Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[karlhenning]

BTW, I have been working on the clarinet/piano Canticle Sonata and have made some changes, but the problem remains, if to a lesser extent.

Very glad that the Canticle Sonata has been benefiting from your attention, Luke;  and sorry both that you find a problem, and that I have been unable to be attentive . . . been pressing to get the Passion in a condition for the choir to read it at nest week's rehearsal . . . .

[Guido]

Luke - out of interest - can you read a score by looking at it and hear the harmonies in your head?

My second question, and this may sound flippant, but I was interested to see that you said you had to build up the modes again in the 'problem passage', which I guessed because of the numbers and letters above the bars along with + signs, but really, do you feel you have to? Why not break the rules? I guess these questions are more aimed at the question - why do you stick to your self imposed rules... a philosophic question rather than critical...

[lukeottevanger]

Very glad that the Canticle Sonata has been benefiting from your attention, Luke;  and sorry both that you find a problem, and that I have been unable to be attentive . . . been pressing to get the Passion in a condition for the choir to read it at nest week's rehearsal . . . .

Not a problem in the slightest! 

Luke - out of interest - can you read a score by looking at it and hear the harmonies in your head?

Depends on the complexity of the score, of course, so the answer is on a sliding scale from 'yes' to 'only to some extent'! That's not much help, is it!

My second question, and this may sound flippant, but I was interested to see that you said you had to build up the modes again in the 'problem passage', which I guessed because of the numbers and letters above the bars along with + signs, but really, do you feel you have to? Why not break the rules? I guess these questions are more aimed at the question - why do you stick to your self imposed rules... a philosophic question rather than critical...

Not flippant, an interesting question. There are a few answer, some specific to this particular part of this particular piece, some general. In no special order, not very well expressed and probably not covering everything I think about the issue:

1 - The use of the modes in this passage is not a superimposed, abstract device, but an integral part of the music, like a 'significant' modulation in a fully, functionally tonal piece. The total conception of this part of the music is well unified, I think - the form and the modes are bound together here, and I am happy with the result; the problem I am having lies at a different level. In this case, the first sections of the sonata, up to the problem area, present the two basic modes, (plus a few occurences of myterious '1+2'); the problem section simply adds notes to mode 1 until it becomes modes 1+2, and then subtracts them to leave mode 2. The musical effect is of an increase and then a decrease in harmonic density, like a wave coming in and receding, but leaving the shore in a different state.

2 - this is really part of the above - this modal particular point of modal transition is not what is causing the problems for me here, so 'bending the rules' wouldn't really help.

3 - more generally, and forgive the digression. I was teaching someone some Brahms today, and was illustrating for her what I find to be one of the most impressive aspects of his music. That is that the deep expressive beauty of the piece is not acheived at the expense of structural precision and rigour; the two are held in a perfect, mutually-reinforcing and touching balance which itself, in its own way, is a remarkable act of counterpoint, one of Brahms's strongest suits (Mozart and Bach are the only ones comparable, it seems to me). Think, for instance, of the first piece of op 119 (and the example could be multiplied many times over - comparable examples are swarming in my brain already). There are these extraordinary chains of descending thirds, creating utterly new and very subtle chords before your very ears, but the whole is held together by an unobtrusive canon between soprano and bass. Or in one of the most lyrical of the Schumann Variations, op 9, in which the bass is the exact, simultaneous inversion of the treble, but is then made to go in canon with it too.... In both cases, I find that the tenderness of the harmony etc. is only reinforced by the strength of the lines within which it is enclosed. In fact, in Brahms's particular case, I think it goes even further than that, but that's for another thread.... Anyway, what I have drawn from that is not only that one needs to balance the one with the other, but that rigour is an expressive device in itself. Also, that the best music is constructed strongly from every angle, so that it 'holds water' however one looks at it, the composer being aware of the import and implications of their use of seemingly limiting technical devices. I've always strived to write music of this sort, though whether I've managed is another matter.

