Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[Karl Henning]

As Dogberry would enjoin: Be invigitant, I pray thee! : )

[Cato]

Cato's essay on Around Fern Hill is a really fascinating little guide to it. What interests me is the different slant he puts on things - to me, for example, its ABCABC structure, where italics are revisitings of old ground in the light of experience, is of central importance. Cato's essay certainly mentions this, but it doesn't emphasize it, instead focusing on harmonic and motivic themes in a way that fascinates me, as the composer, as much as anyone else. Again, he talks about modes in their traditional sense - major, minor, phrygian, lydian and so on - whereas I think of them as aggregates of pitches, which in this piece happen to increase in number (one out, two in) with each stanza of the poem...

As I mentioned in the essay, part of that focus probably came from imagining the score without realizing that the poem's reading by Dylan Thomas was part of the work. 

It would be interesting - perhaps - to have a concert where the music is played 3 times - first without the recording, then with it, and then without it again.

So he finds things there which I both knew and didn't know were there...

In the 1930's a young professor at Harvard University wrote a small book on Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).  Mann, after reading the monograph, wrote to the professor and said that the analysis had revealed many things to him which he had not realized. 

As a former composer and as a novelist of no repute, I can attest that if one tried to be conscious of every meaning in a work, the creative act would be impossible.  And if one were conscious of everything, I think the work itself would be ruined, something cold and artificial.

Must dash. Exam to invigilate!

Such is the life of a modern-day composer!       Billions for rude, crude dudes who cannot spit C major in tune, while the true artist hungers for an audience.

[Karl Henning]

Hungers, but does not slaver! Death before slavery!

[Luke]

Looking at this waistline, I'm not sure I hunger half enough...

[Cato]

With Luke Ottevanger's approval: you will need to have a copy of the music and the performance for the full effect:

http://www.mediafire.com/?no6zykq6464c2z2 - Score

http://www.mediafire.com/?hycr77dymz2665f - Performance

A Walk Around the Music of Around Fern Hill


If you ever had any doubts about the major-minor system's ability to retain its emotional power, then you must listen to Luke Ottevanger's Around Fern Hill.  While the work is not written with a specific key, its opening bars dance in a major-key field toying with the ear in various major scales.  One hears the note G ascending over 4 octaves at the start of the work, which begins with a triplet, a rhythmical figure of great importance throughout the composition.  With the exception of a constant C# in the opening bars, we are in white-key land, with whiffs of G major and, thanks to that C#, A and E major.  In bar 3 the triplet descends (G6 – A5 – A4 (the numbers refer to the octaves)) to give us one of those fleeting hints of a major scale (A-E-C#-A).  But these are only whiffs, as the composer has no intention of allowing us to linger for long in such a deluding land.

I should mention at this point that I first "listened" mentally to the work from the score alone, and had no idea that the title came from a poem.  Deducing that the markings ("Stanza I") meant that the composer obviously had a poem in mind as the background for a particular section, I simply concentrated on the story which the music told by itself, and discovered the composer's source of inspiration only at the end, where the poem appears in full at the bottom of the last page.  Certainly the music alone provides a powerful experience of emotional mystery.

And that mystery begins to arrive in various ways: with our ears accustomed to a tentative brightness in the ambiguity of these major keys, the composer also grants us music of a slow contemplative nature with the chiming, ticking rhythms of bells and clocks (which will persist, with increasing difficulty and dissonance, as the piece tells its tale).  Yet our contemplation is disturbed by the nature of the meter (7/8) and by the music insisting on assorted arrhythmic arpeggios (bars 3-5).  Finally in bars 6-19 we hear in 3/8 the tolling of bells in the distance (the chord E-B-E followed by an A and D-G) in the left hand, while the right hand "dances" merrily in the churchyard with triplets of various kinds.

