Occasional pieces : writings and interviews, 1952-2013

368 Pages·2017·4.288 MB·English

by  Christian Wolff, George E. Lewis

Occasional Pieces

Occasional Pieces
Writings and Interviews, 1952–2013
Christian WOlff
With a fOreWOrd by GeOrGe e. leWis
1
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wolff, Christian, 1934– author. | Lewis, George, 1952– writer of foreword.
Title: Occasional pieces: writings and interviews, 1952–2013/Christian Wolff;
with a foreword by George E. Lewis.
Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016028230 (print) | LCCN 2016028835 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190222895 (hardcover: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190614706 (pbk.: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190222901 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190222918 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Music—United States—20th century—History and criticism. |
Music—United States—21st century—History and criticism. |
Composers—United States—20th century—Interviews.
Classification: LCC ML410.W814 A25 2017 (print) | LCC ML410.W814 (ebook) |
DDC 780.973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028230
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COntents
Foreword by George E. Lewis vii
Author’s Preface xvii
1. (One of) Four Musicians at Work (1952) 3
2. On Webern (1955) 7
3. New and Electronic Music (1958) 11
4. On Form (1960) 19
5. Questions (1964) 27
6. Electricity and Music (1968) 31
7. Interview with Victor Schonfield (1969) 37
8. Fragments to Make Up an Interview (1970–71) 43
9. For Merce (1975) 49
10. Conversation with Walter Zimmermann (1976) 51
11. Frederic Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated
(1978) 67
12. On Political Texts and New Music (1980) 71
13. On the Death of Cornelius Cardew (1981) 83
14. On Notation (1984) 85
15. Open to Whom and to What (1987) 87
16. Morton Feldman Memorial Text (1987) 97
17. On Morton Feldman’s Piano Piece 1952 (1988, 1995) 99
18. On Morton Feldman’s Music (1990) 105
19. What Is Our Work? (1990) 107
20. On Charles Ives (1990) 119
21. Keith Rowe, A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality (1990) 123
vi Contents
22. On Dieter Schnebel’s Marsyas (1990) 125
23. Floating Rhythm and Experimental Percussion (1990) 131
24. Quiet Music (1991) 141
25. Interview with Cole Gagne (1992) 143
26. Interview with Markus Trunk (1992) 169
27. Briefly on Cornelius Cardew and John Cage (1992) 191
28. John Cage Memorial Text (1992) 193
29. Preface to John Cage, Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings I–V (1993) 195
30. Sketch of a Statement (1993) 197
31. Music—Work—Experiment—Politics (1995) 201
32. Letter to Suzanne Josek (1996) 211
33. Thinking of David Tudor (1997) 213
34. Most Material: Evan Parker and Eddie Prévost (1997) 217
35. Frederic Rzewski and His Piano Music (2001) 219
36. Merce Cunningham and CW Music (2001) 227
37. Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2 (2002) 229
38. Earle Brown—Chamber Music (2004) 235
39. Some Notes on Charles Ives and Politics (2004) 241
40. On Day-to-Day Composing Work (2004) 247
41. Remembering Grete Sultan (2005) 249
42. On Music with Cunningham Events (2008) 251
43. Some Recollections of Arthur Russell (2009) 253
44. On Verbal Notation (2009) 257
45. Experimental Music around 1950 and Some Consequences and
Causes (2009) 259
46. Interview with James Saunders (2009) 275
47. Crossings of Experimental Music and Greek Tragedy (2010) 287
48. About Merce (2010) 309
49. What Can I Still Say about John Cage? (2012) 313
50. Thinking Yet Again about John Cage (2012) 315
51. The First Performance of Erik Satie’s Vexations (2012) 319
52. Robyn Schulkowsky’s Worlds of Percussion (2013) 321
53. Selected Program Notes 327
Index 339
fOreW Ord
George E. Lewis
Christian Wolff has lived more lifetimes in music than even his date of birth
would suggest. Imagine being able to say that Theodor Adorno came to your
performance and talked about it with you after, even if David Tudor felt com-
pelled to tell him, “You haven’t understood a thing.” (p. 214) Wolff has con-
tributed trenchant discourses to two seemingly distant disciplines—classics and
music. However, Wolff’s writing about both, as presented in these pages, evinces
a certain modest lack of ease with his own historicity—the establishment of
which (unlike, say, Karlheinz Stockhausen) he seems content to leave to others,
while the ambivalence is further heightened by the very act of collecting and
republishing these writings.
With regard to this aspect of Wolff’s music, I want to take into account Nicolas
Bourriaud’s declaration that “The possibility of a relational art (an art taking as
its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context,
rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space), points
to a radical upheaval of the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced
by modern art.”1 Bourriaud presents the notion of a “relational” artwork that
proposes “moments of sociability” and creates “objects producing sociability.”
Membership in the relational world is centered upon this primary criterion:
“Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the
space it defines?”2
Among Wolff’s pieces, the most obvious candidates for inclusion under a
rubric of relationality would be the works that he describes as “contingent,” such
as Duo for Violinist and Pianist (1961) and For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), which in
Bourriaud’s terms, “operate like a relational device containing a certain degree
