Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[lukeottevanger]

Next installment - these are all pieces associated with my A level music studies at school (aged 17-18). Our teacher would set us a few composition tasks as practise for the pieces we would be asked to write for our portfolio, and, showy sod that I was, I determined to stretch each task a little further than he expected....

October 1992 - Threnody - solo cello
The simple remit - to compose for a solo non-keyboard instrument for the obvious reasons of using idiomatic range, techniques etc. My response was this long and difficult Threnody, which packs in a large number of cellistic tricks. It has good stuff in it - nice motivic work, good and appropriate use of the instrument - but as often in these early pieces it succumbs to the temptation of the 'big tune' too easily. Here's the place to stick in a photo of me playing the cello at about this time! I'm not sure if my nonchalant giving of the finger is intended for the photographer (I've always hated having my photo taken) or if it was accidental in the course of the action!

[lukeottevanger]

November 1992 - Theme and Variations - piano
Obviously, here we were asked to write a set of variations to extend our stylistic range, to think about decoration, figuration, varying harmony etc. I took this as an excuse for a bit of fun, extending a simple, unaccompanied theme in 9/8 beyond its natural life....
Variation 1 - the theme is given a rich harmonisation
Variation 2 - the theme is turned into a waltz
Variation 3 - an interlocking-hands toccata (which ends up far too difficult to play!)
Variation 4 - a pastoral, high up on the piano in what is effectively 21/8 - this is very like VW's Lake in the Mountains again, in sound though not in any specifics.
Variation 5 - a big, rhapsodic, lyrical variation
Variation 6 - a fast, percussive variation in a Bartokian additive rhythm technique (mostly 6/8+7/8+3/8)
Variation 7 - a funeral march whose double dotting softens into a triplet (with consolatory harmonies which now remind me of moments in Liszt's Dante Symphony - this was unconscious, I think, but it was a piece I loved and knew very well back then)
Variation 8 would have been a fugue but, frankly, I couldn't be bothered - I thought I'd done enough and so did my teacher!

I recorded some of this a week or so ago - maybe I'll put it up for fun later....

December 1992 - Largo - orchestra
This wasn't written specifically for school, but it did end up as the 'free' part of my A level composition portfolio. It's quite blatantly written under the shadow of that wondrous slow movement of Shostakovich's 5th symphony, which I was playing at exactly this time as a member of the LSSO (one of the finest moments of my musical life was playing this piece in Les Invalides - we gave a performance which we all thought was pretty darned electric - in the photo below you can see us taking the applause: I'm the fourth desk cello, first player). Here, the influence of the Shostakovich is seen in, among other things, the rising incipit, the wind solos and specifically the entrance of a low second flute towards the end (which is a poor echo of a spellbinding moment in the Shostakovich). From the point in the last third of the piece where the strings set up a trem. to the point where the flute re-enters, I later wrote that the music was to be reworked - and it certainly needs it here. But I evidently never got round to it, so stet.

There's a score here too. 

[lukeottevanger]

January 1993 - Before Sleep - SATB
You've seen this and - sort of - heard it already. It was simply an SATB exercise for school. The text was that which had been set for the previous years' A level.

Early 1993 - untitled piece - flute and piano
In this case we were aksed to write an accompanied piece whose piano part was more than just basic chords and arpeggiations. Again, I responded with as florid a piece as I could reasonably get away with, deliberately making the piano part outstrip the flute part without upstaging it (that being the hard part). The floridity prompted a rhythmic and textural complexity and a rather Scriabinesque harmony which both appear here for the first time in my music - but both are features which are very natural for me, as my later music shows (see, for instance, the Improvisations of 10 years later, which are in some respects the real beginning of my composing). This piece, then, is good humid fun, spoilt and scarred by a ridiculous moment of rodomontade leading into the the 'recap' - ridiculous in context, that is - it's a kind of dominant preparation which is perfectly OK but completely out of place. I may cut these two bars, though, and ressurect the piece.

********

A long gap of about a year, now. There are couple of still-missing pieces that may belong here. One is another cello solo, which I remember as more concise and restrained than the Threnody - I believe I wrote it very fast, and intensely. The other is a song written for school. I remember it clearly - it wasn't 'me' at all, but it worked well on its own terms, I think.

