Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[Saul]

Yep. Bagfulls of notes, sure, but the whole thing is thematic/motivic, very formally clear, and the various textures Liszt devises are structurally important too. It's an extremely lucid piece, for all its difficulty.

Oh those extra bandwagon of chords that go up and down needlessly for no reason, and its not even musical.

I can't stand it.

[Luke]

Yes but - and we've been here before - you not liking it does not = it is bad/badly-composed music.

[Cato]

Oh those extra bandwagon of chords that go up and down needlessly for no reason, and its not even musical.

I can't stand it.

"For No Reason"

Mr. Saul: show me exactly - quote the page and staff - what you mean, and I will show you how you are wrong.

I just happened to see your Scherzo piece with all the nice notes marching in order up and down a scale.

Compare it with Luke's "extra bandwagon" of chords and ask yourself: which piece has more interest and unity?

And Luke's criticism of your piece is on target: again, trust us.  I at least am probably twice your age and have much more experience with musical analysis and technique, as well as producing juvenilia which merited a response from Alexander Tcherepnin.  We know what we are talking about.

[Guido]

Really very moving Luke - that last couple of pages... One guesses the meaning without knowing the words to the poem.

[Cato]

Really very moving Luke - that last couple of pages... One guesses the meaning without knowing the words to the poem.

Which is why I find the ignorant comment that there is an "extra bandwagon of chords that go up and down needlessly for no reason, and it's not even musical" so appalling, insulting, and even enraging, especially when made by somebody whose own work does indeed include passages "needlessly" going up and down a scale!    

[Luke]

Thank you both. I think Saul was referring to Liszt's Dante Sonata when he made that comment - in the context of the discussion, he used it as an example of poor piano writing, I praised it in that respect (even if you hate the piece, you can't fault it as effective piano writing, surely, and as a great example of technique/texture used in a formal dimension), he then made the 'bandwagon of chords' comment.

Guido - I wonder if you do guess the meaning, would be interesting to know! To my mind there's no difference in the last pages, it's all of a piece - it was written in good times! 

[karlhenning]

Thank you both. I think Saul was referring to Liszt's Dante Sonata when he made that comment - in the context of the discussion, he used it as an example of poor piano writing, I praised it in that respect (even if you hate the piece, you can't fault it as effective piano writing, surely, and as a great example of technique/texture used in a formal dimension), he then made the 'bandwagon of chords' comment.

Emphasis mine.

[karlhenning]

I'm feeling a little reckless, so I think I will post a piece here that really doesn't look like the sort of thing I do at all, and which is really a very personal thing to me that I am a little dubious about sharing. But there's a reason for both of those things...

I wrote it a couple of months ago, and it was not intended for public viewing for a couple of reasons - 1) it's really a private piece, as might be clear from the score (though for the purposes of posting it here I've erased various things...); 2) it's a plain and simple out-and-out tonal Romantic pastiche of the sort Saul was asking for a week or two back. In terms of my main compositional output, it doesn't figure at all, like my fugues (only more unambiguously serious), but I wrote it with the idea that it became source material for something more 'me'. In point of fact the formal (not stylistic) model is Liszt, specifically his Petrarch Sonnets, initially written as songs which he then paraphrased into rather gorgeous piano pieces. Well, my piece is a Petrarch setting too, but it imagines that the song is already written, and goes straight to the paraphrase! The idea was that I paraphrase this paraphrase of an imaginary song in my own style at a later date - and eagle-eyed readers will spot that that is exactly what the Karl-destined clarinet+harpsichord piece of whose first lines I posted an image a few pages ago is. Only that piece, if it comes to fruition (I'm finding it hard to do) will not be a paraphrase, it will be a 'deconstruction', as you can see from the title on the image.

Well, here's the score....

I haven't yet had occasion to listen to the performance, Luke.  But I took pleasure in viewing the score again.  I see in the writing such pleasure in the sound of the piano, and artful exploitation of the ways in which one makes such a non-sustaining instrument sing, and ring.

[Franco]

3. One's ego should never exceed one's talents.

You're somewhat of an idealist.

[Cato]

Here we go again. More quarrelsome talk from Mr. "I always tried to separate the topic from the member, and not go into personal attacks." And as soon as I saw Joe write his message (which I completely agree with), I knew we'd yet another variation on the snide back talk. Are you so unwilling to learn from anybody that you have to answer every single comment directed your way with a belligerent wisecrack?

I asked you a simple question the other day as to why the trill you wrote for trombone in one of your pieces is impossible to play. You don't have to be a trombonist (I am not) to realize why. You could find the answer in a 5-minute Google search. But no. You didn't want to. And when someone tells you your piano writing is either awkward or unplayable, rather than accepting that possibility and doing something about it, your first impulse is always to attack the messenger - as I'm sure you will do with whatever response you come up with to my comment here.

Amen!   0:)

Allow me to reiterate my idealistic statement: One's ego should never exceed one's talents.

Luke needs his site back! 

[greg]

We are talking about piano here, and I studied piano.

Joe as well.
They're just tips to keep in mind for when you write future music.

[Saul]

Joe as well.
They're just tips to keep in mind for when you write future music.

Luke,

Am I allowed to comment on your music?

If you don't want me to say a word, I wont.

[Joe_Campbell]

Luke,

Am I allowed to comment on your music?

If you don't want me to say a word, I wont

It's not that you're not allowed to comment on music, it's that every one of your comments rings false for a number of reasons, two of which I stated above. How can anyone take your musical criticisms seriously when your own compositional efforts are riddled with the very problems you find in others' - even more so when you refuse to recognize them in your own music.

