Christian Wolff's lair

[Mandryka]

Very beautiful performance of a duo for two violins here, apparently Feldman loved this one

https://www.youtube.com/v/FQy3yxvkVcU

[Mandryka]

Very interesting lecture by Christian Wolff on experimental music, recorded last May at the University of London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3I6WwY4ftdI

Did you make a copy of it, or a transcript? Is it anywhere else to be found?

[Mandryka]

Here's the boy



Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, John Cage, David Tudor, Morton-Feldman NYC circa 1952

[Mandryka]

I'm working a bit in the dark with Wolff at the moment, though I've just ordered a book which should help, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff (Routledge)  by Stephen Chase.  I don't know when he wrote these pieces, neither do I know what the level of indeterminism is in the scores. The experience of listening to some of them them, for me, is bizarre, and what I'm going to say may be nonsense which I will rapidly regret.  Much of it  reminds me of listening to The Buxheimer Organ Book. The music has that sort of simplicity, and that sort of structure. It is melodic. It has sections mostly demarcated by their rhythm, or demarcated by rhythm and timbre. 

Many of the pieces are short, though Rosas is more substantial and gives the impression of being a great success and something which will repay further listening. It is proceeded by four shorter numbered Rosas pieces, though as of yet the relation amongst them all is unknown to me.

One Coat of Paint gives the feeling of being a similar aleatoric genre as things by Cage. The role of silence is clearly a big deal in this one. Like Rosas, there are several numbered One Coat of Paint pieces and an unnumbered one, one of the numbered ones is long - nearly 20 minutes.

Most pleasant and challenging and very accessible to anyone who enjoys music from the c15. My antennae are telling me that the long One Coat of Paint 3 will very much reward further exploration.

More generally, there's a simple tunefulness to some of this music which does indeed make me think of Howard Skempton, without the nativity - I may not be doing Skempton justice with that comment as I've hardly explored his stuff, but I can see that he's a character who may become more important in my musical life in the near future.

[Mirror Image]

Here's an interesting interview with Wolff:

https://www.youtube.com/v/iHvUMunoCHk

I personally can't say I'm familiar with Wolff's work, but I do know he studied with Cage and learned a great deal from him (hence being a part of that 'New York School').

[Mandryka]

Here's an interesting interview with Wolff:

https://www.youtube.com/v/iHvUMunoCHk

I personally can't say I'm familiar with Wolff's work, but I do know he studied with Cage and learned a great deal from him (hence being a part of that 'New York School').

Cage put it the other way round, that he learned from Wolff.

[Mirror Image]

What works of Wolff's would you recommend to the newcomer of his music (assuming the listener is familiar with his general style)?

[Mandryka]

What works of Wolff's would you recommend to the newcomer his music (assuming the listener is familiar with his general style)?

I don't know, I'm in the position of just getting to know the composer. Much of the music offers a lot of discretion to the performers, and so it's a question of finding recorded performances which make it come off the page for the listener.

[Mirror Image]

I don't know, I'm in the position of just getting to know the composer. Much of the music offers a lot of discretion to the performers, and so it's a question of finding recorded performances which make it come off the page for the listener.

Well, I'll let you do all the work and you can report your findings here.

[Artem]

CD of early piano works on hatnowart label could be a good starting point. Brief, spiky works, kind of similar to what Brown and Feldmand were doing around the same time.

I'm personally fascinated by Wolff's music, bought a few of his disks, but oddly find most of it very difficult to really enjoy, as opposed to Feldman, for example.

[Mirror Image]

CD of early piano works on hatnowart label could be a good starting point. Brief, spiky works, kind of similar to what Brown and Feldmand were doing around the same time.

I'm personally fascinated by Wolff's music, bought a few of his disks, but oddly find most of it very difficult to really enjoy, as opposed to Feldman, for example.

Interesting. Thanks for the feedback. Again, I'll let Mandryka and others do the work before I decide to buy any of Wolff's music.

[Mandryka]

I'm personally fascinated by Wolff's music, bought a few of his disks, but oddly find most of it very difficult to really enjoy

Do you feel the same about Webern? I ask this because Webern seems close "in spirit" to Wolff.

[Mandryka]

https://www.youtube.com/v/Yb-YTeZwKQQ

This is a very early piece, from 1958, Duo for Pianists II Cage said that this was the musical analogue of reading a newspaper. When you read a paper you jump around the page from headline to headline, you may start an artile and leave it unfinished, jump to another etc.  In short the experience is radically discontinuous.