4 - in fact, of course, I have no problem in principle with allowing a good degree of 'give' in technical matters - after all, this is in effect what a 'tonal answer' is (at this point I'm reminded of the way the tonal answer is sometimes used as part of the argument against the intervallic rigour of twelve tone technique). But in practice, and in all honesty, in this particular modal way of writing, I neither find this technical 'give' necessary nor, in fact effective. Using the modes as I have been doing creates (and is intended to create) music of an unusual ambiguous and 'floating' harmony* Playing around with the modes, then, whilst acceptable in principle as I said above, only serves to muddy the waters in actuality, whereas keeping the modes pure makes the music more lucid and the modal interactions more effective.

*six note modes, for instance, are usually enough to suggest two or three tonal centres without conclusively pinning the music down to one, and I have a mental image of the mode floating in space like a 3D object around which the music/composer/listener walks, seeing (hearing) the thing from various angles like an Alexander Calder mobile. Each of the Individuation and Enlightenment pieces works in this way, then; in the piano Sonata, the first section, in mode 1, can be hard as three 'views' of the mode; then a similar thing happens with mode 2, etc. The Canticle Sonata works in a similar but more complex way - the opening melodic paragraphs in mode 1, each on one bar shorter than the last, for instance, are also a variety of views of the mode, exploring various different harmonic implications without ever conclusively settling for one (or being able to)

[Guido]

Very interesting. 

Using the modes as I have been doing creates (and is intended to create) music of an unusual ambiguous and 'floating' harmony'

this is exactly how I experience it, and I have to say that I find I can never be totally comfortable with it. Even when I find it very beautiful, there is something very nervous and restless about it - it never seems to 'settle' like normal harmony does. I'm not sure it will with repeated listening either - I feel that that 'freely floating' sound is an integral and very unique part of it.

Incidentally now that you have broadband could you upload the recordings of the two recent piano sonatas without the hideous amount of compression that you had to use before? That would be great!

Those late Brahms piano pieces are really very special. Are the earlier piano sonatas as good? You haven't mentioned them to me.

[greg]

Those late Brahms piano pieces are really very special. Are the earlier piano sonatas as good? You haven't mentioned them to me.

oh yeah, all of his piano music is amazing- the only rival he has, in my opinion is Prokofiev.
The most interesting thing about Brahms, i think, is his use of rhythm......

*six note modes, for instance, are usually enough to suggest two or three tonal centres without conclusively pinning the music down to one, and I have a mental image of the mode floating in space like a 3D object around which the music/composer/listener walks, seeing (hearing) the thing from various angles like an Alexander Calder mobile.

wow, that's a very interesting thought.... i wonder if there's some formula to that maybe? i haven't thought of it much.....
1 note = 1 tonality, 2 note = 2 tonalities of course, but beyond that i guess it depends on which notes you have and how you use them.

[lukeottevanger]

Guido, I'm not ignoring your last post, I just have to go out for the day in a few minutes. I'll reply this evening. But replying to Greg's point is a bit quicker:

wow, that's a very interesting thought.... i wonder if there's some formula to that maybe? i haven't thought of it much.....
1 note = 1 tonality, 2 note = 2 tonalities of course, but beyond that i guess it depends on which notes you have and how you use them.

Depends on how you define 'tonality' - does a piece made up only of, say, the note C imply only a tonality of C or does it, by persisting so long, imply itself to be a dominant of some sort? So perhaps 1 note = many tonalities. And of course (sticking to 12 tone ET), all 12 notes = all tonalities too. But in between = say I had a mode made up of C, D, F, G, A, B - there's an implication of something like C major, of a Lydian F, of a Dorian D and a Mixolydian G, but without any of these being fully determined. The music can move from one to the other without a single point of modulation. This leads to the 'floating' tonality I described, which, though Guido finds it troubling, is very much to the point in my mind - more later on that.