But in bar 20 things become ominous: the rhythmic complexity in the dance increases, with dissonant major 2nds appearing.  The leaping G's from the opening 2 bars reappear, as does that descending triplet (G6 – A5 – A4) in bar 22, which ends with another ascending triplet (G3 – A4 – B5).  Bar 23 gives us a quick B-minor hint of a severe change in mood, as an F# appears for the first time with the C#: and then the shock of bar 24!  That single F#, a simple semitone lower than G, heard alone at first, becomes the root of a minor-ninth chord (F#-D-B-F), whose sudden emotional impact is Gesualdoan, similar to the famous chord used by Arnold Schoenberg in Pelleas und Melisande (at Cue 8, p. 16 of the study score) where an F natural underlies a first inversion D minor triad with a G# spread over several octaves.

The appearance of the F# has added a melancholy, if not ominous, atmosphere to the music (bars 25-30), which attempts to keep dancing up and down a quasi-G scale (with that augmented 4th C# ).  But the F# is now in the bass, at times with the C#, and prevents a major mood from taking over.  As proof that dissonance can be very poignant, listen to the tolling continue (bars 30-38) with a syncopated and divided G major 7th chord against a C#-E# in the bass: and is that dance on the quasi G-scale now more of a C# minor experience?  A 3-note motif (F#-D-F) provides more tonal and emotional ambiguity, and leads back to the dueling dance of scales (G vs. C#).

At bar 39, the music attempts to "play" in 5/8 time, but with ever more pain or bewilderment, and leads into a variation of bars 30-38.  The divided and syncopated G-major 7th chord now rings against an F-B-D in the bass, and that 3-note motif now descends directly (Gb-F-E, bar 45) rather relentlessly.  The opening octave leaping triplet returns at the end of bar 50, but now descends down 3 C naturals to announce a transition to a new tension between C and the C#. 

For above the triplet-dominated, wandering-the-hill music on modes of E and C#, a melismatic theme on C arises in the treble, a theme masked and hinted at in the previous sections (e.g. the theme in bars 25-26, in the middle voice in bars 32-38, and then in the treble in bars 39-43).  Now unadorned, the theme emphasizes C, with Bb at first the only point of interference, and with the time expanding by a single 16th note over bars 51-54, the theme rises to G, only to be joined unexpectedly in a cluster with E#/F#.   It is as if the tolling sounds in the background have now chosen to speak directly: at times a ding-dong-ding pattern of three is heard, as in those earlier 3-note motifs of F#-D-F and Gb-F-E.  Grace notes echoing the opening triplet are heard throughout the bass in this section (bars 50-62).  Diminished 5th sounds in the bass (C-F#, E-Bb) prevent any rest, and provide a point of comparison, as the opening G modality is now changing to octaves of C# in bars 55-56.   Conflicting with the C# is the melismatic C/Bb theme in the middle voice, ending on D in bars 59-60, despite the tremolos on C# echoing around, and a punctuating E/F high in the treble. 

And then a pause, and again the leaping triplet appears, now on C natural, and the time has changed from 7/16 to 7/8.  But by bars 64-65, the triplet now intones the C/C# (now spelled Db because of an Ab tonality in the left hand) tension, and the melismatic theme attempts a return in a variation in the treble.  A flourish on Eb minor ambles by, and then the tolling of diminished fifths with the Ab-Eb accompanies a long melisma on a C scale, a sort of double minor with a Db and Gb.  The melisma often uses triplets in keeping with the rhythmic motif established in the first bar, and hearkens backward to the "dancing" heard in bars 9-22: and so bars 63-77 can be heard as a shorter, more dissonant version of the opening 24 bars, where the shock of the single F# in bar 24 is now replaced by an Ab pentad (Ab-Bb-Db-Eb-G) with a high C echoing away.   

In bar 78 the triplet figure descends to announce a sort of B mode, and we now hear a variation of the earlier part of the work (bars 25 ff.), but with more stumbling around the hill (compare bar 26 with bar 80), and more anguish: compare that earlier, insistent 3-note motif of F#-D-F with its variation in bars 86-87 as F#-D-Eb/F, and listen to the tolling transform into clusters, with minor seconds sprinkled about (e.g. bars 81, 93-95).  The 5/8 section (bars 93-97) is very similar to its earlier appearance (bars 39-43) In bar 99 ff., the 3-note motif, now changed to Gb-F-E in the middle voice, struggles against an Eb ninth in the bass and a painfully chiming G major 7th chord with an added C above it.

