An Analysis of Two Large-Scale Works by Christian Wolff

Abstract

AN ANALYSIS OF TWO LARGE-SCALE WORKS BY CHRISTIAN WOLFF1 LEWIS KRAUTHAMER INTRODUCTION HE SON OF PROMINENT LITERARY PUBLISHERS from Germany, Wolff began his musical career as something of a rarity—a kind of child prodigy of the avant-garde. At age sixteen he befriended John Cage and quickly found a place within the artistic circle that also included Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham, among others. Wolff soon became known for his astoundingly inventive and original music, which he has continued to produce (notwithstanding his “day job” as a literary academic specializing in the works of Euripides) as the last surviving member of the New York School. Christian Wolff is known today most commonly through his association with the composers of the New York School (named above). As others have pointed out,2 Cage and Feldman held their younger colleague in exceptionally high regard. Feldman described Wolff as Cage’s “North Star” and his own “artistic conscience”;3 Cage himself referred to Wolff as “the most important composer of his generation.”4 Evidently, the connection to these composers is well founded, but the very aspects of Wolff so apparently admired by Cage and Feldman T 76 Perspectives of New Music remain largely ignored or confined to discussions of a generalized and/or superficial nature. What is presented here is a detailed discussion and (structural, poieticleaning ) musical analysis of two seminal works from Wolff’s output, which represents the first serious effort having been made in this direction. BACKGROUND After twenty years of avant-garde music, although accepted to a certain extent, it has not had overwhelming success and one comes to reconsider what it is all about. What are we doing? It is not a technical or formal problem. . . . It is a problem of what music is doing in society or who listens to it. —Christian Wolff (1972) What concerns us here is Wolff’s music post-1972, but for the sake of context let us first consider and reflect upon the unprecedented wave of optimism that accompanied the artistic movement that immediately preceded it. The experimental avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s offered the promise of a new paradigm—one based on openness, freedom , spontaneity, and de-hierarchisation. From 1957, indeterminacy (allowing for chance and/or improvisation in a work’s performance) began to play a major role in Wolff’s music. His first such experiments sought a kind of “shorthand” for achieving a similar musical complexity as exemplified by such composers as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Early works were highly controlled “games”5 in which performers had to make split-second calculations and decisions, spontaneously acting and reacting to sounds and situations —the scores for these pieces would define strict parameters in which this was to take place. Through the 1960s, Wolff’s scores more and more came to uphold freedom and spontaneity as a musical ideal in and of itself. By 1969, Wolff was consciously concerned with creating musical scores that made possible, in his words, “the freedom and dignity of the performers.”6 For many, this musical tendency carried with it strong social and political implications. Problems began to arise, however, when artists and musicians began to attempt to truly apply their artistic/philosophic ideas on a broader social level. Frederic Rzewski reflects upon the tumultuous days of MEV’s (Musica Elettronica Viva) “collective” music-making: An Analysis of Two Large-Scale Works by Christian Wolff 77 In this period, culminating in a tour of the United States in the spring of 1970, MEV became a kind of travelling commune, on the road much of the time, constantly changing in number and composition, including not only musicians but friends and families, for many of whom music, far for being the reason for the group’s existence, was merely the expression of its collective soul. It was a time of conflict, precarious relationships, intense highs, and bitter disappointments. Artistic standards were smashed, professionalism and elitism were denounced, and a vigorous struggle was launched to force art to bend itself to the most elementary level of spontaneous impulse, to become little more than a stimulus triggering outbursts of emotional energy among anonymous...