Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[lukeottevanger]

Just knocked off this really shoddy version of the song, for those who want a laugh, intentionally meant or otherwise - follow it along with the words, imagining the spoken phrases in the various gaps (obviously the first bit of speech goes before the music starts). There's a little introduction, of course.

Ignore the out-of-tune piano and my dodgy playing - my little boy was messing around my feet whilst I played! I cocked up the second and third verses as I sort of forgot to play the vocal line as well as my silly Marseillaise reference (verse 2) and other stuff (verse 3). 'Forgot to play' or mangled up.... 

[karlhenning]

Dodgy playing deserves your support!

[lukeottevanger]

I am one of its most loyal adherents....

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Luke, does your name really rhyme with anger, with a hard g? I thought it rhymed with 'hangar' or 'banger'...

(I'll listen to your classic rendition shortly...)

[lukeottevanger]

The difference is slight, only one of emphasis really - it wouldn't be uncommon to find someone whose g's are identical in anger and banger. I'm 'Ottevanger' with the harder G when I'm enunciating clearly (or shouting at someone!); with the softer one when I'm speaking normally! In the song the girls sing my name evenly and precisely, (each syllable staccato e tenuto  ) to emphasize its oversyllabification - so it will rhyme with anger perfectly!

[lukeottevanger]

Oops - I mistyped the text back then. I didn't really think one could rhyme 'imagination' with 'imagination'. Would show a lack of imagination, anyway. Should read

We're the year five generation,
A group of girls with imagination.
This is what we learnt about this year
(but it's just our interpretation!)

[lukeottevanger]

It's been a lot of fun just writing silly words and silly music for kids to enjoy letting their hair down to!  No omphaloskeptic theorising for once... what a relief!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

'Anger' and 'banger can rhyme, you're right. It all  depends where in the British Isles you come from.

Thanks for this definitive explanation of the Ottevanger Conundrum. 

[lukeottevanger]

'Anger' and 'banger can rhyme, you're right. It all  depends where in the British Isles you come from.

Or simply what mood you're in!

Thanks for this definitive explanation of the Ottevanger Conundrum. 

No problem. It's something that's been plaguing us for generations!

Of course, to be pronounced properly, in a Dutch stylee, I'd have to say my name another way entirely.

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Of course, to be pronounced properly, in a Dutch stylee, I'd have to say my name another way entirely.

Well, to be honest, when I mention you to my wife I pronounce your name in the Dutch way!

Just listened to your piece - very neatly done, that Marseillaise quote! But I had hoped to hear you singing/giggling...

[lukeottevanger]

Well, to be honest, when I mention you to my wife I pronounce your name in the Dutch way!

I hope so too!

Just listened to your piece - very neatly done, that Marseillaise quote! But I had hoped to hear you singing/giggling...

Trust me, you really don't want to hear that...

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Trust me, you really don't want to hear that...

I have insurance.

[Guido]

I love it! Post a recording when it happens!

[lukeottevanger]

I'll see what I can do 

[karlhenning]

Thanks for that detailed response, Karl - it's good to have a fresh and understanding eye cast over the piece. I'll get to work on the changes when I can, but that may take some time as my wife's laptop is now consigned to the scrapyard and for some reason Sibelius stopped working on my PC a year or two ago. (No matter how often I uninstall and reinstall it....  )

How we doing here, Luke?  My recital now wrapped up, I am keen to follow up with Kwoon and see about a time to get together and have a lash at your piece.  Depending on Kwoon's availability, we could put this on in a recital this fall.

[lukeottevanger]

Not 'alf as keen as I am! I'm very exited about the prospect, Karl, though I haven't talked about it much as I don't want to bug you!

Latest is - my wife has a new laptop; all my stuff was saved as the old one was breathing its last; Sibelius is now installed on the new laptop. Therefore I'll be able to do those last little bits this weekend, I think.

In 'Other News':

Though I'd filled up a notebook with work on the prospective orchestral piece, and even written some preliminary pages of score, I've somewhat cooled on the idea - which I never described, and which there's no point describing now! But that process has helped me understand what it was about 'the idea' which is important to me, and what can be shed, and that in turn is helping me to formulate a new idea, more streamlined, more manageable, and equally exciting to me. More when I've got something more concrete to show for it.

[Guido]

In 'Other News':

Though I'd filled up a notebook with work on the prospective orchestral piece, and even written some preliminary pages of score, I've somewhat cooled on the idea - which I never described, and which there's no point describing now! But that process has helped me understand what it was about 'the idea' which is important to me, and what can be shed, and that in turn is helping me to formulate a new idea, more streamlined, more manageable, and equally exciting to me. More when I've got something more concrete to show for it.