[greg]

Guido, I'm not ignoring your last post, I just have to go out for the day in a few minutes. I'll reply this evening. But replying to Greg's point is a bit quicker:

Depends on how you define 'tonality' - does a piece made up only of, say, the note C imply only a tonality of C or does it, by persisting so long, imply itself to be a dominant of some sort? So perhaps 1 note = many tonalities. And of course (sticking to 12 tone ET), all 12 notes = all tonalities too. But in between = say I had a mode made up of C, D, F, G, A, B - there's an implication of something like C major, of a Lydian F, of a Dorian D and a Mixolydian G, but without any of these being fully determined. The music can move from one to the other without a single point of modulation. This leads to the 'floating' tonality I described, which, though Guido finds it troubling, is very much to the point in my mind - more later on that.

i understand a lot more with that explanation, really.
a really obvious demonstration of this would be Terry Riley's In C, or more specifically the performing version of it that i've written out myself, which tends to go back and forth between C Lydian, G Mixolydian and E Minor...... and i mention this one because, unlike most other music, that's all it does- no modulations, and it even sounds interesting. 

[lukeottevanger]

OK, I'm back....brace yourselves! 

a really obvious demonstration of this would be Terry Riley's In C, or more specifically the performing version of it that i've written out myself, which tends to go back and forth between C Lydian, G Mixolydian and E Minor...... and i mention this one because, unlike most other music, that's all it does- no modulations, and it even sounds interesting. 

Greg - picking out Terry Riley is very pertinent - he's been quite an example for me; though this modal technique of mine didn't come from anywhere except my own proclivities, I was interested to see it echoed precisely in Riley's Y Bolanzero, about which he has said:

The entire material, the Oriental sounding melodies as well as the floating harmonies which do not seem to want to settle on a single center [my italics] are derived from the scale (ascending A-Bb-C#-E=F-G-A and descending A-G-F-E-C#-C natural Bb-A-Cl). This has a scalic relationship to the North Indian Raga, Madhuvanti...

His wonderful set of pieces (to be improvised upon) for just-tempered piano The Harp of New Albion work in a similar way, which is why they are such an important work for me.

... this [floating harmony] is exactly how I experience it, and I have to say that I find I can never be totally comfortable with it. Even when I find it very beautiful, there is something very nervous and restless about it - it never seems to 'settle' like normal harmony does. I'm not sure it will with repeated listening either - I feel that that 'freely floating' sound is an integral and very unique part of it.

Guido - thanks for your thoughts - interesting as always. My responses, as usual in no sensible order!

1 - firstly, of course, I wouldn't dream to 'argue' with your reactions (as if that was possible!), nor want to change them. But nevertheless:

2 - perhaps I ought to try to describe why this 'floating harmony' is a specific aim for me; it may help you to see where it 'comes from'.

3 - however, before that, just technically on the matter of 'closure' or the harmony 'settling' as you put it:  the use of the modes doesn't make this impossible at all - there are plenty of cadences with a good feeling of closure in the piano Sonata or the Canticle Sonata, I think, though none of them are emphasized, which is more to do with the tone of the music than the modes themselves. Shorter pieces which use only one mode like the Individuation and Enlightenment pieces are also often strongly oriented around particular keys (the first, just for instance, is clearly and strongly in G minor, but with strong F minor hints in the central section). The use of two modes and related modes in the Canticle Sonata means that the piece also has traditional areas of harmonic 'sweep' - though I've reserved them for rare occasions, such as the lead-up to the centre of the middle movement, or climactic points in the third movement. The piano Sonata certainly ends in floating ambiguity, but this is a deliberate choice, and I chose to use until-then unheard 'negations' of the modes to achieve this effect.

4 - one thing which attracts me to the technique is that this kind of open-ended modality is both more and less expressively specific than more fully-chromatic or fully-modal music. The music takes on the specific expressive colours of the modes towards which it hints, but avoids the relative greyness which greater chromatic saturation could tend towards. One of the first pieces I wrote with the technique, ... mi ritrovai... is as good an example of this as any - it slips between tonal centres and expressive types undemonstratively but quite clearly.

