Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff

Stephen Chase, Philip Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138273535
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317168485
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Christian Wolff is a composer who has followed a distinctive path often at the centre of avant-garde activity working alongside figures such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Cornelius Cardew. In a career spanning sixty years, he has produced a significant and influential body of work that has aimed to address, in a searching and provocative manner, what it means to be an experimental and socially aware artist. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to a composer often overlooked despite his influence upon many of the major figures in new music since the 1950s from Cage to John Zorn to the new wave of experimentalists across the globe. As the first detailed analysis of the music of this prolific and highly individual composer, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff contains contributions from leading experts in the field of new and experimental music, as well as from performers and composers who have worked with Wolff. The reception of Wolff's music is discussed in relation to the European avant-garde and also within the context of Wolff's association with Cage and Feldman. Music from his earliest compositions of the 1950s, the highly indeterminate scores, the politically-inspired pieces up to the most recent works are discussed in detail, both in relation to their compositional techniques, general aesthetic development, and matters of performance. The particular challenges and aesthetic issues arising from Wolff's idiosyncratic notations and the implications for performers are a central theme. Likewise, the ways in which Wolff's political persuasions - which arguably account for some of the notational methods he chooses - have been worked out through his music, are examined. With a foreword by his close associate Michael Parsons, this is a valuable addition to experimental music literature.

PART I
Reception, History

Chapter 1
‘Our Webern’: Cage and Feldman’s Devotion to Christian Wolff

Michael Hicks

The stature of the New York School of composers continues to grow – at least if stature can be measured by an abundance of new recordings, journal articles, books, symposia, websites and scholarly papers. One senses in such artefacts a quiet canonization of hierarchy taking place: John Cage is at the top, Morton Feldman next, then Earle Brown and Christian Wolff. But Cage and Feldman, at least, saw things differently, calling Christian Wolff their equal and even their guide, whose eminence in musical history would one day be recognized. So, before the canon of the New York School closes, we ought to ask: What did Cage and Feldman say about Wolff, why did they say it, and what did they mean?

Let’s begin with a sampling of their assessments of Wolff through the years. In 1959, Cage made a list for Peter Yates of important living composers, calling Wolff ‘the most advanced of all’.1 In 1965 Cage described Wolff to Yates – then writing a history of twentieth-century music – as the head of a new era in music composition: ‘Analysis of W[ebern] won’t do anymore. What will is not analysis but performance … of Wolff’s music’.2 The following year, in a radio conversation with Feldman, Cage explained it this way:

I think that that quality of classicism that was in Webern and which made his music useful for people who wanted to change their thinking about music exists now in the work of Christian Wolff. I found years ago that if one were teaching music and wanted to provide a discipline for a student that first one had to give up teaching harmony. Next one had to give up teaching counterpoint. Now I think one would have to give up teaching Webern. And I think you’d be at the present moment a fairly good teacher if you would teach Christian Wolff. Not teach him but teach his music to a student.3

In 1969 Cage wrote a letter of recommendation to Dartmouth on Wolff’s behalf. It included this statement:

He is not known as a student of mine for the reason that I learned more from him than he from me … Through the association of David Tudor, Morton Feldman, myself, and Christian Wolff, American music has developed to the point of shaping new music not only here but in the Orient and in Europe. This is generally acknowledged. It was because of this that last year I was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is only my age that has brought it about that I am so distinguished: the truer state would be that such honors go to Christian Wolff. For of the four of us, I am certain that his work is the most regenerative of music.4

As late as April 1986 Cage called Wolff ‘the most important composer of his generation’.5

