Christian Wolff: Works for Solo Cello
Recorded by Luke Brouillette
Program Notes by Dr. Jeff Perry
Cello Song Variations (1978)
"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum"
Cello Suite Variation (2000)
Tempo of Prelude
Tempo of Saraband
Tempo of Gigue
One Cellist (2013)
One Cellist
Small Pieces for Cellist (Anton) (2018)
1
2
3
4
5
Program Notes by Dr. Jeff Perry:
In 1950, a precocious teenager named Christian Wolff knocked on the door to composer John Cage's East Village apartment, seeking composition lessons. What followed was more nearly a collaboration than a master-pupil relationship, the younger composer's originality influencing the older just as often as vice versa. Following the example of his own teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, Cage taught Wolff for free; the latter famously gifted Cage a copy of the I Ching, recently published by Pantheon Books, where his parents were editors; the influence of this gift over the subsequent decades on Cage's music (and on experimental music as a whole) is well documented. Leaving to attend Harvard University in1952, Wolff retained
contact with
Cage and the others in his circle - composers Morton Feldman and Earle Brown, pianist David Tudor, and
dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham - through
the rest of the decade and beyond.
Feldman called the precocious Wolff "Orpheus in
tennis sneakers." Pursuing graduate studies in classics, Wolff was a
member of the classics and comparative and literature faculty first at Harvard and then at Dartmouth, where he was eventually given a joint appointment in the music department - he had never stopped composing. His preoccupations as a composer reflect his interests as a social activist: many of his ensemble pieces focus on creating a collaborative, humanistic group dynamic among performers. Wolff has composed for virtuosic musicians like the cellist Charles Curtis (dedicatee of the third work on this disc) as well as for groups of amateurs. He retired from Dartmouth in 1999.
Wolff's
music for two or more players typically deals as much with the dynamics of the group as with the sounds he calls upon them to make; in his solo music
there is a more intimately collaborative dynamic
between the performer and the composer; the sonic
result of the composer/performer interaction is the product of their dialogue. In two of
the works for solo cello on this disc there is an added element of colloquy, between Wolff and the earlier
music he takes as models and inspiration.
Track 1: Cello Song
Variations "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" (1978)
Carl Sandberg printed
the folk song "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" in his 1927 anthology The American Sandberg, a touchstone of the
First American Folk Revival of the
1930s. The identity of its author
is uncertain; it was first
recorded commercially by Harry McClintock, a
singer-songwriter who was a member of
the International Workers of the World (the "Wobblies"), a group whose radicalism and militant stance in favor of workers' rights led to its
persecution by anti-Communist crusaders. Wolff references the Wobblies in another
work, Wobbly Music (1975). The lyrics to the first of the song's six verses in Sandberg are, "Oh,
why won't you work like other men do? How the hell can I work when there's
no work to do? Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again, Hallelujah, give us a hand-out, to revive us again!"
Wolff
observes, "The tune (and its text, in the I.W.W.
version)-cheerful, mocking and threatening-is point of reference
for the expressive character of playing:' Cello Song Variations begins a simple statement
of the melody, followed by increasingly freer paraphrases
and distorted fragments of the tune. Wolff specifies free breaks in the tempo that the performer
is allowed
to realize
as they choose; microtonal inflections are specified
in various places but different technical and expressive
choices (dynamics, arco vs. pizzicato playing, bowing, etc.) are left to the performer as well. Wolff's curvy, "wobbly" beaming of the work's
many sixteenth-note passages invites free interpretation of tempo, although the composer instructs cellists to preserve
(or at least imply) a sense of the original tempo and beat.
Track 2-4: Cello Suite
Variation (2000)
Track 2: Tempo of Prelude
Track 3: Tempo of Saraband
Track 4: Tempo of Gigue
The model for this
three-movement work is J.S. Bach's
Suite in G major for Violoncello Solo BWV 1007,
specifically the Prelude, Sarabande, and Gigue
of Bach's suite. Wolff confronts his model using two main techniques: erasure of portions
of Bach's continuously flowing rhythmic surface, and
substitution of notes of tension that
negate Bach's harmonic syntax. Fragmentation and negation here are a form of commentary, homage, and critical
engagement; they result in an engaging new work that dialogues with the music of the past
while insisting, like the Zen practice
with which Wolff and Cage were well acquainted, that we as listeners engage
primarily to the sonic here and now.
Track 5: One Cellist (2013)
The essential characteristic of Wolff's compositional indeterminacy is that the score presented to the performer
is an
open text-just as no two readers will have the same experience with a given novel (or one reader with the same novel, read at two different periods of their life)
it is impossible, and undesirable, for any two performances to be the
same. Here Wolff combines exact
notational fragments with indeterminate
passages. Some of the latter are to be performed twice, giving the cellist the opportunity to realize them differently each time. Paul Christopher
chooses to interpret Wolff's indeterminate notation
now with calm, quiet
reverence, now as if quizzically
interrogating the composer's intent, now giving full rein to a
sort of fury. The through-line connecting the work's many fragmentary
gestures is
a saturation of the sonic
picture plane; there is a sense that the piece is over when it has explored every corner and cranny of the cello's range of expression.
In this regard the work comes closest to the music of Feldman,
who made explicit connections between
the sonic plane of his own works and the picture plane of the Abstract Expressionist painters
from which he took so much inspiration.
Track 6-10: Small
Pieces for Cellist (Anton) (2018)
The
"Anton" of Wolff's
title is cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, who premiered the work in 2018. These five unaccompanied cello pieces
by Wolff present
a mix of specific and
indeterminate notational instructions
to the
player. Piece 1 alternates conventionally notated gestures with
indeterminate passages - in the first such
passage, the player is asked to pluck each individual note
pizzicato, wait until it decays
to silence, and then move on to the
next note. In another passage,
Wolff provides a series of dynamic - f, p, pp - and instructs the player
to play "any sounds, one sound for each dynamic, anywhere
within 2 second time space. Sustain
beyond time space ad lib." A similar dialog
between specific and indeterminate "time spaces" continues throughout the subsequent movements. In places Wolff
specifies dynamics or rhythms but permits them to be realized
with any sounds. Piece 3 invites the cellist to shuffle
brief musical segments as desired;
piece 4 is notated on an 8 x8 square
grid reminiscent of a chess board (and of tables that Cage was using circa 1950-51 as a first
step into chance procedures);
the performer navigates around
the grid as desired and may play the notes
in squares of the "chessboard" either one after
another or simultaneously, as double or triple stops. In three of the pieces the composer interjects pauses of freely variable duration, suggesting that the performer join the listener in experiencing Wolff's music in terms of both the sounds he invites
the cellist to play and the silence that surrounds them.