And this piece of music is radically discontinuous too. Not one of the gestures has a sense of beginning or ending. There is no continuity whatsoever from one gestiure to the next. No glue.

Does anyone know if the order of the cues and responses in the score is indetermined?

[Mandryka]

What works of Wolff's would you recommend to the newcomer of his music (assuming the listener is familiar with his general style)?

Got the answer!

https://www.youtube.com/v/LqIzAXSAYMw

This is a peice for small ensemble -- Burdocks -- from 1970 -- quite a historic performance, just look who's playing

David Tudor, bandoneon, organ
Christian Wolff, bass guitar, flute
Gordon Mumma, horn, harmonica
Frederic Rzewski, piano, percussion
David Behrman, viola, melodion, whistle
John Nash, violin

I think it's very beautiful.

The score is prose instructions and graphic notation. That way he felt he could create something fresh, in a way which allowed all the performers to preserve their integrity. You can see the London influence, Cornelius Cardew.

Of course, you need great performers -- we have that here! There is another one on youtube from Sonic Youth. But this historic one seems to me to have a bit of magic. It's here

[vers la flamme]

Got the answer!

https://www.youtube.com/v/LqIzAXSAYMw

This is a peice for small ensemble -- Burdocks -- from 1970 -- quite a historic performance, just look who's playing

I think it's very beautiful.

The score is prose instructions and graphic notation. That way he felt he could create something fresh, in a way which allowed all the performers to preserve their integrity. You can see the London influence, Cornelius Cardew.

Of course, you need great performers -- we have that here! There is another one on youtube from Sonic Youth. But this historic one seems to me to have a bit of magic. It's here

What, the Sonic Youth...?

[T. D.]

What, the Sonic Youth...?

Yup.

I once owned this recording, but it didn't survive a periodic cull. In retrospect, given that I'm now exploring the Cage number pieces, I rather wish I'd hung on to it, but I could buy a used copy for less than what I sold it for. I do recall the SYR version of Burdocks as one of the highlights.

[Mandryka]

          

Christian Wolff has composed five pieces called Tillbury, viz

Tilbury 1 (1969) -- for keyboards and/or any instrument
Tilbury 2 (1969)
Tilbury 3 (1969)
Tilbury 4 (1970) -- for at least two players
Tilbury 5 (1996)

In addition there is a composed realisation of Tilbury 4 called Snowdrop (1970) -- for harpsichord and/or other instruments.

Tilbury 1,2 and 3 are in the disconnected, "reading a newspaper" style of  Duo for Pianists II. They will appeal to anyone who likes Webern I think, even though I am sure Wolff uses a diffeent compositional procedure, they have the same lapidary quality.

Tilbury 4 and the related Snowdrop are very different because it is composed from scales and arpeggios. This caused a bit of a storm at Darmstadt when Snowdrop was created. It reflects an interest Wolff had at the time for pastoral, and for American minimalism -- Reich and Rzewesky.

Tilbury 5 was written for the Mode release, in truth I haven't explored it as much as the others. It is long.

Philip Thomas uses a modern piano, sometimes prepared. Sabine Liebner uses an unprepared modern piano, she relishes the ressonances and she takes her time. The mode release uses modern piano, trombone and violin.

I greatly enjoy the Mode release, and I find Liebner very hard to enjoy. And I think Philip Thomas is at least "interesting"

[Mandryka]

The OCR has made a mess of the quotations and footnotes, but it should be readable nevertheless. This is an essay by John Tilbury on Christian Wolff.

Christian Wolff and the Politics of Music

David Tudor, with characteristic perspicacity, noticed the influence of children (of being a parent) in Christian Wolff's music-making. "While working with David Tudor on Burdocks, he said that he could see the results of having small kids around—my music had loosened up."' Becoming a parent, bringing a human being into the world, makes one more aware of ideological constraints and pressures. A domestic culture vies with a prevailing dominant culture which is predatory, aggressive, and individualistic, a day-to-day confrontation of irreconcilable attitudes. The informality of Wolff s indeterminate music-making from the Sixties and early Seventies, culminating in Burdocks (1970-1), is an integral part of that domestic culture and strives to instill and safeguard values that are at odds with those from without which threaten to engulf us.

Michael Chant succinctly characterizes the essence of the philosophical issue at hand:

Collective work and experience stands against what is being promoted on all fronts as the "me" culture, where the issue, for example, becomes that art has importance because it expresses "my" life, "I" did this first, or it gratifies "me." This can only contribute to the general crisis of society.'