********

Now three short piece written for the exam itself, rather than as exercises.

March 1994 - Pavane - piano
Written in four parts, a kind of Frenchified Renaissance pastiche.

April 1994 - Ave Verum Corpus - SATB
OK, this, but not as good as Before Sleep, perhaps.

April 1994 - Rumba - piano
Does what it's supposed to do!

One more installment, later....

[Guido]

Hmm... don't have a mic but would love to record the second elegy. I'll try and find one. Also would need a pianist. Is the threnody going to be released? Great picture of you playing the cello!

[J.Z. Herrenberg]

You are doing something, Luke, I intend to do after I have finally finished my novel - retrace my steps, reassess the trajectory of my artistic development. I read your posts with fascination (and I like the picture!)

OT - I am completely obsessed by a piece of music at the moment: Albéric Magnard's Chant funèbre (1895). Gorgeous. To those interested:

http://www.mediafire.com/?njmhhzzonyq

Michel Plasson conducts the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra.

[lukeottevanger]

You are doing something, Luke, I intend to do after I have finally finished my novel - retrace my steps, reassess the trajectory of my artistic development. I read your posts with fascination (and I like the picture!)

Thanks, Johan. I've tried to keep tabs on my compositional development, initially since about 1996, and then with renewed vigour and completeness since about 2005. I keep a very full and comprehensive set of notes on each piece, complete with any appropriate extra-musical appendages (pictures etc). (Those notes are going to need extensive revision now!) But until now these early compositions have never been included in that account - what was covered was, so to speak, adolescent-to-man; what I've been filling in these last few days is boy-to-adolescent*, and though the music itself sometimes seems a world away from where it is now it is possible, retrospectively, to see the odd glimmer of what was to come even in the earliest works. I hope that what I've written so far suggest as much.

*'Baby-to-boy' - from my very first compositions aged about 11 to the first listed here written at 14 - is not possible, as that music is well and truly gone now.

OT - I am completely obsessed by a piece of music at the moment: Albéric Magnard's Chant funèbre (1895). Gorgeous. To those interested:

http://www.mediafire.com/?njmhhzzonyq

Michel Plasson conducts the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra.

Great! Thank you. It's possible I have this on LP - looks familiar - but I can't unearth it right now, so I downloaded this gratefully. 

[lukeottevanger]

Is the threnody going to be released?

I don't think so. I feel it would need a lot done to it to make it presentable. But I'll have a closer look.

There's another cello piece, from 2000, which might be on its way here soon - it's the one I mentioned ages ago, and which I got quite a way through setting into Sibelius but never finished doing the job on (it's a real bugger, Sibeliusly speaking).

This piece also has a sister work which is really very freeform indeed, an invitation to improvisation more than anything. This latter work, which was the first to be composed, was written for my wife (another cellist!) to play whilst pregnant with our first child - it's relaxed open-endedness was intended to allow her to play entirely stress-free and focusing 'inwards'! I think she played it as intended, once or twice, but she's much more pragmatic and less hippie-ish than me, and not as able to relax into improvisation in the way I would, so I don't think it got many outings!

The second piece, the one I've been typesetting, uses the same basic sets of notes - let's not mince words, there's a 12 note row in this piece, but I'd hesitate to describe it as serial - in a more dramatic and virtuoso way. I'm not sure it's much cop, though. You can let me know what you think when you see it!

[Guido]

I don't think so. I feel it would need a lot done to it to make it presentable. But I'll have a closer look.

There's another cello piece, from 2000, which might be on its way here soon - it's the one I mentioned ages ago, and which I got quite a way through setting into Sibelius but never finished doing the job on (it's a real bugger, Sibeliusly speaking).

This piece also has a sister work which is really very freeform indeed, an invitation to improvisation more than anything. This latter work, which was the first to be composed, was written for my wife (another cellist!) to play whilst pregnant with our first child - it's relaxed open-endedness was intended to allow her to play entirely stress-free and focusing 'inwards'! I think she played it as intended, once or twice, but she's much more pragmatic and less hippie-ish than me, and not as able to relax into improvisation in the way I would, so I don't think it got many outings!

