Otte: Book Of Sounds [CD]

It has often been said that Liszt conquered the piano, while Chopin seduced it. Similarly, a great classical pianist was once asked what was more difficult to play--a bravura Liszt piece or the slow sections of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. His response--the Liszt, despite its overt virtuosity and blizzard of notes, was easy to play, whereas the slow pieces such as Moonlight were extremely difficult to play well. German composer Hans Otte's "The Book of Sounds" seduces the piano in such a fashion that Chopin himself would surely be pleased. This fragile, delicate, often ethereal, but deeply affecting work places enormous value on each and every note, and utilizes passages of silence and space between notes to astounding effect. At times, it is somewhat reminiscent of the best work of jazz pianists Bill Evans and Paul Bley, both of whom created works in which what is not played is as important as what is. It is works such as this that refute the juvenile notion that loudness and a high dynamic level are necessary to create intensely felt music. Sometimes, the slowest and most covert music has the greatest emotional impact. ECM and Herbert Henck deserve plaudits for providing wide exposure for this unforgettable music, and we can only hope that the composer's follow-up to the Book of Sounds referenced in the liner notes will soon appear on disc as well.

mini-malism, repetitive patterning(s) music whatever you want to call it,survives today in a corrupted form, so much so that its budding beginnings with La Monte Young and Fluxus Gesturings seem quite distant his/her/story, Later the "Altmeisters" Reich Glass Adams Riley market ideologies seem to put the nails in the coffins abounding around the globe with world cultures entering at fixed points all concocted with the cash box at the end of the tunnel,well culture at any level moves at break-neck pace now where no one can keep pace.On-going junkpace is thereby created as Rem Koolhaas has said someplace. (I neglected to mention those who saw something more as Harold Budd, Peter Garland, Charlemagne Palestine, who remain more interesting today than anyone)
Otte's finely elegant music here seems odd in a way. Although the piano as a timbral resonant chamber with this work has fostered far more long solo works from Otte; for the piano as his "Book of Hours" :Studenbuch: from 1991-1998, these more a spiritual focus(what else) to be played in canonical content is placed in and around. "The Book of Sounds" is from 1979-1982 and appeared at a time when minimalism was about to take off never to return primarily however in the USA,performative artists as Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson were also getting, starting to get invitations to Europe with again their minimalist musics as a background warm-ups for whatever they do with text,and electronic manipulations. Otte though sees the corruptibility of the context even back in the early Eighties here so his works remain within traditional frames and gesturings. The stark beauty of the piano no one can argue with and is exploited,much as Morton Feldman actually asa distant hovering mentor,"hanging beauties" or "Wohllaut"is the term or "Klangen im Fuelle" classic shapes in abundance although Otte's music has a mild caressing rhythmic charge,more direct than Feldman, more melancholic "schwermuetig" a content of predictability. And he pays a price for that, for one single listening experience is about all there is herein for the proceedings.This has been a paradigm for Western concoctions of the minimal cause, where only the late Feldman the last ten years of his life tried to resolve. This with attempting to write hours long music. And it is really still problematic. Even Glass with his operas all still fall within known tried and tested genres of traditional operas. There was no innovations as his early Farfisa Organ music had implied.
A work like the Otte makes you regain your consciousness on really how far the vagaries and corruptibility of the concept of the minimal cause has gotten,much like any genre that must go public, and blockbuster, Early USA Television was an example where the early serious writers as Sid Ceaser and Milton Berle,who had only one show a week, now had one show per day to write for. So to the composers of mini-malism had to crank it out like working in a factory of culture. We never see it thus in the USA for we have pretensions of a free democracy at work where anyone can write whatever they want. Yes then try to sell,promote, produce and distribute your product. That's a horse of a different color as they say in the Land of Oz,so write for cash box or perish. What actually has perished for minimalism has been unpretentiously its intellectual soul, its premise, where now we simply have fodder,caricatures homgenizations schemes,digitalizations of expression predictable reduced for the lowest common denominator. And minimalism I think now finds itself it much more popular formats as the "studio" expression as Om Lounge and Fila Brazilia, churn out interesting mind-numbing beats,pulses and rhythms.
So the Otte finally is like an old contemplative fixed dinosaur, meant to simply remind you of this "Lost World" and it does so beautifully. Curious how the sustainability of this same idea in the visual arts sees no boundaries, as the ongoing continuous work of Carl Andre, Richard Serra, and photographers Kathy Grannan, Axel Hutte and Erwin Wurm.The un-vigours of Music seems to eat its children or like the sea anemone when it finds a nice comfortably rock to reside for its life proceeds to eat its brain.

here is my attempt at out-writing the previous reviewers:

this disc is soooooooooooooooooooooo good.

read and weep, scott and scarecrow!