of randomness, or a machine provoking and managing individual and group
1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 14.
2 Ibid., 109.
vii
viii Foreword
encounters.”3 These works require the performers to perform actions according
to, among other things, their perceptions of what other performers are doing,
their position in the score, and certain overarching rules. The composer provides
an environment in which real-time decision making by performers, and there-
fore responsibility for the direction of the music, is paramount.4
Moreover, Wolff uses contingency to explore the sound of sociality, intention,
and consensus:
I realized that the kind of sound made in an indeterminate situation in-
cludes what could result in no other way; for example, the sound of a player
making up his mind, or having to change it. In fact, the indeterminate no-
tation I’ve used is, as far as I know, the only possible one for the kind of
sound I should like. And don’t forget, we also like to be surprised. (p. 27)
But well before Wolff developed his interactive, indeterminate notation for the
management of group interactions,5 one could already see the pursuit of rela-
tionality in his early, fully notated works. Duo for Violins (1950) comprehen-
sively presents the possibilities of contrapuntal relations among the pitches D5,
Eb5 and E5,6 and in Trio I (1951) for flute, trumpet, and cello, Wolff’s interest,
as he later recalled, was “in the internal variables of the sonority, the large variety
of possible combinations when one thinks of all the possible simultaneities and
kinds of overlaps of four pitches on three instruments.” (p. 327)
The result becomes an orientation for which “the playing is not so much an
expression of the player (or composer) as a way of connecting, making a com-
munity.” (p. 85) Even so, Wolff remembered at one point that
You never think of yourself as part of tradition or a member of a group.
What happens is that there are a number [of] ideas around, some of
which you have in common with others. All that we had in common
was a desire to do something different, so as to be clear of styles which
were not ours to borrow, or which seem to have gone dead. (p. 38)
The demographic contours of that community have come down to us histori-
cally, and it is fair to say that its self-awareness included a strong European/
3 Ibid., 30.
4 Christian Wolff, For 1, 2, or 3 People, (New York, London, Frankfurt, Leipzig: C.F. Peters, 1964).
5 See David Behrman, “What Indeterminate Notation Determines,” Perspectives of New Music 3,
no. 2 (1965): 58–73.
6 Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, Christian Wolff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2012), 12. Also see Michael Hicks, “ ‘Our Webern’: Cage and Feldman’s Devotion to Christian Wolff,”
in Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, eds. Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas, 3–22
(Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 15–16.
Foreword ix
American axis of orientation, and was largely white and male. Wolff invokes the
names we know:
So there are writings about John Cage, my one and only teacher (for
only a brief time), then lifelong friend and supporter, Morton Feldman,
Earle Brown, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, and Cornelius Cardew,
also about Keith Rowe, Dieter Schnebel, Eddie Prévost, Arthur Russell,
Pauline Oliveros, Luigi Nono, David Behrman, and Robyn Schulkowsky.
And there is the dancer Merce Cunningham, whom I met in 1950
shortly after meeting Cage. (p. xviii)
In his groundbreaking book, Experimentalism Otherwise, Benjamin Piekut asks,
“How have these composers been collected together in the first place, that they
can now be the subject of a description?” Going further, Piekut notes that the
question is “the proper starting place for an investigation into what experimental
music was in the last century. Experimentalism is a grouping, not a group, and
any account of it must be able, in the words of Michel Foucault, ‘to recognize the
events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable
defeats.’ ”7
These writings by Wolff take up Foucault’s challenge, but they also point
out the role of the artists themselves in constituting the grouping. Like the
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, an assemblage of
experimentalists whose work, for an earlier generation of music historians,
seemed somehow too distant from the community outlined above, Morton
Feldman found that “a group gives a sense of permission, a feeling that you do
have to fight against an accepted standard because others are working outside it
too.” (p. 38)
Wolff often invokes other musical forms as having affected him, but with the
clear recognition that these were somehow outside the community, either his-
torically or collegially—“Western classical music (on much of which I was raised
from an early age), going back to the medieval period, musics of other tradi-
tions—African Ba-Benzele Pygmy, for instance, and some jazz (for example,
Ornette Coleman).”(p. 108) The Coleman reference caused me to speculate on
the political and social contours of an American experimental scene in which
Christian Wolff and Ornette Coleman couldn’t easily come together—as
Coleman and Jacques Derrida did, onstage and in print, in 1997.8
7 Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and its Limits (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011), 6.
8 See Timothy S. Murphy, trans., “The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette
Coleman, 23 June 1997,” Genre 36 (2004): 319–28.