Feldman, though less effusive than Cage, still paid homage to Wolff. In a 1964 essay he wrote: ‘Christian Wolff’s early music, his development, the suggestions in all his work, have continually haunted my thinking’.6 In 1966, Feldman told Cage, ‘Christian is becoming a symbol for me of the way … that I really would have wanted to have been myself’. When Cage questioned him on this, Feldman explained that his own music had already become ‘old hat’. ‘And I pick up a piece that Christian wrote when he was seventeen, in 1951 – there’s certainly nothing old hat about it. And the whole continuity of the work, I mean, it’s just absolutely extraordinary. It’s not musty, you’re not opening up a tomb.’7 Later that year he said to Cage, ‘I’m convinced that Christian is and will have the place of Webern in terms of the mind’.8 He echoed that statement the following year, telling Charles Shere in a radio interview: ‘I always think of Christian as the Webern of the future’.9 In 1973, Feldman assessed Wolff’s influence on his and Cage’s work: ‘I am sure that if John Cage didn’t have Christian’s music with him all these years as his North Star, his trip would have been quite different. I too am profoundly indebted to Christian Wolff. I think of him as my artistic conscience’.10

What should we make of the frequent references to Webern? On one hand, they seem to lionize Wolff, on the other to dismiss him. But consider the context of the statements. In the 1940s, Cage recalled, he felt ‘hardly able to contain myself for the excitement that a performance of Webern’s music would give me’.11 The New York Philharmonic’s January 1950 performance of Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21 allowed Cage to hear the work for the first time and coincidentally led him to meet Feldman.12 Admiration for Webern also drew Cage to Boulez and led him to advocate Boulez’s music; in 1951 he wrote that the only new music he loved, besides his own, was that of Boulez, Feldman and Wolff – in that order.13 Something in Webern’s work unified all of theirs. In an early draft of his influential ‘History of Experimental Music in America’, Cage wrote that Boulez – and all other genuinely adventurous composers in Europe – ‘follow from Webern’.14 Boulez in turn promoted Cage’s work as Webernesque to his European colleagues. ‘The direction pursued by John Cage’s research is too close to our own for us to fail to mention it’, Boulez wrote.15

But upon seeing some scores by Feldman and Wolff, Boulez wrote to Cage that ‘I’m afraid that I wasn’t too keen in the end on the works [Feldman] sent me. I’m sorry if he has taken it badly. I hope he hasn’t got it in for me. The same goes for your pupil Christian Wolff’.16 In months of letters thereafter, Boulez criticized the work of the New York School – including Cage’s – and Cage defended it, particularly when it came to the use of pauses and silence. In 1953 Cage wrote that Boulez’s busy serial music tended to ‘embarrass the space [Webern had opened up in music] and place the importance on the object in it’.17 Thus, Cage explained, while European composers like Boulez were superficially embracing ‘the silences of American experimental music … it will not be easy for Europe to give up being Europe’. Re-drafting his ‘History of Experimental Music’, Cage not only crossed out the statement that the European composers ‘follow from Webern’, but replaced it with a complaint that they – Boulez first on his list – had abandoned Webern’s essence. They showed ‘no concern for discontinuity’ but instead ‘a surprising acceptance of even the most banal of continuity devices’.18

By 1959 the New York School had fully repudiated ‘post-Webern’ serialists, who, Feldman said, had derived from Webern a ‘mania for “relationships”, where the terror of “accident”, the wild scramble to avoid mishap, reminds one of nothing so much as a bunch of Keystone Kops all rushing in different ways, and all in the wrong direction’.19 Cage declared ‘I consider American composers more advanced than European ones’. And then he added, ‘I consider [Christian Wolff] the most advanced of American composers’.20 Wolff himself later noted that, while all of Feldman’s music ‘is deeply indebted to … the early Webern [in its] small exquisite gestures … if you were going to look at Webern from [Boulez’s] point of view, [Feldman] would have none of it’.21 By 1966 Feldman could say that he ‘just wasn’t interested’ in hearing any more Webern. At the same time Cage said, ‘I can’t think of anything more unnecessary to do than to listen to any piece of [Webern’s]’. He and Feldman were now, in the latter’s words, ‘illegitimate sons’ of Webern – illegitimate, that is, in the eyes of Webern’s self-proclaimed European heirs.22

Cage and Feldman seemed to consider themselves and Wolff as a sequel to the trio of composers commonly known as the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) – just as the Second had been a sequel to the First (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven). On one occasion in the 1960s, Wolff recalls, Feldman was asked how the New York School members lined up with those of the Second Viennese School. Cage was Schoenberg, Feldman said, he himself was Berg, and Wolff was Webern. Someone asked, what about Brown? ‘Krenek’, Feldman replied.23 Maintaining the essential ‘trinity’ of Second Viennese School composers, who else would represent Webern but Wolff?

