Hans Otte, "passages"
-- Liner Notes --
Hans Otte (born 1926) does not seem to have passed through a continuous stylistic development in the course of his career as a composer. And yet it is precisely the stylistic differences that stress the continuity of his artistic aims: "A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step" (1979) is a typical title in this connection of a piece for the theatre in seven scenes with music. In Otte's case, it is not so much a matter of how he writes, but of what he reacts to. After instrumental and orchestral music in the fifties, and critical pieces for the music theatre in the sixties in which, together with Ligeti and Kagel, Otte was a leading figure, Otte's aesthetic credo became increasingly unequivocal: the search for the uninfluenced self (knowing full well that this is a utopian quest) and the search for the character and independent life of sound per se, which, stripped of superimposed structures must be found and experienced again. The composer looks upon the dialogue with sounds as a process of discovering their nature. "It is an old dream of mine that the nature of sounds is discovered and that they are not used in order to express something else." (Otte)
Heavily influenced by Asiatic philosophies and cultures, Otte believes in intensive work with his audiences, whose ability to receive and communicate is a more or less structural part of his works: for him this is the only way of trying to recover the lost faculty of mental reception which prevents any real understanding. Otte's inclusion of the fine arts, video techniques, theatre and film, electronics and environment in his works is not done simply to achieve an interesting extension of the available material, but, on the contrary, as a form of "self-denial" (as he once called it), in order to reveal relationships and expose structures. He is very much involved with Brecht's and Benjamin's central term gestus, without reading into it the same pedagogical, or political, implications. Otte frequently emphasizes that the composer, the interpreters and the audience should ideally achieve an uninfluenced self-awareness, a dream, as it were, of their unity, a dream also of unshared perception. This concept is so important to the composer, that he is scarcely prepared to comment on his works any more: "That would defeat my very aim. It would deprive the listener of approaching a new piece of modern music without prejudice." (Otte)
The early critical works, of which "daidalos" is one, should be regarded as a stock taking of superannuated structures rather than a challenge. The whole output of the last ten years is no longer directly concerned with social and political themes, but only indirectly - with the negation of this society,., with its division of labour - in that it represents a search for reasons and meaning, a search which is no longer occidental in nature: the spiritual and material sources are the philosophies and methods of the Asiatic search for awareness, the American school around John Cage, and all the elements of present-day intermedial art, which make Otte one of the most important representatives of visual music. The choice of titles alone already seems significant in relation to this inward route towards the "indivisible whole" (Otte): Book for orchestra - text - biography - writing - harmony - yes:no - body music - what's the difference between you and me? - reflex - I.
A brief close look at a few selected works: In "tropismen" for piano, written in 1959, individual figures are modelled from a central note, and despite the still very clear connection with serial music, the colour value of the individual sound, its harmonious delicacy, is already very characteristic of Otte's language. "Passages", for piano and orchestra (1965), which caused a scandal at it's first performance in Donaueschingen in 1966, opens up an immense source of utopian sound, and, with quasiquotations, and some tonal elements, makes provocative fun of any idea of progress along such lines. "Touches" for organ, composed in the same year, is a montage of kitsch sounds directed against the emptiness of habit and consumption. Otte initially composed "daidalos" in 1960 as a seven-part ballet for two pianos, guitar, harp, and two drums. He formulated seven structural elements matching the seven stages of the classical legend of Daidalos, who created artificial human beings and animals, and is regarded as the originator of the labyrinthian dance: dynamics, metre, articulation, density, sound mixture and noise, pitch, and the combination of all the parameters. Independently of Otte's work, but with similar aims, Helms developed a literary-compositorial form based on the concept that puppets are the equivalent of mass man, who can only experience a objectized existence. He uses the international phonetic alphabet, and phonetic and semantic alienations of phrases and cliches. Thus, due to their common ground, the two works are related to each other "like two parts of a whole" (Helms).
"Modell" (1963-6~), one of the first music theatre pieces, is one of Otte's most important works of this genre, and has sub-titles indicating that you can only test something by trying it, and that the piece is intended to demonstrate the "speechlessness of language". It is an attempt to use the banality and cliches of language to expose disguised lack of communication, and has some great godfathers: Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Theodor W. Adorno.
