest and most inspired in empirically- and swiftly-composed miniatures. The large pieces are ambitious, and often have good ideas, but invariably fail badly.

They're proving interesting teaching aids too - the kids at school, so often full of 'I can't do.......', are intruigued to see that, though at their age their teacher 'couldn't do' either, by the time he was a few years older he certainly 'could do'. A few of the kids are at the stage I was at at that age - making tentative and error-strewn attempts to notate their little ideas: it's nice to be able to show them that I was the same, and that with work I managed to get somewhere which they find impressive, and quickly.

[karlhenning]

Bravo!

[lukeottevanger]

(Misprint alert - in that little Prelude, fourth line, fourth bar - G natural, not G flat  )

[karlhenning]

To expand on my one-word post (above) . . . in many ways the most important aspects of composing will likely remain ineffable and mysterious.  But I think that for much of the 'lay public', it is much more entirely an impenetrable cloud of mystery, than really need be.  So I admire and applaud your having found immediate and personal pedagogical use for your early compositional efforts, Luke.

I don't expect Music ever to be "demystified" by (say) Better Science;  but all we can do to tear away some of the needless veils, is all to the good.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

To expand on my one-word post (above) . . . in many ways the most important aspects of composing will likely remain ineffable and mysterious.  But I think that for much of the 'lay public', it is much more entirely an impenetrable cloud of mystery, than really need be.  So I admire and applaud your having found immediate and personal pedagogical use for your early compositional efforts, Luke.

I don't expect Music ever to be "demystified" by (say) Better Science;  but all we can do to tear away some of the needless veils, is all to the good.

Yes. There is mystery to all 'creativity' (hate the word), but we don't need mystique.

[karlhenning]

I am keenly curious, though, Johan . . . how is it you've come to dislike the word creativity?

Luke will yield us space on his Musing Tuffet . . . .

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I am keenly curious, though, Johan . . . how is it you've come to dislike the word creativity?

Luke will yield us space on his Musing Tuffet . . . .

1) Although the term refers to an ability or a force I recognize, it has been devalued through over-use and misapplication to non-deserving persons and activities;

2) 'Creativity' implies an affinity with divine creation - but artists don't create life, or being, only the very powerful and very durable (in the greatest cases) semblance of it; procreation is the only creation, in my opinion, and even then the parents are only passing on, as it were, the miracle they are themselves.

3) 'Creativity', for me, is above all the transformation of your own life force into another, symbolic, form that, hopefully, will endure. But it is secondary to the thing you are transforming, Life itself, thus - not 'creativity'.

[lukeottevanger]

Blimey, the G flat obsession in my typesetting that Prelude was worse than I thought! I've obviously been so convinced by its Janacek similarity that I slipped in a (Janacek favourite) D flat key signature instead of the A flat one it should have had! 

Error corrected, here's the file again. I delete the attachment from above, and those 6 of you who've downloaded it probably ought to replace it with this one.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Good morning and replaced. 

[lukeottevanger]

To continue with the survey of my recently rediscovered earliest music (which started here:

June 1991 - ?? ?? - orchestra
Very odd this - an untitled and unfinished set of 3 orchestral movements (were there meant to be more? - I can't remember). Again the old familiar flaws of previous orchestral pieces - the perrenial 10ths in the bass register, the static inner and lower parts, the orchestration problems/misconceptions. But beyond this there is some interesting and quirky individuality here. The 1st movement is preludial - a bold unison melody over those ubiquitous static, 10th-based harmonies, with a brief violin solo in the middle. It ends in E flat major, but oddly notated - D# G A#. I find it hard to think that this is a mistake, and the other quirks in the piece lead me to think that it is deliberate, for a reason I can't now remember or fathom. The 2nd movement is equally odd, pitting a slow string choral (and again the solo violin, even more prominent and extended this time) against an odd trio of solo flute, solo horn, and solo..... xylophone!! The misconception here is that these three soloists share similar types of material which leaves the non-sustaining xylophone as rather an odd-man-out - maybe, again, this was deliberate. 3rd movement is incomplete, and another bizarre one. Among other things it features a clangourous outburst with prominent swaying bells which were surely influenced by parallel sections in Holst's Saturn. This movement is more sectional, with some interesting ideas; the music stops as pairs of flutes, oboes and horns begin a canon which plays against itself in augmentation and double augmentation.

July 1991 - Music for Piano and Orchestra
Back to earth with a bang. For all its flaws the previous piece was full of Ideas. This one - a concertante thing (with noticeable echoes of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto in the initial cadenza and the following orchestral section) - is much less original. Some of the ideas are nearly good, I suppose - but the same orchestration problems remain. I mean this seriously, and not meaning to disparage or reopen old debates - the stasis of my non-melodic parts and the bland sonorousness of my 10th dominated harmony reminds me of nothing so much as a certain type of film score writing...