The 3-note motif is also emphasized in subtle, almost unconscious ways in the middle voice: listen e.g. to bars 104-105, where the middle voice begins its triplets with E-Gb-F, while bars 106-107 begin with Gb-F-E and E-F-Gb respectively.

And as clusters of notes reach upward in the treble (bar 109), perhaps as symbols of desperate, useless clutching at the surface of the water of memory, the gravity in the bass reveals a swallowing sea, using that diminished 5th  of G-C# from the opening as a tremolo leading to a deep G/A finale, while the last manifestation of our poor 3-note motif is heard in the middle voice.  Seven notes ring out in the final bars, from that G/A in the bass to an E/F in the treble, not unlike the finale of Schoenberg's Erwartung,  where the music both descends and rises to "swallow" the character at the end.

I mentioned to the composer that the use of the "scratchy" recording of the poem reminded me of the unusual novels of W.G. Sebald, who often included fuzzy, "faraway" photos to accompany his themes of lost memories.  The result is that the work is successful on various levels: the music could stand alone without the poem, in the same way that the poem has stood alone.  Yet together one experiences a quite different third dimension of meaning, as if the music were the poem's deepest unconscious. 

Finally, the title of the music is Around Fern Hill, and may explain many of the circling figurations in the music, as if these and the other motifs and themes are the sounds when one walks around Fern Hill.

In case anyone missed it, here is a reminder to take a musical walk Around Fern Hill by Luke Ottevanger

[Karl Henning]

Whew, first free stretch of non-sleep time since . . . Tuesday evening.  Will head back to Luke's Hill to-morrow!

[Luke]

'Busy' barely begins to describe my last few weeks, but I am now offcially on holiday, and maybe, just maybe, some composing might get done. There are ideas aplenty - maybe too many of them, because I'm finding it hard to settle on just one. Everything I have sketched in the last few weeks, however (and there have been a few bars, which I didn't write about here) has at best failed to please me, and at worst actively displeased me (and that's why I didn't write about any of it). Part of me worries that I am losing my touch, if I ever had one...but I've been here before, more than once, and always came out of it better-equipped than I went in, so I won't worry too much.

One idea I have been mulling over, though...recently I've been approached with the sketchy idea of possilby writing something along the lines that were once called 'Third Stream music.' IOW, something that has a foot in both classical and jazz camps. Though I don't talk about it much here, I am quite a jazz nut, and in general keen on music that can be open to other ways of working. At first I had no idea how to start, but I realised yesterday that in fact I'm already there, in a way: the modal system I use in pieces like Around Fern Hill, Elegy and Ascent, my various piano sonatas and the Canticle Sonata is very different in many ways to 'modal jazz' in its various types, but the root idea is the same: different areas of the music use only particular scales; chords are not really the point here, only the totality of the mode. So, just as 'So What' (the most famous piece of modal jazz of all?) switches between D dorian and Eb dorian, so e.g. the opening phrases of my Canticle Sonata switcc between various exclusive modal groupings. In a piece like the Canticle Sonata, (and indeed in Ascent and in Around Fern Hill) the whole argument of the piece is carried and reinforced by the modal structure; the music wouldn't work without it. In fact I can envisage taking one of these pieces and reinventing it in a Third Stream kind of way. Possibly. E.g the basic motives of the Canticle sonata and its metric and modal structure being the framework for an improvisation of some sort, the clarinet+piano turning into sax, piano, bass and perhaps a few other instruments... Food for thought.

Thoughts and advice on the above would be grealty appreciated, because this would be a wholly new direction for me!

[Karl Henning]

Roll with it! And great to "see" you about, Luke!

