Ottevanger's Omphaloskeptic Outpost

[Karl Henning]

Dude, soon, really, I am going to get your PDF and mp3 in the same place, at the same time . . . .

[Cato]

Stay tuned!  The analytical essay on Around Fern Hill is in progress, and the composer, after reading the first pages, has encouraged me to continue.  0:)

My life has become much more hectic recently.  So I am behind schedule on this, but I hope everyone here will become acquainted with the work during the delay.

[Karl Henning]

Splendid! And it turns out that I can download the files at this machine, it was just Media Fire being a bit dodgy . . . .

[Karl Henning]

Dude, soon, really, I am going to get your PDF and mp3 in the same place, at the same time . . . .

To-day is the day! Just printed them out.

[Karl Henning]

Luke, I'm fresh from (finally) an initial listen while following along with the score.  I want (and need) to listen and absorb a good deal more, but at the least, again: lovely work!  And beautiful playing.  Love the development and re-contextualization of the octave flourish-lets in Around Fern Hill. An especially nice touch (gosh, I hope I am not mis-remembering) is how you managed to co-ordinate (I think it was) the return of that gesture in the first measure of p.2 with the conclusion of the recording of the first stanza. (In the third system, third measure, the first semiquaver of the septuplet, did you mean the F#? – or maybe I misheard.  Might have just been a slip, and of course, I've made so many mistakes in my own music, of which you have been so charitable, that I hate for you to think that I'm rapping your knuckles . . . .)

The Fantasy, too, waxes yet lovelier with improved acquaintance.

That has got to do for the moment. I will go back to both pieces soon!

[Cato]

The "little" analytical essay on Around Fern Hill is finished in a first draft, but not yet approved by the composer, so in a short time, depending on Luke Ottevanger's busy schedule, it will appear here.

[Luke]

Cato - have downloaded and read it all. Some really penetrating listening, uncovering lots of pertinent points, including (as I expected) ways of understanding the piece which I hadn't thought of myself (all of which please me!). But it's not for me to go into them here, they are all in your essay. Please go right ahead and copy it here - you have, as you known, my deepest thanks!

Karl - firstly, thank you for your own deep-listening; you too say things there which chime with me. I like the way the 1st stanza concludes w.r.t the music too; to my mind there are other such happy moments in the text-music relationship later in the piece too. And you are right - that's a fingerslip you hear. Not the worst one I could have made (at least the wrong note is also to be found in the mode which is being used at that point!) but nothing to be proud of either. There will be hundreds more later in the piece, especially in the second half, as the music of the opening three stanzas is repeated in a more dissonant harmonic environment, with new encrustations, more layers of musical 'stuff' and generally much busier fingerwork (= memories, experiences etc...)

Thanks, both. 

[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.

[Guido]

Oh - good to see you here! I emailed you a few weeks ago, but not sure if its your email address. Getting into the Janacek choral works The least explored corner of his output surely, and so much wonderful stuff (no surprises there!) Hadn't even heard of the 1908 Mass!!

[Luke]

You did, and I got it, and it got deluged, and I had forgotten it! Mea culpa!!

The best of the choral stuff is certainly amongst Janacek's finest music, and none of it finer than the Petr Bezruc choruses. which one could make a case are amongst his very best works. What you asked me, IIRC, is how one can most easily get all the essential stuff in one or two places. The answer is:

[asin]B000024WC2[/asin]
This utterly delightful old Supraphon disc, which contains the Bezruc choruses, the crazy Tagore setting 'The Wandering Madman' (one of Janacek's most experimental pieces), and much more. It's a hidden gem, this one.

[asin]B0072A4FJI[/asin]
There are a number of discs with tracklistings approximately the same as this one, but none I like more, of those I've heard. Though for Riklada my favourite by a mile is:

[asin]B000000AXP[/asin]
which is a but unexpected and usually slips under the radar, but which I simply adore - the whole disc is perfect Janacek playing, to my mind, a radiantly lovely Mladi, and the two 'concerti' done fabulously well.

This is pretty good, too, with repertoire hard to find elsewhere, and well worth hearing (for example, the 'Virgin of Frydek' movement from Overgrown Path in its choral setting - and sublime it is, too). It contains the two best of Janacek's very, very early organ works (they aren't great, don't get your hopes up, but they are interesting in the light of what followed):

[asin]B0000030V9[/asin]

That's a start. There are many others, of course.

