German Composer Hans Otte

Avant Garde Pianist, Composer, and Advocate Dies on 25 December 2007

Dec 29, 2007

The German avant garde composer Hans Otte died on Christmas Day, 2007. His minimalistic work explored music through its most basic elements of sound.

Following closely in Stockhausen's footsteps, the avant-garde pianist Hans Otte passed away on December 25, 2007, just a few weeks after his 81st birthday. His death coincided with Christmas Day.

Pianist, Composer, Music Advocate

Hans Otte was born December 3, 1926 in Plaunen, Germany. He began piano lessons at the age of 5 and later studied in Germany, Italy and the United States (at Yale University). He returned to Germany and headed the Radio Bremen music department for 25 years (from 1959-1984). He was an avid supporter of fellow avant garde composers John Cage and David Tudor.

The Beauty of Simplicity: Sound as Such

Otte believed that music's emotion should be distant, sought for beneath the surface layers of sound. His compositions resemble starkly empty rooms: each note reverberating into nothingness before the next comes to take its place. In contrast to German romanticism's "heart-on-sleeve" emotional transparency, Otte's music requires a rather intense form of "deep listening."

He described his compositional technique as "the search for the character and individuality of sound as such, which must be rediscovered and re-experienced independent of superimposed structures. The composer understands the dialogue with sounds as the discovery of their nature." (Ute Schalz-Laurenze)

Otte's aesthetic is demonstrated most powerfully in his piano music. When a key is struck on a piano, the sound waves vibrate for a moment and swiftly fade. To a composer used to the seemingly endless sustain of a string ensemble, the piano's quick decay proves a somewhat frustrating challenge. But for a composer like Otte, the sparsity of a piano unaided by pedals fits exactly with his love of sonic simplicity: sounds are experienced as individual, atomic units rather than as pieces of a greater whole.

Otte also used sounds from the environment, repetitive texts, and atonal melodic patterns, arranged in barely overlapping layers that also echo across emptiness.

Like many of his fellow avant garde composers, Otte drew inspiration for his aesthetics from the East. Otte's fascination with bare space and elegant simplicity developed from his interest in Eastern calligraphy.

Suggested listening

Hans Otte is best known for his composition Book of Sounds (1979-82). Other compositions include Minimum: maximum / orient: occident (1973) and Book of Hours (1991-98).

Sources

Ute Schalz-Laurenze. Quoted in "Minimum:maximum / orient:occident - Hans Otte." Pogus linear notes

The copyright of the article German Composer Hans Otte in Classical Composers is owned by Sarah Canice Funke. Permission to republish German Composer Hans Otte in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.