Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[sul G]

Here's the book I was talking about:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ART-no-nonsense-guide-art-artists/dp/1841590444/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1239234573&sr=8-4

its available for 1p at the moment!

Not any more, it isn't! 

[sul G]

Yes, that's it, exactly. And the slow day-to-day pace, the lack of drama, the big cyclical repetitions. It is a beautiful, calm mixture of large and small, seasonal change and tiny events.

....what strikes me, but what I perhaps didn't emphasize last night (the wine was flowing freely!) is that texts like this remind me that mundane, day-to-day 'boring' life is Good, even though we tend to forget about it when we recall our own lives, in favour of the few-and-far-between Big Events which punctuate it. Romantic and post-Romantic music especially tends to emphasize the extremes of ecstasy and despair, and of course that's the music that gets most discussion round here, I'd have thought. But you know, in general, for 99% of the time life potters along. Maybe we hardly even notice it doing so, but if one knows how to look one can find the simplest but also, IMO, the most profound beauty in this moderato, comodo aspect of life. It's this that I love in White's journals above all.

[sul G]

Well, for better or worse, here's the diary-like, surprisingly desolate-ending-to-my-ears Sonata (no 2) written in the last couple of weeks, as detailed above. Recording has its too-evident flaws, but it captures some of the piece's fragile on-the-edge-of-psychosis state, I think! 

Sonata II - recording
Sonata II - score

I wonder how it will strike you lot? The more I listen to it, the more I think it is good. But who knows?

[karlhenning]

I can't mash those links from the office . . . can you attach a pdf of the score? (That, I could download . . . .)

[sul G]

No problem.

[sul G]

Already spotted one (small) misprint! 

[karlhenning]

No problem.

Got it! And I like it!

[karlhenning]

Already spotted one (small) misprint! 

Sure . . . I nabbed a stinker in stars & guitars while proofing on the bus yesterday.

[sul G]

I'm sure there will be plenty more - I had a good go at the piece this morning, in the sense of sprucing up the dynamic markings etc. That's why I've posted it today. But maybe I should have waited until I'd proof-read a little more!

As for you liking it - well, if your internal ear is a good as I suppose it must be, then I'm very pleased! 

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Well, for better or worse, here's the diary-like, surprisingly desolate-ending-to-my-ears Sonata (no 2) written in the last couple of weeks, as detailed above. Recording has its too-evident flaws, but it captures some of the piece's fragile on-the-edge-of-psychosis state, I think! 

Sonata II - recording
Sonata II - score

I wonder how it will strike you lot? The more I listen to it, the more I think it is good. But who knows?

Will listen to it asap, Luke!

[sul G]

Thanks, Johan

(aware of the dangers of building up expectation too much, I post this piece before the waiting gets too long!)

[karlhenning]

I'm sure there will be plenty more - I had a good go at the piece this morning, in the sense of sprucing up the dynamic markings etc. That's why I've posted it today. But maybe I should have waited until I'd proof-read a little more!

Not a bit of it, I appreciate being able to have a look at it even before all the sprucing is up!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

Thanks, Johan

(aware of the dangers of building up expectation too much, I post this piece before the waiting gets too long!)

After my first listen - wonderful! The piece has a brooding quality, with things stirring in the depths or leaping up into the sky. That 'Scotch snap' is very striking. It's a very 'mature' piece and it keeps your attention. One thing - I do think the 'psychosis' is held back, is held in check, there is a latent wildness (anger?) there that doesn't really become flesh, so to speak. I get a sense that the brooding protagonist of the piece is a bit frightened of the lurking monsters. But you do catch the odd yellow eye through the chinks...

Oh - I really love the semplice passages!

[sul G]

Very perceptive, Johan. You are such a subtle, attentive listener! (This thread is blessed with a good few of them, in fact.) I think you are probably right - there is something held back, and it's held back in quite a lot of my music. That's my nature, I suppose - my music doesn't 'let rip' that often, but there's often something stirring underneath. With the most recent of these more diary-like, confessional pieces - that is, really, the first Sonata and Quiverings - I feel that the music has reached a further degree of faithfulness to me, more so than, for instance, in 2003 when I began on this deliberate course of semi-improvised splurging. IOW, what I write in these pieces is really what I feel and can't be otherwise. Because of that I'm able to look back at a piece a few days later, as now, and in a real sense get to know myself through it. And so can everyone else, too, should they be fool enough! (In recent years it's been quite common for those who know me in person to say of these pieces 'they really sound like your personality'). An odd sensation.

[Guido]

Nice comments Johan - far better than I could have articulated them. I think Sean's comments might be even more apt for this piece - very bleak and sad, though there is hope when it stops hovering and begins to soar instead. Actually some of it sounds amongst the most 'English' music that I have heard from you, and not just in the sense that I feel there is some commonality with some early 20th century Brits (though I do feel this); it also seems to evoke something very English in terms of nature and the English countryside - maybe a darker, bleaker side that the same English composers tended to avoid. Might be barking up the wrong tree here entirely!

[sul G]

it also seems to evoke something very English in terms of nature and the English countryside - maybe a darker, bleaker side that the same English composers tended to avoid. Might be barking up the wrong tree here entirely!

No, I don't think so - though your guess is as good as mine. It should be fairly evident looking at the score and at the piece's subtitle that there is a landscape element here. The picture is of a fenland nature reserve about a mile from my house, a place I go for a walk fairly often. It was walking there on 1st April that I began to sense this piece coming (unfortunately I didn't take this picture then, it's lifted from somewhere online). One striking thing in the fens is the way landscape can be reduced to big, simple planes - water, sky, sun on that day (on another it might be cloud, reeds....). So the first image in the piece, the marking 'fluido' above it, and the general (almost) ever-flowing ever-twining nature of the music spring from the water, definitely. But after that there was no conscious attempt to relate the music to the landscape. To me it feels a much more intimate, personal piece than that, but I'm pretty sure that the landscape invaded it more than I was/am aware of.

As for Englishness - yes, I feel this more and more. The first of my pieces in which I am aware of it are the children's pieces, Through the Year, and the Christmas pieces. Essentially it's just a mistiness, a gentle tenderness, a certain innocence and a lack of going right to the extremes. I never imagined this would happen to my music, but I don't mind it in the least.

[Cato]

Check your personal messages: my first impression finds it wondrously meditative, blurrily longing for that faraway memory which can never be recovered. 

Mr. Scriabin is in that memory, and a fine presence to have in such a work!   0:)

[karlhenning]

(* pounds the table *)

[sul G]

Check your personal messages: my first impression finds it wondrously meditative, blurrily longing for that faraway memory which can never be recovered. 

Mr. Scriabin is in that memory, and a fine presence to have in such a work!   0:)

And check yours right back!  And as there, many thanks to you for these kind comments!

[Dr. Dread]