Sorry for the delay! Hope you're keeping well.     

[Guido]

Thanks! I got the first one you listed, with its twin supraphon recording too, and then also the hyperion Mass in E flat, and the eternal gospel with Volkov. Will definitely czech those others out though, they didn't even come up in my amazon searches!

[Guido]

Woops, just ordered them all.

[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.

Addendum: Google Books has a preview of The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, an example to illuminate my comment above.

http://books.google.com/books?id=m5Kgh-3OVBYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=W.G.+Sebald&hl=en#v=onepage&q=W.G.%20Sebald&f=false

[Luke]

Cato, sorry not to have had time to get back to you publicly about your essay on Around Fern Hill (you know from my emails how much I appreciate it, and value it). My work on the Wizard score is now done, though still another highly frenetic couple of weeks of term remain before I can sleep easy - the production itself, for a start! And the 350+ reports I must write in the next few days. And the endless days of rehearsing. Oh, and the teaching, nearly forgot that!

I loved your Sebald/Rings of Saturn comparison. Exactly the sort of thing I mean. I have read a number of books by Sebald, yes, and in fact the East Anglian places he describes in Rings of Saturn are relatively local to me. The poetry of the images - the 'fuzzy, "faraway" photos' - is the type of thing I've always been very conscious of, the layers of meaning and memory etc. It's something that runs in various ways through many of my pieces, but never as explicitly as in Around Fern Hill. As you imply, the most obvious musical analogy to those fuzzy old photos (or perhaps extra-musical analogy - it depends maybe upon whether the sound is intended to be heard as part of the music or is there coincidentally) is the crackly surface of an old slab of vinyl. That's what is powerfully evocative about the Dylan Thomas recording, I think. And in general it's probably one of the things that makes old recordings seem even more precious to me, a reminder of the delicacy of these objects that captured a fleeting moment of sound decades ago and held it, fighting inevitable slow decay - to hear (to cite one example form the many that spring to mind) Louis Krasner playing the second performance of the Berg Concerto which was written for him, with Webern conducting, shortly after the composer's death, on the scratchiest set of old acetates one can imagine, rescued from his loft by the aging Krasner 50-odd years later, nearly lost, but still just about audible through the hiss...well, that hiss is almost as potent as the music itself, in some meta-musical way, I think. A composer like Max Richter uses this sort of sound, and others similar to it, a lot: on top of his softly Glassian string writing and his use of other evocative lost sounds - typwriters tapping, murmuring voices etc - it can work well, though its an easy way of making an effect, I think.  And it's a sound which has been used for its evocative qualities, but divorced from any actual context, by all manner of electronica and ambient musics in recent years, I think - the clanking, breathy all-enveloping, seemingly 'lo-fi' sound we hear on all sorts of actually very hi-tech recordings.

[Karl Henning]

Cato, sorry not to have had time to get back to you publicly about your essay on Around Fern Hill (you know from my emails how much I appreciate it, and value it). My work on the Wizard score is now done[....]

Comme on dit en Amérique: Sacrée vache!

[Luke]

Without wanting to say too much, was a mammoth task - ending up with a tiny-typed score, two systems, landscape, 100 pages long. It's been a brutal thing to work on, and without the ameliorating factor of it being a labour of love - it certainly wasn't that!

[Karl Henning]

Aye, Cato gave me a glimpse. It was a vision, and not of sugarplums dancing . . . .

[Karl Henning]

You remind me that I need to revisit that iconic Krasner recording . . . anyway, I want to listen some more to your two pieces to-day.

[Luke]

And all these projects I am so desperate to begin, too...! The list is growing - probably 8 or 9 potential pieces I want to work on, and scarcely a note written.

[Luke]

Crossed posts.

I can't listen to the Berg any other way. No, perhaps not strictly true, but I find I return to the Krasner over and over, despite the appalling sonics and the hardly faultless playing. It just burns with intensity. Nothing else seems to match this, to my mind. Perhaps, though, it's the potency of its age/its iconic status that affects me so. I can't really divorce the two from each other dispassionately.

Thanks for bearing with these two pieces! 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, leading to the increasing harmonic complexity. So he finds things there which I both knew and didn't know were there (I'm sure that you, Karl, understand what I mean by that seemingly nonsensical sentence!).

Must dash. Exam to invigilate!