Open Instrumentation and Nonhierarchical Forms of Social Organization: Christian Wolff's <em>Exercises 1–14</em> (1973–74)

Abstract

OPEN INSTRUMENTATION AND NONHIERARCHICAL FORMS OF SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: CHRISTIAN WOLFF’S EXERCISES 1–14 (1973–74) JONNY STALLINGS HRISTIAN WOLFF’S EXERCISES 1–14 (1973–74)1 epitomize Frederic Rzewski’s description of the composer’s music: “Weird little tunes, sounding as if they had been beamed at some remote point in the universe and then bounced back again as a kind of intergalactic mutant music; recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns, somehow sewn together in monstrous pairings.”2 As these “weird little tunes” dance on the brink of representation and abstraction, form and formlessness, order and chaos, Wolff’s Exercises implement Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s dictum to “write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of ight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency.”3 The use of open instrumentation, “heterophonic unison,” and performance instructions facilitates such rhizomatic deterritorializations of sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and form in the Exercises. C 174 Perspectives of New Music Deleuze and Guattari explain, “Principles of connection and heterogeneity : any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”4 They also assert that “there are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.”5 The rhizomatic melodies of Wolff’s Exercises consist of diverse “points” (i.e., timbres, pitches, rhythms, keys, clefs, instruments , performers, listeners, etc.) whose connections form “lines” celebrating a nonhierarchical multiplicity. Such a nonhierarchical multiplicity has social and potentially political rami cations. This essay will consider Christian Wolff’s words, performance instructions to his Exercises, and score excerpts from Exercise 1 and Exercise 3 in order to draw parallels between the composer, the music, and critical theory.6 An examination of these sources will elucidate a deterritorialization at play within and surrounding Wolff’s Exercises, showing its validity as a means and an end regarding social change. The deterritorialization unleashed by Wolff’s music bridges musical and extra-musical aspects of the formal, the aesthetic, the political, and the social. Rzewski muses, “there is order, but also constant interruption , intrusions of disorderly reality upon regularity and lawfulness, combining to create an effect of both familiarity and strangeness: Shklovsky’s ostranenie.”7 The order of music (i.e., appropriate cadences, counterpoint rules, resolution of dissonances, rhythm, harmony, etc.) tends to differentiate within each musical community or genre. However, Wolff’s Exercises exceed genre expectations as well as the notion of expectations. The evasion of genre de nition in Wolff’s music results not through a rejection of preexisting genres and performance practices (Western classical, jazz, folk, etc.), but rather an openness to the integration of varying musical styles, practices, and personalities in a quasi-improvisational, dialogical setting. As these typically disparate voices and personalities communicate, the listener experiences intrusions of disorderly reality upon the “regularity and lawfulness” of notated music. Rzewski proceeds, “You could say this music is surrealist—not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life’s unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can’t really say what it is like.”8 Preexisting musical elements assemble themselves within a nonhierarchical space in which neither improvisation, performance, nor composition supersede one or the other. The performance of the Exercises thus results in deterritorializations of music, sound, ritual, performance practice, and social interaction, which leads to my thesis that Wolff’s Exercises arrive at Deleuze and Guattari’s goal for the work of art Open Instrumentation and Nonhierarchical Forms of Social Organization175 summed up by Michael Gallope: “In Deleuze and Guattari’s fully developed theory of the ritournelle, the sonic rhythms of music will vividly show us how one might ‘bring into play’—not imitate or duplicate, but continue and extend—the rhythms of the cosmos.”9 Gallope contends that Deleuze develops this unique take on music in even earlier works, writing, “this particularized role for music is hinted at in the closing of The Logic of Sense . . . the ‘problem of the work of art yet to come.’ For Deleuze, such a work of art would be...