Thanks Luke. Keep us posted with any developments. When was the last time you composed an orchestral work?

[lukeottevanger]

Actually, it was ages ago - The Chant of Carnus, finished Christmas 2000, performed February 2002. That piece was one of the last things I wrote before my daughter was born (May 2001), and from that point on I really moved away from the aesthetic of the 'big statement' inherent in orchestral music - you might recall me talking about that, in rather distressed terms, when the Outpost was originally started.

So, as you know....

no, hang on....

[Omphaloskeptic rambling alert - humour me, I haven't done this for ages, and it's relevant in my own mind at the moment even if not in anyone else's! Please skip this if you find such stuff distasteful]

As you know, I think a lot - too much? - about the hows and whys of my music, and how it reflects my life, so I've been aware of every little ebb and flow in my aesthetic stance, in my listening and working preferences, and I've also been aware of why these changes have occured, and what they mean. I also know for certain that fatherhood, the perspective that gave and the impatience with adolescent posturing in the face of 'real life' that it engendered in me, had everything to do with it. But writing a new orchestral piece encourages me to  take a single retrospective glance at what's happened to my music since The Chant of Carnus (and since Mila's birth). In that wide sweep I'm able to see two main trends in my attitudes and in the resulting music, which leave evident traces in my better or more representative pieces.

The first trend was towards reduction, thinning things out, stripping them down to essentials. That's where we came in when the Outpost was first started - me worrying and bemoaning the fact that my music, whilst pleasing to me, was vanishing into its own intimacy (one has to be careful how one reads that!). This reductionism goes hand-in-hand with a growing desire to create music which, whilst still human and expressive, is 'low-impact' or 'non-interventionist' - music which glides without imposing itself in big statements. Using a semi-improvising method of composing helped me to achieve this.

The second trend is harder to describe. In one, technical sense, it was the discovery of a natural, personal  and compatible way to take the bare bones of the very personal style I'd uncovered in the previous stripping-down, and to turn them - re-assemble them, almost - back into bigger statements. That technique, of course, is the modal technique I've described in this thread, which started small and simple - in the Individuation and Enlightenment pieces, for instance - but which grew into a technique which could help to create something larger, more formally strict, more teleological and 'classical' like the Canticle Sonata. The technique also creates formal implications which lead inevitably to such 'big statements' as occur in that clarinet work - but now these big statements are wholly natural and unforced; they don't feel like the adolescent posturing which I hate so much.

The other side of this second trend is the hard one to discuss, which is why I've never done so here. And I'm still not quite sure how to. Suffice it to say that the modal technique provides me with a musical means of writing music which closely parallels some non-musical concepts - concepts of psychology, of 'the self' and the spatial imagery of 'the centre' at which one finds this self, and with it one finds stillness - which are quite profoundly important to me. The Jungian-Zen intersection to be seen in the Individuation and Enlightenment pieces is one aspect of this concern of mine, but it's something that in general I find fascinating, compelling and helpful on a personal level. The idea of being able to create music which in a very real way functions similarly, so that the music itself contains the sort of 'centering' I'm (vaguely) talking about, is very exciting for me - but I didn't realise the potential of the modal technique for doing so straightaway, and in fact I haven't yet written a piece which uses the technique in these ways, which only after I'd written the Canticle Sonata did I suddenly realise were implicit in it. This orchestral piece will hopefully be the first to do so, and so, for this reason and others, it will be a very different piece from the aggressive, rough and dichotomous world of The Chant of Carnus.

There was a point, back in 2005 or so, when vast swathes of the central Romantic repertoire were anathema to me, for the reasons implied in all of the above. If I'd been asked to write an orchestral piece at that point, I think I would have found it impossible to do so. But gradually that core repertoire has seeped back for me - though now I listen to it with a wiser, more mature head than I did when I last heard it. Mahler, who had become a totemic symbol for me - 'I haven't been able to listen to a Mahler symphony since 2002' - well, I've been spinning Barshai's 5 and 10 and Schoenberg's reduction of Das Lied incessantly this week.  In this sense that wilderness I was in, which itself had a calm stillness at its centre which I needed to reach, to understand and to absorb before returning to the hurly-burly - in this sense it was both necessary and immensely helpful.

I am well aware, btw, of the ridiculousness of all this talking about music - too much talk, not enough music to justify it. But as you all know by now, this is the only way which works for me, even if I only manage to eke out a few meagre drops of music as a result!

I now retreat back into my shell. Or 'Mystery scores' as it is also known....

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Very interesting read, Luke.

[lukeottevanger]

You made it all the way through?  Alive?