5 - this is the really important bit, I suppose. As you'll know from my endless banging-on about it, I regard a composers' 'being-true-to-himself' as of absolutely vital importance; without it, the music is pretty worthless to my mind. The lack of demonstrative closure or settling in my modal pieces is certainly in tune with my character. I have a very strong tendency towards timidity, as you can see from (among other things) my lack of interest in thrusting my music forwards. This timidity has always been echoed in my music as a tendency to avoid anything in the least 'showy' - I've been aware of this for years and years, but I used to fight against it, thinking it was a weakness; now I welcome it. So, certain pretty standard parts of being a composer come very unnaturally to me - the big gesture, the strong close or sweeping harmonic sequence - in fact, anything that says to the audience 'listen to me'! Those big pages of orchestral score I posted above are examples of precisely the thing - they go so much against the grain; I adored writing them but to some extent they were applied 'cerebrally', from 'the outside'. All this lack of desire to make any kind of big statement is hard to square with wishing to write music, I know, but there we are. I don't like the power games that this whole thing implies - to me, music is more important than a composer exercising magic and wizardry over his listeners, and I much prefer the image of the composer who simply presents the listener with a world to enter, to take or to leave.  This floating world, with a minimum of intervention from the composer, is what the modal technique gives me. Any 'big gestures' that remain in e.g. the Canticle Sonata, which is a much more 'classical' work than its companions, are therefore a mini-triumph for me, as they are both really 'meant' and implied in the musical material itself.

6 - implicit in the idea of music and composer being as closely unified as possible is the conclusion that if someone doesn't like the music one writes, this shouldn't be taken as cause for offence. As I've said before, if my music is really and truly an expression of myself, and therefore something I can't really change, nor wish to - and I've come to think that in this at least, I have succeeded - then someone not liking it is only like someone not liking the shape of my ears (that was the example I gave before!) The same, of course, goes for someone who likes it....!

8 - also staying true to small tendencies of mine - I like my music to drift from and to silence. Not any old silence but the silence described by Zen as 'ma', a kind of 'meaningful silence' which follows on noise, heard for instance in the breathing gaps between phrases in shakuhachi playing...or in the gaps between frogs croaking at nighttime, or whatever! My modal pieces tend to work in short breath-like phrases, each one reaching ending with something which, then, we might describe as an 'open closure', which leads into the silent space after it and hopefully makes it similarly 'meaningful'.

7 - There is one more thing, a very important one for me, though I'm not sure if it need be important for the listener. It is linked to the imagery with which I described the modes earlier - as a kind of 3D, floating object around which one walks. I do have a kind of obsession with this concept, a spiritual thing in some ways, and also a Jungian one - the mandala-like circling around the singular point at the centre, which Jung would see as the Self (this goes someway to explaining my chosen avatar, for those of you who know what it is). The circling motion eventually leads inwards - this is the process which Jung would call Individuation (as explored in my pieces of that name), and it is this 'individuation', or to use Janacek's terminology 'introspection', for which I'm looking, both for my music and, I suppose, for myself. I know I'm beginning to sound a little like Sean here, and in fact when he talks about things tangentially connected with this I do think that he approaches closer to sense than elsewhere. But importantly, I'm not proposing some Seanian Grand Truth in this - just something that has importance for me, and that has worked for me in some surprising ways. As you might be able to guess, this is something I could talk about at length, but the gist of it, musically, is that I want my music to be this 3D floating object, undemonstrative, to be walked around and seen from every side, with the underlying idea that in circling around something one comes closer to its essence than if one imposes oneself on it.

Incidentally now that you have broadband could you upload the recordings of the two recent piano sonatas without the hideous amount of compression that you had to use before? That would be great!

Yes, OK, I'll get onto that....

Those late Brahms piano pieces are really very special. Are the earlier piano sonatas as good? You haven't mentioned them to me.

Short answer - no. Long answer - the third sonata is a wonderful, virtuoso work of full-blooded early[ish] Romanticism, with much of the subjectivity that you get in early Brahms. It has been much-recorded, deservedly, whereas the other two sonatas have been less well-served. The first sonata is less successful but still a fine work, with deliberate echoes of the Hammerklavier. The second sonata is one of Brahms's weakest works in some respects, straining at the seams too much (e.g. it has the only three stave layout I can remember in Brahms) and bursting with Sturm und Drang double octaves etc. The middle movements are very good indeed, however.