August 1991 - Mountain Rhapsody - chorus and orchestra
This is the piece which I rediscovered the other day, and whose rediscovery prompted me to search out all this other stuff. It has the same flaws as the previous pieces (why the hell couldn't I do something about them? - I recall, vaguely , a feeling of disatisfaction with some of these aspects of my music even then). But there are some improvements. It is structurally good - the text settings (of T'ang Chinese and Aztec poetry) are often pretty flaccid stuff, but the hinges, beginning, middle and end, are strong, full of momentum, and tie the piece together well. I remember that composing these passages I had the sense of inevitability and conviction that I often get with my best composing. It was only in brief flashes here, but at least it was present somewhere.

October 1991 - Elegy - cello and piano
Built on parallel triads, with a nice enharmonic mediant shift in the middle. A shame about the 'nonchalant' little unaccompanied tune inserted before the end - the idea is OK, but not the execution.

January 1992 - Prelude, Fugue and Fantasy - piano
Yes, the Fugue really is before the Fantasy! Startlingly awful, this one. There was again some 'romantic' impulse (or something of the sort) behind this one. I viewed the piece itself as a kind of catharsis in which the fugue and the fantasy were a kind of catalyst through which the emotion is transformed into self-knowledge - there's even a quotation from VW's Sea Symphony near the end, the part which sets 'Now first it seems my thoughts begin to span thee'. I note in passing that this piece exhibits a technique I used to use when writing fugal or canonic entries - each is a fifth above the last, so that instead of (say) C-G-C-G we get C-G-D-A - it's also in the Mountain Rhapsody and, to look forward a little, in Before Sleep, which you've already seen and in which it actually works! Anyway, this pieces is terrible and should never be heard - it was merely intended to be something like a personal confessional or diary entry - but I suppose it does show the first glimmerings of an interest in finding a musical parallel to the acquisition of self-knowledge, which became so necessary and so central later on, as you all know.

April 1992 - Requiem - soloist, chorus, orchestra
Unfinished. The text is set with very little repetition, which means that the music is too fragmentary to gather much momentum. The ideas are pretty well-defined, more than in the previous pieces, but the style, especially in the first movement, is often more derivative - above all from the obvious Verdi and Britten models (it looks like the Berlioz was in my mind too, but it can't have been as I'd never seen or heard it at this point). Also possibly Brian's Gothic (behind the profile of some of the brass fanfares) and, at one specific point, the central parts of Holst's Mars. The opening movement, which sets the text up to 'Salva me fons pietatis' has some arresting ideas, especially at the beginning and at the end, where some powerful momentum is built up, and some larger-scale harmonic planning pays off. The second movement, Libera me, which is where the composition breaks off, opens in a much more tonally ambiguous area, with a build-up of ostinati which is more 'contemporary'. The solo voices enter in turn - B, T, A, S - and quickly, each taking two lines of text. The rising tessitura parallels a rise in tension, an increase in speed,  in motion and harmonic complexity; there's an implied progression (In musical style) from past to present also, but it isn't hammered home in too obvious a manner. There the music breaks off...

Undated - Untitled - orchestra
Undated, untitled and also unfinished, this piece probably comes from about this time, taking as clues the manuscript paper, the handwriting, and my observations on the development of my technique and habits (not my style, I can't really speak of a unified style here, of course). This is a slow orchestral movement in 5/4, and an improvement again, with interesting ideas now accompanied by fewer moments of banality. I think this was supposed to be a symphonic poem, possibly Nordic in inspiration. Looking at the score gives me a mysterious and unplaceable frisson, as if it has some forgotten significance.

May 1992 - Elegy (no 2) - cello and piano
Much better than the previous one - this is actually pretty good, confident, exploiting the cello well and mostly getting the relationship between size and technique 'right'. The exception is the cello figuration in the middle, which is a little too hard, too prominent and too 'big' for this moment. I made a quick and ad hoc improvement on it the other day, and tried to record it.....but my cello playing is much worse than it used to be ( I hardly play any more) and I really wouldn't presume to inflict it on you. Here's the score to be getting on with, though. Fancy it Guido?

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Again - very interesting, Luke! And now I'm off to bed...

[lukeottevanger]

There are still a few more pieces to go through, taking me up to the end of my school days (aged 17/18 - Before Sleep being one of these). And after that there are still one or two more forgotten-about pieces which date from later, university days, when I was somewhat more mature, about the time I was composing Ophruoeis and, later, the Four Paz Songs.

Amongst all these are a couple of brief orchestral scores which I've set in Sibelius, and which I'll post up here for fun at the appropriate point.

(Funny, all this emphasis on older pieces when there are plenty of later, better works which have never even been mentioned here!)

[karlhenning]

Wonderful to read your reflections on this fascinating process of 'discovery', Luke.