Advice, not sure I have any . . . now and again I'll set to writing something with, I shouldn't say any specific musical goal of fusion (or infusion), but with the ghost of Monk not far off.  It still turns into Henning, though I expect there is still value added from the jazz spirit world.

[Cato]

Part of me worries that I am losing my touch, if I ever had one...but I've been here before, more than once, and always came out of it better-equipped than I went in, so I won't worry too much.

Trust me: you have the golden touch!  And it needs more exercise!   

One idea I have been mulling over, though... the modal system

Polymodality, or even a technique like Modus Lascivus, will still offer many possibilities. 

... in pieces like Around Fern Hill, Elegy and Ascent, my various piano sonatas and the Canticle Sonata is very different in many ways to 'modal jazz' in its various types, but the root idea is the same: different areas of the music use only particular scales; chords are not really the point here, only the totality of the mode.

Despite Wagner and Gesualdo (although I hate writing that!), chords should (usually) never be the point!  Yes, "only the totality of the mode" should be the point.  Mahler once opined that harmony should not matter as such, as long as the counterpoint generates it.

Yet, exceptions (Gesualdo?  Schoenberg?  Art Tatum?) can be made.

In fact I can envisage taking one of these pieces and reinventing it in a Third Stream kind of way. Possibly. E.g the basic motives of the Canticle Sonata and its metric and modal structure being the framework for an improvisation of some sort, the clarinet+piano turning into sax, piano, bass and perhaps a few other instruments... Food for thought.

Thoughts and advice on the above would be greatly appreciated, because this would be a wholly new direction for me!

Alfred Hitchcock once said that one of his driving points of creativity was to avoid cliches.  You might consider - especially for the Canticle Sonata -  not the usual saxophone one would expect, but an English horn, perhaps with an oboe d'amore and/or bass clarinet.

Or if the saxophone is what is in your head, then follow that: the trick then will be to find your own sound with it.

[Jo re mi]

Just as another example of busting the bounds of categories, I refer the honourable gentleman to the new Can "Lost Tapes" box set. Never one camp or another, as you know their music is as urgent, organic, complex (and simple) & beautiful as any.

[Karl Henning]

Currently Listening to:
I listen only to the music of Luke Ottevanger

I like the way you roll.

[Karl Henning]

Just as another example of busting the bounds of categories [....]

Zappa famously (and Monk, rather obscurely, I should think) disregarded musical borders.  That was Value In.  Much of Zappa's (and probably all of Monk's) oeuvre, though, fits with reasonable ease into broad categories.  Not that there's anything wrong with that . . . .

[North Star]

Zappa famously (and Monk, rather obscurely, I should think) disregarded musical borders.  That was Value In.  Much of Zappa's (and probably all of Monk's) oeuvre, though, fits with reasonable ease into broad categories.  Not that there's anything wrong with that . . . .

Another jazz guy, Miles could probably be included, too - jazz (cool, hard bop, modal, post bop), classical, rock, funk... Miles didn't give a hoot about the labeling of music.
And perhaps Ellington and Mingus, too, in their more thorough composing than most other jazz composers, approaching classical composers.

[Luke]

Just as another example of busting the bounds of categories, I refer the honourable gentleman to the new Can "Lost Tapes" box set. Never one camp or another, as you know their music is as urgent, organic, complex (and simple) & beautiful as any.

Ah, Mr Mi, how nice to hear from you again! Do I have that one? I think I might. But if so it went straight to my portable hard drive thing, which fell on the floor a few weeks ago and is now a goner, with all the files on it now inaccesible (about 17000 music files/scores included    )

But, yes, I've touted Can hereabouts a few times, you know how I highly I think of them, and they have such intriguing links to the classical world in any case, what with the Stockhausen thing. Your description of them is spot on - the urgency is the thing, there is never the slightest hint of noodling or pretentiousness, just this unique mixture of hard intensity, virtuosity (Leibezeit/Karoli) put solely at the service of art, limitations (Damo/Mooney's voices...) turned to shockingly expressive advantage,  Stockhausen-trained musical sophistication (Schmidt/Czukay) used to explore the extremes of what rock can do. All this done with complete and utter ineffable cool.