On a good day, your response is "I'll take it into consideration," as if you must carefully parse the suggestion with respect to your pure and perfect musical ideas, and on a bad day, you'll just dismiss or ignore the problem as you have done with nearly every one mentioned thus far.

You just continue to play the victim and assume that we are all somehow ignorant to your towering intellect and compositional genius, enjoyed by 11 year olds the world over. Even now, due to the lack of traffic on your own works' thread, you've somehow managed to drag another one of your masterpieces over here.

[Cato]

The curse of relativism: all opinions are created equal, even if they are not.

[Luke]

Wow....I go away for a few hours....!

Saul can comment on my pieces, of course he can. They're public domain now. As far as I know all he said about this one was that he thought there were too many notes in it. I can live with that. I disagree, of course - and one thing you probably know about me if you've been following this thread all this time is that this issue, of note density or whatever we should call it, is something I would have thought about whilst composing, as indeed I did. I tend to think alot when I'm composing!    It's the way it is for good reason.

To address Saul's point directly (though I've done this a little already) - if Saul knows much of my other music he will know that in general I use a lot of silence and thinner textures as well as thicker more complex ones. This piece, however, is deliberately following a Lisztian format (one which Saul also rejects) in which variation and figuration is of the essence. Moreover, its 'subject' in a certain sense is abundance, overflowing, welling-up emotion; those throbbing waves of semiquavers are 'emotionally precise'. Finally, the piece is a paraphrase of an [imaginary] setting of poem whose texts includes river/water imagery, from whence the undulating and waving semiquavers derive. (I ought to point out, too, for those who haven't listened or looked, that the piece is actually hardly unfree of moments of rest and respose.)

But Saul, if you are allowed to comment on my piece, others are also free to comment on those comments. To put them into some sort of critical context. And if you post pieces of your own on my thread as examples of 'how it should be done', ditto - their comments are equally welcome.

This thread has always been a welcoming gathering of friends, even in the days of the Artificially Ignited Flame War (remember that one!?) - and I'd rather it stayed that way.

[Cato]

For those worried about the figurations in the Canzone, allow me to point out 2 simple examples near the beginning and the end.

First one should see, however, that part of the marvelous character in Luke's work comes from a major/minor tension.  Note that the work begins with a key signature in F major (D minor? Or is it maybe A minor with a Bb?  The A at the top tells us nothing so far.), but that things immediately become ambiguous with the C#, i.e. Db, in the theme, creating the possibility of F minor, and then the F# arrives (which to my ear has always created a kind of "double minor" sound,i.e. F, Gb, Ab, Bb, C, Db, Eb, F).

In bar 9 on page 1, observe the 16th-note figuration: it is not there merely to drive the piece, nor to show off the pianist's fancy fingerwork.  The notes are D/C#=Db, and then change to Eb and Db, showing specifically the major/minor tension.  Also see the bass line, which no longer has the A at the beginning, but goes from E (from F major) to Eb (F minor).

On the last page, page 10, look at the 16th-note figurations again and observe how they harmonically make sense with the theme: note especially the Db in the figurations, producing the major/minor tension heard in the C#(Db) in the theme.  Note how again the F#(Gb) ambiguity is chased away at the end, resolving definitely to F major.

What might seem like "too many notes" to the untrained eye or ear is in fact quite necessary.  Given the nature of the piano, simply to have solid unarpeggiated chords would make the piece resemble an exercise in a chromatic harmony book, albeit the best one there!   0:)

[Luke]

You know, I think that might be the first time I've had an analysis of that sort done on any piece of mine (well, except that you've done similar things on a smaller scale before, now I think of it)! It feels so odd, to have my music subjected to such knowledgeable scrutiny - and wonderful, too, that you find that the piece holds together at this level. You have picked out some of the moments which I would have wished you to notice, the ambiguities inherent in some of the harmony from the outset. and the way in which they resolve, in the end.

I really want to thank you, very sincerely. 

[karlhenning]

Yes, Cato's musical perspicacity is both a great resource and a delight.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Since I don't visit this thread as often as I should, I do apologize to Luke for intruding solely with a comment on the ubiquitous presence of our friend Saul. Let me first say that I too very much like the Canzone, which is beautifully pianistic and a delightful reminiscence of its Lisztian model. I hear it also a slightly tongue-in-cheek (those climaxes on the subdominant!), as if it's saying that while it's fun to write in this way, it's an older style that composers can use only with the knowledge that it's no longer a language of their time.

Edited by Knight

[Luke]

Since I don't visit this thread as often as I should, I do apologize to Luke for intruding solely with a comment on the ubiquitous presence of our friend Saul. Let me first say that I too very much like the Canzone, which is beautifully pianistic and a delightful reminiscence of its Lisztian model. I hear it also a slightly tongue-in-cheek (those climaxes on the subdominant!), as if it's saying that while it's fun to write in this way, it's an older style that composers can use only with the knowledge that it's no longer a language of their time.

Thanks, Sfz - you got it in one, of course: it was fun, writing in that style, and I enjoyed indulging in a little splashiness, but it's nothing I would want to do again. As I said when I initially posted the piece, it was designed as a sort of pre-compositional resource, and actually not as something I was going to share with anyone else (well, hardly anyone else). It was really intended to be something that existed not in its own right but as a musical object to be drawn upon in the writing of another piece, a piece written in my own accents. That fact is also why the score is set in that 'handwritten' font, btw - that was just something I found useful as a constant reminder of the status of the music I was writing.