Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[Guido]

Okay. I listened to 'Through the Year' three times (the first time without the scores). What strikes me? These are very poetic miniatures, simple but not simplistic. The child in the composer is alive and well. They show imagination, humour and colour. A few remarks:

2. Something you could whistle whilst walking;
3. 'A Fallen Leaf' - very affecting;
8. One of my favourites, even at a first hearing;
10. My other favourite, because of its magical modulation (reminds me of Holst, 'The Perfect Fool');
13. Lovely and tender;
16. Rhythmically fine;
18. Most layered piece, Ivesian in its combination of musics.

It's not difficult to understand why 'Through the Year' is your favourite piece, Luke.

I'll explore your other, 'adult' pieces with great interest the coming days.

Johan

As well as Luke's suggestions above (my favourite of which are the Paz Songs and the Sonata), might I draw your attention towards the little Christmas pieces too. They are all miniatures and simple but not simplistic much like the childrens pieces, but I find them extraordinarily affecting (particularly no.6 - Jesus Christ the Apple tree) - their Ivesian layering of the vernacular elements of the Christmas carols and more mystical elements creates a unique aura around them that is just extraordinary. And I don't even believe in Jebus!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I intend to listen to everything, so the 'little Christmas pieces' won't be overlooked...

[GilFray]

Dear Sir: I listened to your 2007 Piano Sonata while perusing the score and thought it lovely in a pastoral vein. I am fond of Lydian inflections and like your use of them here. The logic of a Neapolitan cadence to arrive at the final tonic cadence out of the  Messiaen-ish bird song pedaled haze was gratifying in the implications of resolving the the upward inflection of the raised fourth through balancing it with  the flatted second to the tonic. I anticipate more pleasure in listening to other items you have posted as my time permits. Nicely performed, too. Hope you could take a listen to some of the music i have posted.  I would be curious to read what you thought of them. Thanks, gil fray.

[lukeottevanger]

Thanks for your kind comments. Although the piece is written using a technique I describe as 'modal' I don't use the term intending to imply traditional descriptions of melodic inflection such as Neapolitan (or phrygian, dorian and so on), so it is interesting to see you use that terminology here. But of course you are right - it doesn't matter what words are used, my first mode tends to stress a sharpened fourth, whereas the modal negation at the the end of the piece hints at a 'phrygian' A flat-G for the first time (there have been no A flats at all until this point). If you hear that as sucessfully balancing the previous tendency then I can only be pleased - it wasn't done deliberately, except in as much as my use of 'modal negations' has an in-built, deliberate tendency to invert previous modal implications.

I will listen to your pieces in a few days when I can give them more time!

Thanks again.

[greg]

I am fond of Lydian inflections and like your use of them here.

the first scale i fell in love with  0:)

[Joe_Campbell]

Since your inbox is full, Luke:

I found the music to Decaux's 'Clair de Lune,' if you'd like. I think it's the only thing he ever wrote for piano. I'll email it to you if you'd like.

PM your email addy if you'd like

Joe

[greg]

Since your inbox is full, Luke:

I found the music to Decaux's 'Clair de Lune,' if you'd like. I think it's the only thing he ever wrote for piano. I'll email it to you if you'd like.

PM your email addy if you'd like

Joe

Me, too...... and I have a recording. Sweet stuff....

[Guido]

Since your inbox is full, Luke:

I found the music to Decaux's 'Clair de Lune,' if you'd like. I think it's the only thing he ever wrote for piano. I'll email it to you if you'd like.

PM your email addy if you'd like

Joe

http://www.geocities.co.jp/NatureLand/5390/impressionist/decaux/english.html

Here it lists other pieces. Sounds very interesting indeed.

[lukeottevanger]

Sorry for turning up late to my own thread! Joe, that sounds very interesting - PM is in the post! I could have sworn I had something by Decaux somewhere here, but searching turns up nothing, so obviously not!

[Guido]

While there's a bit of a fallow period here can anyone tell me where John Cage said that repetition was a sort of change, and exactly the way he said it?

[lukeottevanger]

Sorry for turning up late to my own thread! Joe, that sounds very interesting - PM is in the post! I could have sworn I had something by Decaux somewhere here, but searching turns up nothing, so obviously not!

Thanks for sending it, Joe - looks marvellous, and I can't wait to print it out and play it! But I was almost right, btw - I didn't have any Decaux here, but I had seen some recently: a little organ piece, which is actually to be found via that link you sent me recently. It's nothing like as interesting as the piano piece, though, which must be why I didn't download it. According to Wiki, Clairs de lune is his only surviving piece at all (not just the only one for piano) - just shows how far you can trust Wiki, then!

