Program Notes by Dr. John T. Dunn, Associate Professor of Fine Arts
Christian Wolff (b. 1934) a self-taught composer of the “New
York School,” which consisted of a group of artists that drew inspiration from
surrealism and avant-garde artistic ideas. He was born in Nice, France, to the
German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who published works by Kafka
and Walter Benjamin and later helped found Pantheon Books. His family escaped
fascism in Europe in 1941 by emigrating to New York City, where they started a
business, publishing English translations of European literature. When Wolff
was 16, his piano teacher sent him to study composition with John Cage, one of
the leaders of the New York School. The two quickly became friends, and Wolff
was closely involved with Cage’s inner circle, which also included musician
Morton Feldman and dancer Merce Cunningham. He never left his literary roots,
however, and was soon hired to teach Classics at Harvard University specializing
in the works of Euripides, and later taught classics, comparative literature,
and music at Dartmouth College. He became the Strauss Professor of Music there,
and finally retired from teaching in 1999. He remains active with his
compositional output in retirement.
Wolff’s early works have a strong emphasis on exploring silence, indeterminacy, and often explored creative, new ways of including improvisation. He would often create new notation to explore his soundscapes his music would often be based on complicated rhythmic schema, systems of aural cues, or contain political texts based on the policies of the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies). In Wolff’s collaborations with choreographer and dancer Merce Cunningham, the two created something innovative at the time (but more common now): performances where dance and music would happen simultaneously yet would be artistically two separate statements. Wolff’s music has reached a wider range of audiences than most other avant-garde composer thanks to his collaboration with the rock band Sonic Youth and their album, Goodbye, 20th Century.
Wolff composed Cello Suite
Variation at the urging of the Slovakian composer Daniel Matej after a
discussion of performance practice. Here, Wolff shows that a museum piece of
the canon, such as Bach’s First Cello Suite, can be transformed into new music.
When Cello Suite Variation borrows melodic material from Bach, it is as
a structural element not an aural quotation that is readily identifiable (as is
heard in the music of Charles Ives, for example). By marking each movement
“Tempo of,” he establishes that liberties with other aspects of music such as
pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and technique occur, but the tempo of each of these
Baroque dances should be maintained.
One Cellist (2013) was
composed for Charles Curtis, Professor of
Contemporary Music Performance at the University of California at San Diego.
The piece is built on small musical units, divided by indeterminate amounts of
space, that the performer then connects. Some ideas repeat in various guises,
but it is up to the performer to create unity, or disunity, through their
pacing. As in most of Wolff’s scores, microtones are used to provide an unusual
coloration, and dynamics are left up to the performer.
Small Pieces for Cellist (2018) uses a different technique in each
movement to extend the performer’s control over various dimensions of music. As
Wolff notes, “There are five pieces. In the first, second and fifth there are
phrase sequences with free pauses between them. There are also notations for
just dynamics (sounds free), and for just rhythms (free sounds). The third and
fourth pieces are on grids of 6X6 and 8X8 bars, allowing continuities to be
chosen in variously free ways.” The “Cellist” in the title is the dedicatee,
cellist Anton Lukoszeviere, who gave the world premiere of this piece at St.
James church in London in 2018.
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