"alpha-omega I and 11" (1960 and 1966) lashes out savagely at secularized liturgical language and empty colloquiallisms. "nature morte" (1960) marks the first step away
from criticism, away from the concreteness of false communication to the concreteness of sound: with the aid of the consonants and vowels of the title the development of a sound, of a word and a picture is demonstrated. This also represents the first reversal of producer and recipient - from which Otte was later to draw other, multifarious formal consequences: for example, the dramaturgy of "On Earth" is based on the reversal of actor and spectator; this "stocktaking of human culture" requires a sound landscape of 36 loudspeakers. Thus the pieces are not so much compositions as realizations - for example, the use of one's voice in "vox" (1976) or the use of photography in "hier" (1976-79).
"nolimetangere" (1966167) is a further scenic-filmic and verbal onslaught on society and ideology: the form, the intermingling of music, action, and picture characterizes - typically for this period - Otte's theatre of consciousness. "terrain" for large orchestra (1974) is a radical realization of Otte's idea of gestus: a single musical form rises throughout the orchestra and subsides again. The delicate rhythmical structures are reminiscent of American minimal music. Here the ability to understand is virtually the subject of the composition. A similar aim but different method is to be found in "Book for orchestra" (1968): the splitting of the sounds into the smallest possible particles and their individualization. Again and again the subject is sounds, texts, spaces - as also in "show down" (1979), a large-scale sound landscape in which one goes in search of sounds with the aid of the movements of the loudspeakers. The switching back and forth from major to minor helps to make a sound wholly visible and audible - this is Otte's immanent protest against consumability, it is a composition along the lines of "modell". "orient:occident" (1979) is a work that completely ignores the process of producing, and utterly concentrates on forms of perception. In it, intervals are held for - for Europeans - almost unbearable lengths of time against a contrasting background of waterfall-like electronic sound. and clusters of major, and minor thirds. The effect is like an attempt to recover the original beauty of a single interval - stressed by the intonation of the wind instruments.
Hans Otte was trained as a pianist (he attended Walter Gieseking's master class) and began a promising career as such, playing with various European orchestras of note. But the interpretation of Classical and Romantic music could not give him lasting satisfaction. As a composition pupil of Paul Hindemith, he won a number of important prizes and a scholarship for the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1959 he became Director of the Music Department at Radio Bremen, a post that he still holds. Otte's works are performed at all the important festivals of contemporary music, and are also performed at the "pro musica nova" biennale in Bremen. -- Ute Schalz-Laurenze (Translation: John Bell)
Hans Otte (born 1926) does not seem to have passed through a continuous stylistic development in the course of his career as a composer. And yet it is precisely the stylistic differences that stress the continuity of his artistic aims: "A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Step" (1979) is a typical title in this connection of a piece for the theatre in seven scenes with music. In Otte's case, it is not so much a matter of how he writes, but of what he reacts to. After instrumental and orchestral music in the fifties, and critical pieces for the music theatre in the sixties in which, together with Ligeti and Kagel, Otte was a leading figure, Otte's aesthetic credo became increasingly unequivocal: the search for the uninfluenced self (knowing full well that this is a utopian quest) and the search for the character and independent life of sound per se, which, stripped of superimposed structures must be found and experienced again. The composer looks upon the dialogue with sounds as a process of discovering their nature. "It is an old dream of mine that the nature of sounds is discovered and that they are not used in order to express something else." (Otte)
Heavily influenced by Asiatic philosophies and cultures, Otte believes in intensive work with his audiences, whose ability to receive and communicate is a more or less structural part of his works: for him this is the only way of trying to recover the lost faculty of mental reception which prevents any real understanding. Otte's inclusion of the fine arts, video techniques, theatre and film, electronics and environment in his works is not done simply to achieve an interesting extension of the available material, but, on the contrary, as a form of "self-denial" (as he once called it), in order to reveal relationships and expose structures. He is very much involved with Brecht's and Benjamin's central term gestus, without reading into it the same pedagogical, or political, implications. Otte frequently emphasizes that the composer, the interpreters and the audience should ideally achieve an uninfluenced self-awareness, a dream, as it were, of their unity, a dream also of unshared perception. This concept is so important to the composer, that he is scarcely prepared to comment on his works any more: "That would defeat my very aim. It would deprive the listener of approaching a new piece of modern music without prejudice." (Otte)
The early critical works, of which "daidalos" is one, should be regarded as a stock taking of superannuated structures rather than a challenge. The whole output of the last ten years is no longer directly concerned with social and political themes, but only indirectly - with the negation of this society,., with its division of labour - in that it represents a search for reasons and meaning, a search which is no longer occidental in nature: the spiritual and material sources are the philosophies and methods of the Asiatic search for awareness, the American school around John Cage, and all the elements of present-day intermedial art, which make Otte one of the most important representatives of visual music. The choice of titles alone already seems significant in relation to this inward route towards the "indivisible whole" (Otte): Book for orchestra - text - biography - writing - harmony - yes:no - body music - what's the difference between you and me? - reflex - I.