Music is an integral part of the fabric of our social existence. In the early Seventies raising a family coincided with a political involvement, expressed unequivocally in Wolff s music, moving (ideologically) from what he characterized as democratic libertarianism (anarchism) toward democratic socialism, which in one way or another was supported and promoted by the use of political songs and texts. In this he was not alone; several of his friends and colleagues, including Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, had made the same commitment. In the Thirties Hanns Eisler, whom Wolff admired, proclaimed:

I have always striven to write music that serves Socialism. This was often a difficult and contradictory exercise [my italics], but the only worthy one for artists in our time.3


Wolff criticized his own (earlier) music for being esoteric, too "introverted"; it did not addaress social reality. Above all, he tried in various ways to make his new, political music more accessible.


But my notion is that music can function better socially if it is more clearly identified with what most people recognize as music, which is not a question of liking or disliking, but of social identity. By function better socially I mean help to focus social energies that are collective not individualistic, and that may therefore be revolutionary politically.(4)

Hanns Eisler discussed the subject with characteristic candor and insight. One of his favorite quotes was from The Damnation of Music by the philosopher Me-Ti, 600 years BC:

If the nobles of the country really have the welfare of the people at heart, they should prevent and forbid music wherever it makes an appearance. For the fact that the people practise music has four disadvantages. The hungry are not fed, the cold are not clothed, the homeless are not sheltered and the desperate find no consolation.'



But Eisler would alter the last phrase to "and the desperate do find consolation." Typically, Eisler identified a fundamental problem which Lenin, for one, encountered but could not come to terms with:


Music and poetry can turn individuals and masses away from necessity—in some cases the necessity of acceptance, in others the necessity of self-sacrifice in the cause of social advancement—towards sensuousness, toward individual gratification, toward play, toward childhood.'

Unlike his close friend Cornelius Cardew, who sacrificed all on the altar of revolution, Wolff never loses his musical focus; he always writes good music. For Cardew music was the handmaiden of the revolution; it did what it was told and it suffered. Not only that, the audience, too, was expected to do what it was told. At a recital at the Air Gallery in Lohdon Cardew harangued his audience:

And when I play this music I'm saying to you what actually is the case. This music is about Thalmann [a German communist who was murdered by the Nazis in Buchenwald concentration camp]. It uses the materials that developed culturally around Thalmann, around the issue of Thalmann, and how he fought against the fascists before the second world war, and nobody is going to tell me any different.'

For Cardew the song is subverted, invalidated, by the culture that sings it, by the audience that hears it, A revolutionary activist in a day-to-day struggle with the State, a committed street-fighter, Cardew was involved in a power struggle (class struggle), a fight to the death, literally. Wolff was never in this situation; rather it was the occasional political demonstration, involvement in progressive local politics, a defiant visit to East Berlin during the Communist reign, etc; his response to music and politics has been the same as most leftist composers, except that he did make a choice to change his music, and quite radically. This was a bold step from which he never looked back.

Wolff s early scores are a projection into the future, a utopian paradigm; they are political. The music-making they generate is collaborative, self-consciously giving and taking, non-judgmental, respectful, attentive, sharing, cherishing the quotidian, where individuality, not "individualism," is nurtured. In short, it is strongly anti-authoritarian, "democratic."

This is treacherous territory: Music is notoriously promiscuous, to which the history of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony attests, having been used, and abused, right across the political spectrum, from extreme right to extreme left. As for positive human attributes, if Wolffs earlier music does manage to convey such qualities, it has no exclusive rights; Democratic Socialists cannot lay claim to a monopoly. Men, and much less frequently women, have committed acts of unspeakable bestiality; the same men have also displayed bravery, compassion, commitment, resourcefulness, and self-sacrifice, not to mention a love of art. Human complexity denies us the right to limit these claims to a chosen few. Moreover, in the struggle between art and ideology, art is often the loser. Or, as W.G. Sebald wrote: "Art is a way of laundering money." Art capitulates. Or worse. Writing of art during the Third Reich George Steiner reminds us:

Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich.'

