Editors' Introduction

Abstract

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION ROBERT MORRIS, BRUCE QUAGLIA, AND JAMES ROMIG N THE OCCASION OF CHARLES WUORINEN’S EIGHTIETH year, we celebrate the work of a composer who has appreciated, studied, and prodigiously created “permanent things.”1 Wuorinen’s vision of his art has steadfastly epitomized the pursuit of a serious and enduring musical practice. He has not always been praised for keeping this faith, at least not by all music critics or even by all other composers, but for many of us he has been a model. He has produced—and continues to produce—an astonishing body of work: over 250 compositions (and counting) in virtually all genres, including more than a few pieces for unusual combinations of instruments whose very constitution is a testimony to his skills as a composer. While he has won virtually every major award available to an American composer, including the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, he has never rested upon his laurels. When, early in his career, it seemed that opportunities for good performances of demanding new music were hard to come by, he founded the Group for Contemporary Music with compatriot Harvey Sollberger. Wuorinen conducted the Group, performed at the piano, and established an exacting measure of attention to detail and overall musicality for the performance of contemporary music that has inspired O 8 Perspectives of New Music the formation of many subsequent contemporary music ensembles. Some of the essays that follow, from but a few of the performing colleagues who have worked with Charles over the years, will further attest to this and then deepen that characterization of his contributions to professional music making. Wuorinen’s parallel engagement with musical academe was complicated from the outset, yet he still taught at distinguished universities for many years and mentored several generations of accomplished professional composers, some of whom have contributed their words and music to this volume. Throughout all of the years and the creation of many new works, surprisingly little attention has been paid by musical analysts to Wuorinen’s music, aside from some contributions from a few former students and then others who have been fortunate enough to know him and gain insights into his methods. Wuorinen, like many composers, rarely discusses the details of his diverse compositional techniques, and so the analyst who approaches his works from the top down rather than with some a priori analytical tool kit may have some advantage in finding a way in. Perhaps this dearth of analytical attention is also due in part to the fact that Wuorinen has long been understood to be a “twelve-tone” composer, and yet what that appellation actually means has long remained something of a mystery for many commentators who have inherited certain assumptions about how the music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or Webern goes, and therefore how all twelve-tone music must go. Wuorinen’s music, over its long arc, has continued to elaborate and expand upon that inherited twelve-tone language, resulting in a compositional practice that works with ordered, unordered, or partially ordered sets of pitch-classes and time-points under transformations that affect all levels of a composition. His book Simple Composition first appeared in 1979,2 and presents a concise and straightforward tutorial on the “twelve-tone system,” many features of which can be found in Wuorinen’s music up to that point and after. But the reader of Simple Composition—a book written as a tutorial to assist young composers, and not to explain Wuorinen’s own music—will not find any clear, much less complete, explanation of Wuorinen’s subsequent techniques, or even examples from his own published works. Those attempting to explain his music strictly through the twelve-tone lens will encounter the complication of Wuorinen’s own expressed belief in an enduring musical culture that connects current musical practices to their past. Any analyst who believes there is something like a monolithic twelve-tone practice that emerged suddenly and intact would be generally hard-pressed to reconcile whatever that is to the music of the tonal past, and would be Editors’ Introduction 9 left even further confounded by the methods and attitudes that Wuorinen brings to bear in his own...