However, slightly later but still 'early' are the op 10 Ballades - extremely fine pieces, somewhat Schumannesque, but with strong Ossianic tinges and very original keyboard writing. And as I've mentioned before, my favourite Brahms piano music outside the late sets is the set of variations on a theme of Schumann op 9, which themselves have a deliberately Schumannesque allusiveness (and ellusiveness) and which even have their own Brahmsian parallel to Schumann's 'F[lorestan und E[usebius]'. These are really extraordinary pieces, highly subjective and multi-layered in their referentiality, the sort of thing that really allows a performer lots of space - I adore playing them. Here's some dude playing them on youtube (a few mistakes and odd tempi), just to give you an idea (it's in three parts)

Go still later and you get to another couple of sets of variations, that 'on a Hungarian melody' (good) and that 'on an original theme' (extremely good indeed). The latter is Brahms at his most D major-lyrical (see Nanie, Violin Concerto, Second Symphony, and indeed many of the Schumann Variations) and is really a gorgeous piece, its keyboard layout and counterpoint at times recalling no one but Webern. These three variation sets are forgotten alongside the classicising edifice of the Handel set and the pyrotechnics of the Paganini sets, but for my money at least the two I have singled out are every bit as fine and many times more personal.

[Guido]

As usual, thanks for your thought provoking and comprehensive notes. With regards to the Brahms - I just listened to the Schumann Variations for the first time yesterday, and then instantly listened to them 3 times again. I adore the set of variations by Schumann that they are based on - the Geistervariationen which are just heartbreakingly beautiful (as you probably know, the last thing he composed before he died and repressed by Clara*). I will look out those two variation sets by Brahms.

I'd like you to know that the unease that I feel does not translate to dislike, but merely a new feeling that I have derived from music, which can only be a good thing. I am very very fond of the plainly titled Sonata, and I think the Canticle sonata will have a similar impact on me when the real clarinet version is played.

*Incidentally the theme is very similar to the one in the late violin concerto - Which is another work that I feel is just stupidly and blindly denigrated... Without question for me one of the most affecting and beautiful pieces of the Romantic period.

[lukeottevanger]

As usual, thanks for your thought provoking and comprehensive notes. With regards to the Brahms - I just listened to the Schumann Variations for the first time yesterday, and then instantly listened to them 3 times again. I adore the set of variations by Schumann that they are based on - the Geistervariationen which are just heartbreakingly beautiful (as you probably know, the last thing he composed before he died and repressed by Clara). I will look out those two variation sets by Brahms.

Ah - that's a different set of Schumann Variations you are talking about, I think - the piano duet set, a completely different (though also wonderful work)! The Schumann Variations which I meant (and gave the youtube link to) are for piano solo, and based on the first of Schumann's Bunte Blatter. But all are good!

I'd like you to know that the unease that I feel does not translate to dislike, but merely a new feeling that I have derived from music, which can only be a good thing. I am very very fond of the plainly titled Sonata, and I think the Canticle sonata will have a similar impact on me when the real clarinet version is played.

Cheers - no, I understand completely. My post was really an attempt to describe the reasons which lie behind my writing such rootless stuff! And you gave me a good excuse to write about it in a way I haven't been able to do before. 

[lukeottevanger]

As requested by Guido, I've uploaded the original-quality versions of two piano pieces - the Nightingale Sonata (an odd, clumsy, very personal and tonal piece reveling in its rural naivety and ineptitude, inspired by aspects of the life and writings of John Clare - I don't think I've talked about it much here before) and the more recent, modal piano Sonata. I'm not sure if there will really be much discernable difference in quality between these files and those previously linked to, but you're welcome to try. I fear that no amount of improvement to the quality will help the many shortcomings here, especially in the 'Nightingale' piece, of which, however, I am strangely fond.

Nightingale Sonata
Sonata

Let me know if the links don't work for you.

[Guido]

How do I donwload those bad boys?

[lukeottevanger]

Yes, this is confusing me. All the stuff I linked to before, e.g. in the first post on this thread, is in the same folder as these new uploads, and given that almost everything appears to have been downloaded many times, I can only assume that the old links worked for everyone. I didn't upload anything for quite a long time, but when I did (with the mystery scores PDF and with these two sonatas) they seem to be more difficult for people to get their hands on, though at least two people have managed since I stuck them up last night. I don't understand how some people can and some can't.

However, check PMs...

[greg]

OK, I'm back....brace yourselves! 

