Luke Ottevanger talks about his new book

OCTOBER 30, 2026

The Sound of the Place: A Journey Through Britain’s Musical Landscapes is a book by composer and music teacher Luke Ottevanger in which he explores the myths, legends, and backstories of nearly 30 composers and roughly 70 musical works, while reflecting on his own creative recovery.

THE SOUND OF THE PLACE GREW OUT OF A PERIOD WHEN YOU FOUND YOURSELF UNABLE TO COMPOSE. CAN YOU DESCRIBE WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR CREATIVE LIFE DURING THAT PERIOD, AND WHAT FINALLY PROMPTED YOU TO TRY TO FIND A WAY BACK TO COMPOSING?

I should stress that I only composed for myself, for the joy of it! If I had to define myself I would have said that I ‘was’ a composer, but no-one else would have seen me in such a way – they would have seen a music teacher. With that qualification made, things changed around 2011 when everything I tried to write quickly became dissatisfying to me and found its way to the bin. Eventually I gave up trying. It felt as if I had written myself into an impasse. Or perhaps the blockage began because, unconsciously, I was changing, and composition was no longer my natural form of creativity. Whatever the reason, I felt distressed at losing my creative outlet. The blockage was just that: the stopping up of something that had previously flowed, and it put me increasingly out of kilter.

Eventually, in early 2022, the desperation to do something about it led to this sudden compulsion to travel to places where other composers had found inspiration, with the vague hope of discovering whether what they had experienced might also rub off on me.

YOU DESCRIBE MUSIC AS HAVING CAPTIVATED YOU FROM CHILDHOOD, WITH COMPOSITION BECOMING AN IMPORTANT PART OF YOUR LIFE FROM AN EARLY AGE. WHAT FIRST INSPIRED YOU TO BEGIN CREATING MUSIC OF YOUR OWN?

It just seemed magical to me. In one of my earliest memories I was clearly already enchanted by the idea of creating worlds in sound (it was not yet music!). I was sitting at our old upright as a very young child – maybe three years old – and ‘telling the story’ of Red Riding Hood with my little fingers and, as I remember, my fists. The big bad wolf seemed to be lurking somewhere in the heavy black wooden case of the piano, and those black and white keys I was pressing were the scene on which the drama played itself out. I remember pounding away on clusters of low notes in order to create a dense forest of sound. It must have sounded awful to my poor mother, who was on the other side of the wall, in the kitchen, but I was lost in the world I was building out of notes.

I also remember my first piano lesson a little later, at the age of four or so, and the joy I felt at ‘meeting’ C, D and E, and the overwhelming desire to keep learning these notes as fast as my teacher would let me, to go on musical adventures with them.

Then at some point, when I was perhaps eight or nine, I stumbled on a scrap of manuscript paper and realised that there was no reason I could not try to set down my own patterns and sequences of notes, to build them into something bigger, better and more permanent. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. But with no-one to say ‘no’ I kept doing it and gradually learnt a few things.

That first, fundamental joy of playing with notes never left me, and when I write early on in The Sound of the Place that ‘these moments in which sounds are born in silence… are as close to magic as anything I can imagine’ I am describing something that was true at the beginning and is still true now ...

CONTINUED HERE: https://crosseyedpianist.com/2026/10/30/author-interview-luke-ottevanger-the-sound-of-the-place/