The second piece, the one I've been typesetting, uses the same basic sets of notes - let's not mince words, there's a 12 note row in this piece, but I'd hesitate to describe it as serial - in a more dramatic and virtuoso way. I'm not sure it's much cop, though. You can let me know what you think when you see it!

These sound fascinating. When you say that your wife played it once or twice, do you mean in concert? Does she give recitals?

I can't remember if I asked this already, but on the cello elegy no.2 are the harmonics suggestions or are they performance directions. bar 17 for instance seems to be an obvious case of the latter, but with bar 32-33 I'm not so sure - does it mean that you want it in thumb position after the G harmonic there?

[Guido]

You are doing something, Luke, I intend to do after I have finally finished my novel - retrace my steps, reassess the trajectory of my artistic development. I read your posts with fascination (and I like the picture!)

OT - I am completely obsessed by a piece of music at the moment: Albéric Magnard's Chant funèbre (1895). Gorgeous. To those interested:

http://www.mediafire.com/?njmhhzzonyq

Michel Plasson conducts the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra.

Thanks for this! Fantastic piece.

[lukeottevanger]

These sound fascinating. When you say that your wife played it once or twice, do you mean in concert? Does she give recitals?

Oh, no! I wrote the piece for her to play when pregnant, as I said - with the idea of the music being felt by the baby. That's all I mean by saying she played it a couple of times!

I can't remember if I asked this already, but on the cello elegy no.2 are the harmonics suggestions or are they performance directions. bar 17 for instance seems to be an obvious case of the latter, but with bar 32-33 I'm not so sure - does it mean that you want it in thumb position after the G harmonic there?

Bars 11-12 - the harmonics are what I meant, as they underscore the change of harmony from flat to 'white note'
Bars 17-20 - again, the harmonics here are vital - their different tone colour is part of the 'argument' of the piece.

I play them like this, obviously:

[lukeottevanger]

The harmonics at the end, however, are not quite so precisely defined. I simply wanted the end light, flautando, so notated as harmonics any notes which could easily be played as such. 

[Guido]

Good, this is what I thought. Additionally, playing the harmonics down there gives a subtly different tone colour, as we have previously discussed on this thread.

[lukeottevanger]

To clarify, they're notated as in the above pic in the original score; I didn't do them that way this time simply because at one point I was going to make an mp3 of the MIDI of this one, and fully indicated harmonics get in the way of such things!

[lukeottevanger]

BTW, here's a rough copy of the flute and piano piece I referred to above. 

Rather ridiculous, isn't it!? Still, with a little editing I could make something presentable of it....

[Guido]

On a tangent... I recently became the proud owner of the score of that 1656 bar, 90 minute long behemoth that is Patterns in a Chromatic Field by Morton Feldman. It's rather difficult and endlessly subtle in its variations. I think I remember saying that it had microtones in it, but it doesn't as such... He uses a lot of double sharps and double flats, such that the intervals look much wider than they are (the first three notes are Bbb Ab F##, which looks like a fourth, but of course is actually a second) this is surely significant, and I am positive that he would have wanted Bbb as a Bbb and not an A - of course, whether it comes out as such is another matter - it's really fast and as I said rather difficult. Another truly wonderful piece.

[Guido]

BTW, here's a rough copy of the flute and piano piece I referred to above. 

Show off. 

[lukeottevanger]

Why?

[Guido]

Again, I responded with as florid a piece as I could reasonably get away with, deliberately making the piano part outstrip the flute part without upstaging it (that being the hard part).

[lukeottevanger]

Ah yes - I must have been a right git, mustn't I?  Rarely does the look of a score say so much about its composer!

[M forever]

That's an odd way to notate harmonics. Normally, the circle shows which note is to be executed as a harmonic and at which pitch it sounds. The diamond is usually written over a solid note which is either the open string or a stopeed note, for artificial harmonics over stopped notes, to show where on the string the player is supposed to play the harmonic - which often results in a completely different note in a different octave. It is strange to see the two symbols mixed like this.