Greg - picking out Terry Riley is very pertinent - he's been quite an example for me; though this modal technique of mine didn't come from anywhere except my own proclivities, I was interested to see it echoed precisely in Riley's Y Bolanzero, about which he has said:

His wonderful set of pieces (to be improvised upon) for just-tempered piano The Harp of New Albion work in a similar way, which is why they are such an important work for me.

Guido - thanks for your thoughts - interesting as always. My responses, as usual in no sensible order!

1 - firstly, of course, I wouldn't dream to 'argue' with your reactions (as if that was possible!), nor want to change them. But nevertheless:

2 - perhaps I ought to try to describe why this 'floating harmony' is a specific aim for me; it may help you to see where it 'comes from'.

3 - however, before that, just technically on the matter of 'closure' or the harmony 'settling' as you put it:  the use of the modes doesn't make this impossible at all - there are plenty of cadences with a good feeling of closure in the piano Sonata or the Canticle Sonata, I think, though none of them are emphasized, which is more to do with the tone of the music than the modes themselves. Shorter pieces which use only one mode like the Individuation and Enlightenment pieces are also often strongly oriented around particular keys (the first, just for instance, is clearly and strongly in G minor, but with strong F minor hints in the central section). The use of two modes and related modes in the Canticle Sonata means that the piece also has traditional areas of harmonic 'sweep' - though I've reserved them for rare occasions, such as the lead-up to the centre of the middle movement, or climactic points in the third movement. The piano Sonata certainly ends in floating ambiguity, but this is a deliberate choice, and I chose to use until-then unheard 'negations' of the modes to achieve this effect.

4 - one thing which attracts me to the technique is that this kind of open-ended modality is both more and less expressively specific than more fully-chromatic or fully-modal music. The music takes on the specific expressive colours of the modes towards which it hints, but avoids the relative greyness which greater chromatic saturation could tend towards. One of the first pieces I wrote with the technique, ... mi ritrovai... is as good an example of this as any - it slips between tonal centres and expressive types undemonstratively but quite clearly.

5 - this is the really important bit, I suppose. As you'll know from my endless banging-on about it, I regard a composers' 'being-true-to-himself' as of absolutely vital importance; without it, the music is pretty worthless to my mind. The lack of demonstrative closure or settling in my modal pieces is certainly in tune with my character. I have a very strong tendency towards timidity, as you can see from (among other things) my lack of interest in thrusting my music forwards. This timidity has always been echoed in my music as a tendency to avoid anything in the least 'showy' - I've been aware of this for years and years, but I used to fight against it, thinking it was a weakness; now I welcome it. So, certain pretty standard parts of being a composer come very unnaturally to me - the big gesture, the strong close or sweeping harmonic sequence - in fact, anything that says to the audience 'listen to me'! Those big pages of orchestral score I posted above are examples of precisely the thing - they go so much against the grain; I adored writing them but to some extent they were applied 'cerebrally', from 'the outside'. All this lack of desire to make any kind of big statement is hard to square with wishing to write music, I know, but there we are. I don't like the power games that this whole thing implies - to me, music is more important than a composer exercising magic and wizardry over his listeners, and I much prefer the image of the composer who simply presents the listener with a world to enter, to take or to leave.  This floating world, with a minimum of intervention from the composer, is what the modal technique gives me. Any 'big gestures' that remain in e.g. the Canticle Sonata, which is a much more 'classical' work than its companions, are therefore a mini-triumph for me, as they are both really 'meant' and implied in the musical material itself.

6 - implicit in the idea of music and composer being as closely unified as possible is the conclusion that if someone doesn't like the music one writes, this shouldn't be taken as cause for offence. As I've said before, if my music is really and truly an expression of myself, and therefore something I can't really change, nor wish to - and I've come to think that in this at least, I have succeeded - then someone not liking it is only like someone not liking the shape of my ears (that was the example I gave before!) The same, of course, goes for someone who likes it....!

8 - also staying true to small tendencies of mine - I like my music to drift from and to silence. Not any old silence but the silence described by Zen as 'ma', a kind of 'meaningful silence' which follows on noise, heard for instance in the breathing gaps between phrases in shakuhachi playing...or in the gaps between frogs croaking at nighttime, or whatever! My modal pieces tend to work in short breath-like phrases, each one reaching ending with something which, then, we might describe as an 'open closure', which leads into the silent space after it and hopefully makes it similarly 'meaningful'.

