Imago Dei

Item details

Description +
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  Preface
  Imago Dei is a piece which ironically examines Man’s “likeness to God“. As a species we are creating machines, building quantum computers and inventing AI. At the same time we create injustices, oppress minorities and destroy nature from economic and egoistic motivations. Regardless, Christian history in particular calls us the „crown of creation“.
  
  This piece is full of fast and crazy ideas, flashes of thoughts, like a computer creating false conjunctions. Short snippets of music of different styles appear and disappear. They collide with each other until the absurdness culminates in a total crash. The piece concludes in apparent peace but one is left wondering if this is just yet another false conjunction.
  
  Contact Edition Svitzer on mail@editionsvitzer.com to obtain accompaniment track
  Duration: approx. 10 min.
Instrumentation +
- Vibraphone and Tape
About the composer +
- Fabian Otten is the principal percussionist of the Philharmonic State Orchestra of Hamburg, Germany. Born in 1993 in Steinheim, Germany, he started to play piano and percussion at the age of six. In search of something which combines these two instruments, he fell in love with the sound of the marimba.
  
  He studied percussion in Hamburg with Massimo Drechsler, Stephan Cürlis and Cornelia Monske, and completed his studies in Berlin with Rainer Seegers, Franz Schindlbeck and Biao Li. As a percussionist and marimbist he won several prizes including the special award of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2nd prize at the International 'Marimba Festiva‘ Competition and the 'Eduard-Söring-Preis' in Hamburg.
  
  Composing has always been his passion. Alongside his percussion studies, he enhanced his knowledge in music theory and took private lessons with Professor Fredrik Schwenk. Through his compositions he hopes to increase awareness of the emotional possibilites of his instrument.
Reviews +
- Review (Percussive Notes, April 2025)
  
  This new musical journey is brought to us by German composer and percussionist Fabian Otten. The piece is intended to explore a duality of the great technological advancements that mankind has brought into this world, and the great atrocities that humans are capable of. The result is a soundscape that combines technology with malevolence, dark electronic or electronically distorted sounds from an accompaniment track, and the eerie, metallic sonorities of a vibraphone. A truly thought-provoking work.
  
  While many sections of the piece are set in steady tempi, what is truly remarkable is how Otten can replicate rubato in a composition with tape. The opening portion of the work is a great example of this. The composer sets the dark tone with eerie drones from the accompaniment and chromatic gestures from the performer. These gestures are highly syncopated, include intricately written ornamentation, and utilize multiple time signatures to give the illusion of metric freedom. While this looks challenging on paper, the effect to the audience will be that the performer is being freely expressive against an electronic drone.
  
  Along with these brilliant moments of implied rubato, most of the piece is constructed from snippets of musical ideas. As the performance progresses, these snippets get shorter and change back-and-forth at greater frequency. This requires the vibraphonist to change playing characteristics rapidly and drastically: duple to triple; flowing sextuplets to articulate sixteenths; piano to forte, back to piano.
  
  This collision of rapidly changing ideas leads to a “crash,” in which all sound stops and all that remains is resonance. After dust settles, we are led to a contrary portion of classically beautiful vibraphone playing set to accompanying harp. It is the only section of the work in which the player utilizes double verticals with four mallets. Before this point, the piece has required incredible independent and lateral techniques to accomplish all that Otten has presented. The piece ends in this peaceful character, with hints of the menacing technology heard in the background and in the final sonority.
  
  This is a beautifully constructed work for vibraphone and tape. The sounds Otten has created in his accompaniment track complement the vibraphone well and effectively create the soundscape of a technological dystopia. This piece is certainly worthy of a champion vibraphone player to perform on a program.
  
  —Kyle Cherwinski
Credits +
- Front Cover graphics and layout: Nicola Lee
  Painting: Marcel Hüppauff
  Photo: Philip Loeper
  Engraving: Fabian Otten
  Printed in Copenhagen, Denmark
  Copyright © Edition SVITZER
  www.editionsvitzer.com

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