Topic: Christian Wolff's lair

[Mandryka]

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/XVFJaYI_VUE" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/XVFJaYI_VUE</a>

A piece I very much like here for trombone and piano, from 1991, called For Ruth Crawford or maybe just Ruth. The whole album's intreresting, it's streaming on many platforms. Does anyone have the booklet? Does it say anything interesting?

And the piece called Peggy, from 1993, is if anything even more striking than For Ruth. This is an outstanding CD.

[Mandryka]

I think, if I didn’t know better and was listening blind, I’d have said that the music on the above Wolff CD is by Hans Joachim Hespos, I’d be very surprised if there wasn't a strong influence in one direction or another. So much for preconceived ideas about a schism between Wolff, Cage, Feldman, Cardew on the one hand, and the European avant garde on the other - it’s more complex than that!

[Mandryka]

Long Piano is a solo piece which lasts about an hour. The score lets the performer decide tempo, and sometimes pitch and rhythm. It is a collage of 95 patches. There are, according to the composer and indeed to John Tilbury, references to other composers' music Ives, Schumann, Beethoven and Bach, L'homme armé -- I hardly noticed that myself.

The problem with this sort of thing is to make it flow and cohere. Otherwise it could sound like 95 boring piano exercises. Thomas Schultz does a remarkably good job in that respect.

Listening to it I was reminded of something very enigmatic in Cage's writing, which is the idea of form. He defines it as  “the morphological line of the sound-continuity.” He expanded on this

At the time I considered form as the aspect of mystery in which the life of an organism sometimes cloaks itself. If you attempt to organise it, you kill it.

I guess what I'm saying is this apparently random juxtaposition of piano pieces is given a life line by Schultz's performance. Of course it helps that you know you're in for an hour of music, it sets expectations.