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To be asked to write about Will Ogdon and his music is a
particular pleasure because our musical lives have
intertwined in various ways. We both met at Hamline
University in St. Paul in 1946 and we retired from the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1991; a time
frame of fifty-five years. We came to Hamline to study with
Ernst Krenek, the well-known Austrian composer who was
teaching there. (By chance, even our desks in the back of
the college library were back to back.) Will returned to the
Twin Cities in 1954 to teach at the College of St. Catherine
and lived in the same four-plex we rented from Hamline. We
rejoined each other in 1967 with the formation of the UCSD
Music Department, which could be considered one of
Will‚s finest imaginative works.
His
"Music One" course illustrates one of the distinctive
approaches in the department he formed. Devised by Will and
Robert Erickson, it was team-taught, lasted an entire
academic year, and was intended for undergraduates who were
not in music. One of several projects, for example, was to
make a sound map of some section of the campus, tape record
those selected sounds, and then compose a tape work of two
or three minutes using twenty or more splices. Projects such
as this,combined with a wide variety of listening and
attendance at concerts served as our "introduction to
music."
Will
has written an extensive range of music over the years: a
theater work for chamber ensemble and two singers, several
orchestral works, and some exceedingly striking and
expressive choral works that should be rediscovered and
performed more often. His music is distinctive and he
follows his own path and is not swayed by changing trends.
(Now that he is retired, he calls himself a "full-time
composer.") Many of his works are for voice and even his
instrumental chamber music seems to me, in some sense, to be
songs-without-words. His music is often brief, but not
merely laconic; his music has the very expressive qualities
that can remind one of Imagist poetry. The works on this CD
are fine examples of the full-time composer Will
Ogdon.
"Thomas
Nee"
Will
Ogdon sits atop conquered territory. His view from that
perch, though isolated and pensive, is a gorgeous sight,
lovely and nostalgic. His is music the Viennese serialists
might have written had they been more comfortable and
relaxed about the system they developed. For them, the
warriors long past, the twelve-tone technique was a
revolutionary crowbar that leveraged composers into a new
relationship with the world; and though they longed for
comfort, they rarely attained it. For Ogdon it is a place
for unhurried reflection. There is nothing to be proved
˜ just a need to be honest and true to one‚s
character and inner values.
Here
is a music that communicates life's uncertainties and
unfulfilled longings with resolve and a quiet dignity that
comes from seasoned introspection.
What
is revealed within this music‚s dodecaphonic context is
surprisingly tonal. It is wistfully expressive and simply
beautiful in its subdued romanticism ˆ listen to the
brief but pregnant piece for solo marimba, Oratory, which
swells suspended over long fermatas, followed by falling
minor thirds; or the doubling of lyrical lines in the Third
String Quartet and the Second Wind Serenade, often in thirds
and sixths.
Both
life‚s smallest details and greatest contradictions
fully engage Ogdon‚s attention. The nervous tremolos
which resolve phrases in the Violin Suite capture the
contradictions between longing and acceptance. These
tremolos are the most agitated feature of the work and also
the most conclusive in their strategic cadential function.
The heavy issues of D. H. Lawrence‚s poems in the Moon
Songs suit Ogdon and are underplayed with small gestures.
The grand drama of life and death is played out in the
second of Two Songs for Two Seasons which describes, in both
the composer‚s own text and music, the anxieties of a
stalked rabbit in a bleak winter scene. His style minimizes
external conflicts so that it is never overtly dramatic or
melodramatic. Yet it emphasizes the private details of
something ordinary turned over and over, lovingly, in his
hands. Consider how in the first movement of his Third
String Quartet the interweaving cavatinas (a "cavatina" is a
simple song), scherzos, a trio and a nocturne act
essentially as variations on a theme, as if the observer
were reflecting on the same object from different angles. We
see this rigorous process again in the 3 by 3 small trios of
the Introduction and Nine Short Variants.
With
similar careful familiarity and love of contradiction, Ogdon
reaches out to friends and colleagues with small pieces in
which a sense of isolation looms large. Each of the
movements in his Three Piano Pieces is dedicated to,
respectively, Stefani Wallens, Aleck Karis and Cecil Lytle
-- pianists, and friends, all. The multi-sectional Violin
Suite is likewise dedicated to his dear friend János
Négyesy. Will Ogdon‚s view is at once vast,
covering friends, objects, and life itself, while never
losing its introspective focus.
"Igor
Korneitchouk and Ray Cole"
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