Wolff s first two explicitly political pieces were Accompaniments (1972) and Changing the System (1973-4). Describing Changing the System Wolff wanted to represent a "focusing of concerted, persuasive but not coercive energy ... a kind of revolutionary noise." Crucially, the later music draws its material from songs, particularly political songs, and whereas the earlier indeterminate music deals with durational rhythm, the later music features accentual rhythm. "Rhythms are interesting because they have a lot to do with how people respond"... [but in public music] some kind of rhythmic definition is necessary."(9)

Much of Wolffs political music uses counterpoint, hocketing (a frequent feature in the early music), stretches of clear rhythmic articulation, diatonicism, and sounds are often treated referentially; by contrast, in the earlier works it is the way in which the sounds are actually produced. In both there is a concern for freedom. But in neither is there recourse to "theory." Some approaches are completely intuitive, others completely rationalized.

Written more than thirty years later, Long Piano (Peace March 11) (2004-5) begins with a peace march, one of several which Wolff began writing in England in the early Eighties. It is written in a tablature type of notation, with fingering and rhythm prescribed, but not pitches. Peace marches are usually ragged affairs, "messy," but with a strong sense of purpose and direction. Long Piano begins unequivocally with a political "statement," and yet in response to the question about the peace march from Long Piano, Wolff was equivocal. He simply replied, inscrutably, that "maybe it's just to remind oneself."

In my more recent work that content a number of times relates to a political mood, assertive, resistant, commemorative, celebrative, for instance. The connection may be fairly tenuous or subterranean; it is often discontinuous.

The music, which his desire for a political orientation created, has not changed. The "content," broadly speaking, remains the same. All these "moods" can be found, though never self-consciously, in Long Piano, along with echoes, intimations, of a Western classical music which Wolff has absorbed: Bachian counterpoint, the chorales and passages where the tread is steady and regular, and the late Beethoven sonatas. In the recesses of the music there is occasionally something familiar; I detect oblique references to Beethoven's op. 110 and the Gigue from Bach's sixth keyboard Partita. There are more general references to aspects of Western culture, to some characteristic quality, as well as to Afro-American music. There is playfulness, too—grace, wit, and humor. And Tom Schultz's playing is the perfect vehicle for the subtlety of Wolff s aesthetic. One admires the clarity of his contrapuntal playing, maintaining the diverse character of the individual lines through deft touch control, which also demonstrates what Cage described (and admired?) as the "musical" quality of Wolff s later music, by which he meant, presumably, its allegiance to the classical musical tradition.

Recalling Cage's anecdote of a performance of Wolff s music where the composer was asked to close the window to which he replied that it wasn't really necessary because the sounds of the environment in no way constituted a disturbance, I first listened to Schultz's recording of Long Piano on a Sony Walkman on a two-hour train journey (so with plenty of time to spare) from the south-east coast to London. At every stop, thus at irregular intervals, a train signal would penetrate my Walkman, a doleful descending minor third, which, however, the music felicitously accommodated—all part of what Frederic Rzewski has aptly described as a "disorderly reality." There is a rough-hewn quality to some of Wolff s music, such as the much-admired Prose Collection, but what it does boast, in toto, is a lasting toughness and resilience. In respect of its unpredictability and originality, its generous all-inclusiveness ("the musical composition of the world"), early and late, it is, uniquely, the music of Christian Wolff.

Every piece, I think, has, in addition to the abstract arrangement of its sounds ... what I would call a content, something that it suggests, which is not the same as its sounds, though such a content may deeply affect those sounds, how they are arranged and how they appear to us.10

Perhaps it is no longer necessary to make explicit reference in Wolff s later works. The content is somehow secure, inviolable. In music and words Wolff has made his position clear.

The writing about music that I like best ... communicates a very strong sense of the dignity of music partly by refusing to treat it as an art.(11)

Art or no, this is composition of the highest caliber.





