Faculty Research Grant funded!

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.