released August 28, 2023

Otto Laske is a composer, musicologist, lyric poet, painter, and graphic artist who has been active in the arts since 1955. Outside of poetry, most of his artwork is digital and comprises instrumental and electronic music (www.ottolaske.com) as well as a large repertory of painting, graphics, and photography (www.saatchiart.com/olaske). While as a social scientist he was schooled at the Frankfurt School of ‘Critical Theory’ (Th. W. Adorno), as an artist he is largely self-taught except for an MA degree in music composition from New England Conservatory, Boston, MA (1968).

Historically, Laske’s compositional work in music is grounded in the Darmstadt School and in the digital-sound experiments of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe. Initially trained as a composer of instrumental and vocal music by Konrad Lechner and Renato de Grandis, Darmstadt, Germany, and in the U.S. by Avram David (A.D. Kemler) and Robert Cogan, after 1970 he encountered decisive influences on his work from G. M. Koenig, Director of the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Having left Utrecht after five years in 1975, Laske continued to work with Project One for all his compositions. He aimed to replace manual by software-based composition in all musical genres.

As a scientist, from early on Laske took great theoretical interest in the question of “what is music?” and replaced it by the question “what is the cognitive structure of the real-time compositional process in music?” As a musicologist he asserted that music only exists in the present, not some historical past, since by nature it is always re-generated by musical experts in real time, whether they are composers, listener, conductors, musicologists, instrumentalists, or vocalists. From this vantage point, Laske created the discipline of cognitive musicology, working with children and adults (mainly himself) to scrutinize the structure of the cognitive processes of composition, listening, music analysis, and the design of computer music software. See JerryTabor’s 1999 ‘Otto Laske: Navigating New Musical Horizons’.

Laske’s profile as a composer was strongly shaped by the influence on his creative process of G.M. Koenig’s compositional and composition-theoretical work as well as Koenig’s direct and indirect mentorship in getting grounded in the computer arts. Koenig’s Project One composition software (1969) enabled Laske to design instrumental, vocal, concrete, electronic, and computer music compositions based on top-down score designs (“score synthesis”) that could be orchestrated by ear in all acoustic media available and were even applicable to modern dance choreography (as made by his then-wife Peg Brightman, founder of the dance company CHOREO in Cambridge, MA).

In the 1980s, Laske’s public profile was further shaped by his work with Curtis Roads in NEWCOMP, the New England Computer Arts Association founded in 1981. As friends and co-artistic directors, Laske and Roads presented electronic and computer music concerts both locally and internationally, the latter in the form of transatlantic concerts as well as an international competition judged by a group of continental and American composers and administered by Newcomp.

Laske’s compositions (not only his vocal parts) are intensely lyrical as well as symphonic (especially his compositions for loudspeakers), designed to structure large temporal spaces in highly contrapuntal and tone-color-rich ways. While the early instrumental-vocal and electronic compositions are strongly score-synthesis centered, from the late 1990’s on Laske compositions come into their own as tone-color compositions of shifting sound densities.