There were superficial affinities, to be sure.24 First, Wolff was German, not just by parentage but by intellectual heritage – a notable advantage to both Cage and Feldman, both of whom often tied their work to European traditions.25 Wolff’s father, Kurt, was a celebrated German publisher who had promoted Kafka and Expressionist writers such as Trakl and Heym. He was also a cellist whose father was a music professor with ties to Brahms’s circle.26 (In his second letter mentioning Wolff to Boulez, Cage wrote that Christian was ‘the son of a German who used to play with Paul Klee in the evenings’.27) The Wolffs had fled the Third Reich for France, where Christian was born in Nice, on 8 March 1934. They moved to New York in March 1941 as part of the American liberation of intellectuals in occupied France. Settling in Greenwich Village, Kurt and Helen established a home in Washington Square, where many of their progressive compatriots also had settled. In 1942 Kurt and Helen founded Pantheon Books, soon to be publisher of Gide, Camus and other pioneering authors, mostly European. Thus, as Cage observed, ‘from early years, Christian was familiar with the conversation and views’ of Pantheon authors.28 Meanwhile, Kurt often spoke to Christian in German because, according to Helen, he did not want to speak in a ‘rudimentary’ way (i.e., in English) to his son.29 For his high-school graduation in 1951, Wolff made a trip with his parents to Europe, where he lodged briefly with Boulez. After returning home he began school at Harvard, majoring in classics, that foundational literature of the Old World. From 1959 to 1961 Wolff served in the US Army, stationed in Germany. For the remainder of his adult life Wolff has kept close ties with Europe (including the UK) for both professional and familial reasons.

Second, as Webern had been the youngest of his circle, so Wolff was the youngest of his: Cage was 22 years older, Feldman 12 years. As the three grew closer, a familial dynamic emerged. Cage was the father-figure, Feldman the big brother, and, as Wolff put it, ‘I was the baby’.30 Thus, Bunita Marcus explains, ‘because [Wolff] was so much younger than [them] every time he did something ingenious, it was like magic’.31 ‘Just imagine’, Feldman said, ‘here was a composer who astonished the New York avant-garde at sixteen and seventeen’.32 Wolff’s precociousness bespoke the idea of ‘genius’ itself, often defined as a perpetually youthful view of the world.33

Though he matured, of course, as Wolff said, ‘to your parents you’re always a child. It drives you up the wall at times, but it’s very difficult to get out of that relationship’.34 Understandably, Cage tended to treat Wolff as a surrogate son. But Wolff, of course, had his own real parents, relegating Cage to a more avuncular role. At the same time, Cage’s relative age – only two years younger than Helen – allowed him to bond not only with Christian but with Christian’s parents. They invited him to dinners and parties, whose guests included many literati published by Pantheon. Already something of a polymath, Cage eagerly embraced this heady company, some of whom he might never have encountered without the Wolffs’ introduction. In 1954 Cage wrote to Helen Wolff of his ‘love for you and a sense of responsibility to you and to Mr Wolff (through my relation to Christian) from which I am not free’.35 Cage came to feel that musical history itself had entrusted him with nurturing Christian’s genius.36

Feldman lacked Cage’s paternal sense about Wolff, of course. At the same time, he savoured the young man’s European intellectual heritage. He likened Christian Wolff to Virginia Woolf for his ‘background of intense intellectual cultivation’, by which he was ‘at home in a terrain other men f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I Reception, History
• Part II The Music
• Part III Politics
• Part IV Performance
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index