7 - There is one more thing, a very important one for me, though I'm not sure if it need be important for the listener. It is linked to the imagery with which I described the modes earlier - as a kind of 3D, floating object around which one walks. I do have a kind of obsession with this concept, a spiritual thing in some ways, and also a Jungian one - the mandala-like circling around the singular point at the centre, which Jung would see as the Self (this goes someway to explaining my chosen avatar, for those of you who know what it is). The circling motion eventually leads inwards - this is the process which Jung would call Individuation (as explored in my pieces of that name), and it is this 'individuation', or to use Janacek's terminology 'introspection', for which I'm looking, both for my music and, I suppose, for myself. I know I'm beginning to sound a little like Sean here, and in fact when he talks about things tangentially connected with this I do think that he approaches closer to sense than elsewhere. But importantly, I'm not proposing some Seanian Grand Truth in this - just something that has importance for me, and that has worked for me in some surprising ways. As you might be able to guess, this is something I could talk about at length, but the gist of it, musically, is that I want my music to be this 3D floating object, undemonstrative, to be walked around and seen from every side, with the underlying idea that in circling around something one comes closer to its essence than if one imposes oneself on it.

Yes, OK, I'll get onto that....

Short answer - no. Long answer - the third sonata is a wonderful, virtuoso work of full-blooded early[ish] Romanticism, with much of the subjectivity that you get in early Brahms. It has been much-recorded, deservedly, whereas the other two sonatas have been less well-served. The first sonata is less successful but still a fine work, with deliberate echoes of the Hammerklavier. The second sonata is one of Brahms's weakest works in some respects, straining at the seams too much (e.g. it has the only three stave layout I can remember in Brahms) and bursting with Sturm und Drang double octaves etc. The middle movements are very good indeed, however.

However, slightly later but still 'early' are the op 10 Ballades - extremely fine pieces, somewhat Schumannesque, but with strong Ossianic tinges and very original keyboard writing. And as I've mentioned before, my favourite Brahms piano music outside the late sets is the set of variations on a theme of Schumann op 9, which themselves have a deliberately Schumannesque allusiveness (and ellusiveness) and which even have their own Brahmsian parallel to Schumann's 'F[lorestan und E[usebius]'. These are really extraordinary pieces, highly subjective and multi-layered in their referentiality, the sort of thing that really allows a performer lots of space - I adore playing them. Here's some dude playing them on youtube (a few mistakes and odd tempi), just to give you an idea (it's in three parts)

Go still later and you get to another couple of sets of variations, that 'on a Hungarian melody' (good) and that 'on an original theme' (extremely good indeed). The latter is Brahms at his most D major-lyrical (see Nanie, Violin Concerto, Second Symphony, and indeed many of the Schumann Variations) and is really a gorgeous piece, its keyboard layout and counterpoint at times recalling no one but Webern. These three variation sets are forgotten alongside the classicising edifice of the Handel set and the pyrotechnics of the Paganini sets, but for my money at least the two I have singled out are every bit as fine and many times more personal.

wonderful thoughts, again.
i suppose In C would come close to floating tonality, but not quite there, because it does rest on C, Em, G, etc. If the music where more equally distributed, i guess then it'd qualify.

[Guido]

Still can't seem to download it. Where would the download button be?

[Maciek]

Did you try right-clicking (Save As...)?

(I can't get the link to work for the same reason as always: the embedded WMP always crashes my browser and I'm too lazy to switch over at the moment... 0:))

[lukeottevanger]

OK - I never saw this (assuming you can read that page!). Anyway, it's essentially a new policy which I didn't know had come into force - I have to edit the details for all my mp3 files now for them to be downloadable. I've done so for the new two so far, so try them again now. Click on the filename to be taken to a page with a player and a download button.

[lukeottevanger]

Sorry for all that hassle, guys - I hope this helps!

[karlhenning]

I think I've got it a-working! 

[lukeottevanger]

Excellent! All files (I think) now downloadable once again.