Thomas Schultz has established an international reputation both as an interpreter of music from the classical tradition—particularly Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt—and as one of the leading exponents ofthe music of our time. Among his recent engagements are solo recitals in New York, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, Ghent, Seoul, Taipei, and Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Festival in Vienna, the Piano Spheres series in Los Angeles, Korea's Tongyoung Festival, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, and the April in Santa Cruz Festival. In 2005 he gave a series of master dasses on the piano music ofthe Second Viennese School at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna. His recitals are notable for programming that celebrates the continuing vitality of the piano repertoire, juxtaposing the old and the new. Since 2002, Schultz has included in his recitals and recordings works written especially for him by Frederic Rzewski, Christian Wolff, Hyo-shin Na, Walter Zimmermann, Boudewijn Buckinx and Yuji Takahashi. In addition, he has worked closely with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Elliott Carter. Schultz's musical studies were with John Perry, Leonard Stein, and Philip Lillestol. He has been a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University since 1994. www.thomasschultzpianist.com
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY 10 Exercises. New World Records 80658-2. Bread and Roses: Piano Works 1976-83. Sally Pinkas. Mode Records 43. Burdocks. The Other Minds Ensemble. Tzadik 7071. Complete Works for Violin and Piano. Marc Sabat, violin; Stephen Clarke, piano. Mode Records 126. I Like to Think of HarrietTubman. The Barton Workshop. Mode Records 69. Percussionist Songs. Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion. Matchless Recordings 59. (Re):Making Music. The Barton Workshop. Mode Records 133 (2CDs).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Behrman, David. "What indeterminate notation determines," Perspectives of New Music, 3/2 (Spring/Summer, 1965): 58-73.
1.0
Oteri, Frank J. "A Chance Encounter with Christian Wolff," NewMusicBox (March, 2002), http://www.newmusicbox.org/35/interview_wolff.pdf Patterson, DW. "Cage and Beyond: an annotated interview with Christian Wolff," Perspectives of New Music 32/2 (Summer, 1994): 54-87. Thomas, Philip. "Determining the Indeterminate," Contemporary Music Review 26/2 (April, 2007): 129-40. Wolff, Christian. Cues: Writings & Conversations/ Hinweise: Schriften and Gesprache, ed. G. Gronemeyer and R. Oehlschlagel. Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 1998 .
Producer: Thomas Schultz Engineer: Mark Dalrymple Digital mastering: Paul Zinman, SoundByte Productions, Inc., NYC Recorded October 2007 at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University. Cover art: Hew Wolff, Streak Mix, 2009 (acrylic on canvas) Long Piano was commissioned with assistance from Stanford University's Smith Piano Fund. This recording was made possible by a grant from the Francis Goelet Charitable Lead Trust.
FOR NEW WORLD RECORDS: Herman E. Krawitz, President; Lisa Kahlden, Vice-President; Paul M. Tai, Director of Artists and Repertory; Mojisola Oke, Bookkeeper; Anthony DiGregorio, Production Associate. ANTHOLOGY OF RECORDED MUSIC, INC., BOARD OF TRUSTEES: Richard Aspinwall; Milton Babbitt; Amy Beal; Thomas Teige Carroll; Robert Clarida; Emanuel Gerard; David Hamilton; Rita Hauser; Lisa Kahlden; Herman E. Krawitz; Fred Lerdahl; Robert Marx; Elizabeth Ostrow; Cynthia Parker; Larry Polansky; Don Roberts; Patrick Smith; Paul M. Tai; Blair Weille. Francis Goelet (1926-1998), Chairman For a complete catalog, including liner notes, visit our Web site: www.newworldrecords.org. New World Records, 75 Broad Street, Suite 2400, New York, NY 10004-2415 Tel (212) 290-1680 Fax (212) 290-1685 E-mail: info@newworldrecords.org & @ 2009 Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
11

Christian Wolff, Cues: Writing and Conversations (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 1998), p. 162. 2 Michael Chant, 'A turning point in music history," a paper delivered at a Symposium on the Scratch Orchestra on its thirtieth anniversary, November 21, 1999, and published by the Progressive Cultural Association, September 2002.

Hanns Eisler, from an open letter to the Composers' Union of the German Democratic Republic, printed in the newspaper Neues Deutschland on February 24, 1957. Christian Wolff, Cues: Writing and Conversations (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 1998), p. 352. 5 Hanns Eisler, A Rebel in Music (Berlin: Seven Seas Book, 1978), p. 192.

Maynard Solomon on Lenin, Marxism and Art, edited Maynard Solomon (Detroit Wayne State University Press, 1979), p. 166. 7 John Tilbury, Cornelius Cardew—a life unfinished (Copula, 2008), p.850.

9 George Steiner, In Bluebeord's Castle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), p.63. 9Christian Wolff, Cues: Writing and Conversations (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 1998), p.162.

(10) Christian Wolff, op. cit, pp. 229— 30. (II) Christian Wolff, op. cit., p. 156.

[Mandryka]

A lovely thing on this CD here, a set of four pieces dedicated to Jasper Johns, whom he met via Morton Feldman. Written in 1991 it has all the lapidary quality of the early music combined with a haunting lyricism. A collage of small phrases.  For double bass and violin.

The first and the third are more introvert than extrovert.

[Mandryka]

https://www.youtube.com/v/XVFJaYI_VUE

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?