[lukeottevanger]

While there's a bit of a fallow period here can anyone tell me where John Cage said that repetition was a sort of change, and exactly the way he said it?

No doubt Cage said something along these lines at some point, but (thanks Google!) the line seems to be most famous as written by Brian Eno as one of the aphorisms of his 'Oblique Strategies' cards. Here for an online version of the cards; here for an introduction

[lukeottevanger]

....elsewhere Eno says:

Another psychoacoustic area that I've been extremely interested in, as is probably evident, is repetition and the effect of repetition. One of the Oblique Strategies that I wrote actually says, "Repetition is a form of change." The point of that comment was to make it clear that repetition doesn't really exist. As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if, in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn't stay in one place. So a lot of the work I've done has involved repetition or drones, which are another form of repetition. It has relied on some kind of perceptual modification as being the composer of the piece really. What you do is, you offer something that allows the listener's perception to become a composer.

This is evidently true, and has been observed by other composers, Cage no doubt included (I'm having trouble remembering exactly where I've read the observation made by others, but I know I have done!)- a phrase repeated does not have the same sense second time around, because it is heard with the weight and presence of the first playing in the listener's mind.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

I am reminded of Heraclitus: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

[lukeottevanger]

[attempt to wrench thread back towards its subject]
I suppose the central section of my Nightingale Sonata is an example of this - a 'folktune' called 'The Nightingale' (probably Dutch in origin) collected and notated by John Clare (an early example of the Bartok/Kodaly/RVW/Janacek phenomenon? ) - is played through only once, but in a deliberately uniform environment. The tune itself contains a lot of internal repetition, so that it is hard to recall exactly which version of which phrase happens at which point. We end up with a couple of minutes of relatively uninflected music which seems to bulk larger in the music than in strict temporal terms it really does. The effect is that, although nothing really happens, by the end of the tune the music has become hypnotic - under the weight of its own lack of change it has taken on a stasis that is [meant to be] a reflection of Clare's ideas on childhood and eternity, with which, for him, the song of the nightingale was very much entangled, as a couple of quotations show:

...The eternity of song
Liveth here...

...and still the haunts of its annual visit are in the self same spots the paradise of our young hearts first extacys - green thickets where the leaves hide him from all but joys...

(Clare's orthography)

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Helping you wrench back the thread to its subject...

I have two mp3s of the Nightingale Sonata, Luke - one 'first draft', the other 'compressed'. Is there any difference? I also have the score - belonging to which version? I am going to listen to it tonight.

[lukeottevanger]

There are almost no differences - the compressed version irons out some of the nastier moments in the first draft recording (I know, I know, compression is classical music's enemy no 1, but believe me, it was required here!). Technically, the piece is still in its first draft stage - but I can't envisage changing it now. An odd little piece, if you ask me. I'm not sure how I feel about it, though I think it achieves what I wanted it to.

[Guido]

Thanks for the info Luke and good work in steering the thread back on track. It was my A level music teacher who said that Cage said that thing, and seeing as he was a buffoon, it's qute likely that he got it wrong. But I think it is an interesting point nonetheless.

[lukeottevanger]

Thanks for the info Luke and good work in steering the thread back on track. It was my A level music teacher who said that Cage said that thing, and seeing as he was a buffoon, it's qute likely that he got it wrong.

  The hardest thing about my A level music course was holding back from correcting the teacher when he told us misleading information. Sometimes it was impossible, as I saw my fellow pupils diligently noting down 'facts' which I knew were wrong - I had to meekly suggest that perhaps things weren't quite as they had been explained. I must have been a real pain to teach, but OTOH, it's a hard situation to find oneself in!

As a teacher now, of course, I can see things from the other side - standing up in front of a class is not the least stressful situation one can be in (not for me anyway), all the time trying to be conscious of the needs of each pupil, of time constraints, etc. etc., and one can catch oneself slipping up even on a subject one knows inside out.

But I think it is an interesting point nonetheless.

It certainly is. It's so important when composing to try to bear in mind the almost physical 'mass' of the music as it builds, and to try to balance things accordingly (not that I necessarily manage this at all). The sometimes almost comical extended repetitions of tonic chords at the end of a large Beethoven symphonic Allegro, for example, are instances of LvB trying to find the correct 'mass' of tonic to balance the weight of his excursions outside this key in the development. This mass isn't just a matter of counting bars, either; it's something similar to the difference between clock-time and ontological time in music perception, I think.

Any luck with the Nightingale piece, Johan?

[karlhenning]

As a teacher now, of course, I can see things from the other side - standing up in front of a class is not the least stressful situation one can be in (not for me anyway), all the time trying to be conscious of the needs of each pupil, of time constraints, etc. etc., and one can catch oneself slipping up even on a subject one knows inside out.

Coraggio!