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The Death of Virgil, mvt. 1 (2004)

from The Otto Laske Collection Part Two: Electronic Music by Otto Laske

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The Death of Virgil takes its name from Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil (1945) which evokes the last 18 hours of the poet's life in the Palace of the emperor Augustus at Brundisium, Italy. As the novel itself, the composition is in four parts: Arrival, Descent, Awaiting, and Home-Coming. (The third movement is omitted here). Comparable to Broch's text, the piece is an inner dialogue of an alternately lyric, epic, and dramatic nature. It is the equivalent, in sound, of my life-long reading of Broch's novel, and of the vibrations the reading carried over into my life.

Just as Broch's novel is woven out of strands of stream-of-consciouness, the composition is woven together from contrasting, interrelated, and superimposed orchestrations commenting upon each other as variants of a foundational score. Composed with Koenig's Project One program and orchestrated by way of Kyma, each of the scores used maintains its own harmonic, melic, rhythmic, and timbral profile. Often, the same score is contra-posed with itself in a divergent orchestration, even to the point of annihilation.

A pointer to Broch’s work may be helpful. At the center of Broch's novel, as well as of this composition, stands the fate of the poet's main work, the Aeneid. Incomplete at his death and destined by him to be destroyed, it is rescued by Augustus for his own greater glory as representative of the newly pacified Roman state. The work survives, however, as the voice of the poet that announces another, Christian, era, depicted in Dante's Divine Comedy, initially under the Virgil’s guidance.

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from The Otto Laske Collection Part Two: Electronic Music, released August 28, 2023

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Otto Laske Gloucester, Massachusetts

Otto Laske is a pioneer of software-based composition in both its instrumental-vocal and electronic forms. He is also a cognitive musicologist, poet and visual artist. As a musicologist, he created a new literature on music focused on understanding music composition and analysis as researchable cognitive processes that can be illuminated by focusing on the ‘thought forms’ used by creators. ... more

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