And of course the other guys are right too (and I know you know all the stuff they mentioned). Been in my annual summertime Ornette Coleman mood recently (Lonely Woman is the one which always hangs around in my mind), a bit of Sun Ra too, and just read David Schiff's fascinating The Ellington Century, which is written from a very interesting perspective - various facets of twentieth century music of all sorts seen through the prism of Ellington's music (Schiff is primiarily a classical scholar, with a book on the music of his composition tutor Elliott Carter, for instance, but he certainly knows his jazz and his Ellington inside out). Some fascinating insights. So my mind is in the right state at the moment for this potential project...

Anyway, looking forward to seeing you this weekend....

[Karl Henning]

Ah, Mr Mi, how nice to hear from you again! Do I have that one? I think I might. But if so it went straight to my portable hard drive thing, which fell on the floor a few weeks ago and is now a goner, with all the files on it now inaccesible (about 17000 music files/scores included    )

Yowch!

[Luke]

first post in a few weeks to say....


I COMPOSED SOMETHING!!!!!



It's only very short, but it is notes on paper, and they are the first for a while.

A couple of my pieces have been played by amateur orchestras, as some of you will know. The performances left much to be desired, but nevertheless I remain very grateful indeed to the conductor Michael Sackin who commissioned, rehearsed and performed both pieces. It was his 70th birthday bash today, and I wrote him a tiny thing for string quartet, in the vein of the little pieces (often canons and musical jokes) that composers so often used to dash off to send each other greetings.

This little piece enshrines the dedicatee's name in the usual way of these things; it is called Le Siffleur - the whistler - in reference to Michael's legendary ability to whistle in two parts at once (maybe more)....

I'd attach the score if I could - I'll upload it somewhere else soon...

[Karl Henning]

Splendid!

[Jo re mi]

That is splendid indeed! I hope Michael's birthday bash was enjoyable, so good you could make it.

By the way, Vince looks somehow different. Has he done something with his hair?

[ibanezmonster]

http://www.mediafire.com/?no6zykq6464c2z2 - Score
http://www.mediafire.com/?hycr77dymz2665f - Performance

Wow, what atmosphere!  For some reason it brought to mind when I was playing Bioshock, traveling through certain environments that were somewhat sophisticated, yet with a touch of darkness, all the while listening to old voice recordings. I guess that's the closest description I can come up with.

One thing I've noticed about your style is that rhythmically you can kinda tell it's complex, but in the score it's even more complex than it sounds. Actually, it's pretty interesting studying your rhythmic style.

[Luke]

Wow, what atmosphere!  For some reason it brought to mind when I was playing Bioshock, traveling through certain environments that were somewhat sophisticated, yet with a touch of darkness, all the while listening to old voice recordings. I guess that's the closest description I can come up with.

One thing I've noticed about your style is that rhythmically you can kinda tell it's complex, but in the score it's even more complex than it sounds. Actually, it's pretty interesting studying your rhythmic style.

Thanks for this, Greg! Glad you found the piece atmospheric - that can't be bad. The potency of old recordings - yes! They can be so powerful, and I do feel that this is a force which can be harnessed to good effect in one's composing. OTOH, I sometimes worry that it's quite an easy effect - which is why I've never followed through on this fascination I have, apart from in this one piece where, yes, I feel it works well.

OK, I've been having big problems uploading anything anywhere recently, but maybe this works - it's only the score to the little birthday piece I mentioned above, but if someone could download it and just check that the link works then perhaps some of my problems will be solved

http://www.4shared.com/office/jyWo_JsL/Le_Siffleur.html

Mr Mi - nice to hear from you again! Vince likes to try various styles, and also, as you can see, has been experimenting with more than one gender. But at the moment he is sporting his traditional black, and, all unawares, merrily sweeping the kitten off the furniture with reckless waves of his enormous, muscular and violently wagging tail...