A brief close look at a few selected works: In "tropismen" for piano, written in 1959, individual figures are modelled from a central note, and despite the still very clear connection with serial music, the colour value of the individual sound, its harmonious delicacy, is already very characteristic of Otte's language. "Passages", for piano and orchestra (1965), which caused a scandal at it's first performance in Donaueschingen in 1966, opens up an immense source of utopian sound, and, with quasiquotations, and some tonal elements, makes provocative fun of any idea of progress along such lines. "Touches" for organ, composed in the same year, is a montage of kitsch sounds directed against the emptiness of habit and consumption. Otte initially composed "daidalos" in 1960 as a seven-part ballet for two pianos, guitar, harp, and two drums. He formulated seven structural elements matching the seven stages of the classical legend of Daidalos, who created artificial human beings and animals, and is regarded as the originator of the labyrinthian dance: dynamics, metre, articulation, density, sound mixture and noise, pitch, and the combination of all the parameters. Independently of Otte's work, but with similar aims, Helms developed a literary-compositorial form based on the concept that puppets are the equivalent of mass man, who can only experience a objectized existence. He uses the international phonetic alphabet, and phonetic and semantic alienations of phrases and cliches. Thus, due to their common ground, the two works are related to each other "like two parts of a whole" (Helms).
"Modell" (1963-6~), one of the first music theatre pieces, is one of Otte's most important works of this genre, and has sub-titles indicating that you can only test something by trying it, and that the piece is intended to demonstrate the "speechlessness of language". It is an attempt to use the banality and cliches of language to expose disguised lack of communication, and has some great godfathers: Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, and Theodor W. Adorno.
"alpha-omega I and 11" (1960 and 1966) lashes out savagely at secularized liturgical language and empty colloquiallisms. "nature morte" (1960) marks the first step away
from criticism, away from the concreteness of false communication to the concreteness of sound: with the aid of the consonants and vowels of the title the development of a sound, of a word and a picture is demonstrated. This also represents the first reversal of producer and recipient - from which Otte was later to draw other, multifarious formal consequences: for example, the dramaturgy of "On Earth" is based on the reversal of actor and spectator; this "stocktaking of human culture" requires a sound landscape of 36 loudspeakers. Thus the pieces are not so much compositions as realizations - for example, the use of one's voice in "vox" (1976) or the use of photography in "hier" (1976-79).
"nolimetangere" (1966167) is a further scenic-filmic and verbal onslaught on society and ideology: the form, the intermingling of music, action, and picture characterizes - typically for this period - Otte's theatre of consciousness. "terrain" for large orchestra (1974) is a radical realization of Otte's idea of gestus: a single musical form rises throughout the orchestra and subsides again. The delicate rhythmical structures are reminiscent of American minimal music. Here the ability to understand is virtually the subject of the composition. A similar aim but different method is to be found in "Book for orchestra" (1968): the splitting of the sounds into the smallest possible particles and their individualization. Again and again the subject is sounds, texts, spaces - as also in "show down" (1979), a large-scale sound landscape in which one goes in search of sounds with the aid of the movements of the loudspeakers. The switching back and forth from major to minor helps to make a sound wholly visible and audible - this is Otte's immanent protest against consumability, it is a composition along the lines of "modell". "orient:occident" (1979) is a work that completely ignores the process of producing, and utterly concentrates on forms of perception. In it, intervals are held for - for Europeans - almost unbearable lengths of time against a contrasting background of waterfall-like electronic sound. and clusters of major, and minor thirds. The effect is like an attempt to recover the original beauty of a single interval - stressed by the intonation of the wind instruments.
Hans Otte was trained as a pianist (he attended Walter Gieseking's master class) and began a promising career as such, playing with various European orchestras of note. But the interpretation of Classical and Romantic music could not give him lasting satisfaction. As a composition pupil of Paul Hindemith, he won a number of important prizes and a scholarship for the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1959 he became Director of the Music Department at Radio Bremen, a post that he still holds. Otte's works are performed at all the important festivals of contemporary music, and are also performed at the "pro musica nova" biennale in Bremen. -- Ute Schalz-Laurenze (Translation: John Bell)
Labels: Avant Garde Project, Hans Otte, jodru
posted by jodru at 12:18
3 comments
links to this post
