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Christian Wolff CHRISTIAN WOLFF APRIL 23, 2013 8:30 PM presented by REDCAT Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater California Institute of the Arts CHRISTIAN WOLFF Tuesday, April 23, 2013, 8:30pm PROGRAM All works by Christian Wolff You Blew It (from the Prose Collection) (1971) Audience John Heartfield (Peace March 10), sections 1 and 4/4a (2003) Casey Anderson, alto saxophone/percussion; Matt Barbier, trombone/ percussion; Eric KM Clark violin/percussion; James Klopfleisch, contrabass/ speaking voice; Kathryn Pisaro, oboe/percussion; Michael Pisaro, guitar/ percussion; Cassia Streb, viola/speaking voice; Christine Tavolacci, flute/ percussion Trio V for James Tenney (2006) Vicki Ray, Danny Holt, piano four hands, Colton Lytle, percussion Fall III (2000) CalArts Percussion Ensemble: Jodie Landau, Ben Goldman, Dan Ogrodnik, Tony Gennaro, An-Lian Cheng, Brian Foreman, Kelly Furniss, Jenica Anderson, Colton Lytle, Colby Beers, Tionna Brunson, Nick Baker; David Johnson, director Intermission For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964) Michael Jon Fink, electric guitar; Brian Walsh, clarinets; Andrea Young, voice with electronics Changing the System (1972–73) Casey Anderson, alto saxophone/percussion; Matt Barbier, trombone/ percussion; Eric KM Clark violin/percussion; James Klopfleisch, contrabass/ speaking voice; Kathryn Pisaro, oboe/percussion; Michael Pisaro, guitar/ percussion; Cassia Streb, viola/speaking voice; Christine Tavolacci, flute/ percussion ABOUT THE WORKS One way of viewing the music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) is to see it as action and activation. Performers are activated to think and to do; the audience is as well.With this in mind, we’d like to begin the concert with an activity for everyone! We ask that you join us in performing the following piece: You Blew It (from the Prose Collection) (1971) The letters stand for the sounds, as far as can be managed, which the letters in the above phrase stand for, except that “ou” stands for both the “ou” in “you” and the “ew” in “blew”. y ou—b lou i t t—you bl ou i it—y ou blou ou—it y ou—bl lou t—y ou—b b l ou—I t—you ou—blou it bl ou—it Inflections possible at line ends: ? (proper or rhetorical) or . (declarative or ironical) or ! (pleased, displeased or invoking). Pauses of any lengths are represented by the spaces between letters or combinations of letters. Durations of sounds may be long (ca. 3 seconds or longer) or free. Where letters or combinations of letters are connected by a line: (a) those before the line (e.g. ou—) should be long and those after (—b) are free; then, at the next pair, (b) those before the line are free and those after long, then (c) both those before and those after are free. Thereafter freely between (a), (b) and (c), and occasionally apply one of them to two successive sets of letters or combinations of letters connected by a line. Each of any number of players may start at any line; repeat any line as often as desired before continuing to another, but do not return to it. Sing as many of the lines as desired. When using pitches repeat no pitch on successive vocal articulations. It is worth keeping this experience in mind as you listen to the rest of the works on the program: the musicians are likely to be given related kinds of “freedoms” from the scores they are performing. This could mean the freedom to align and coordinate events, to choose which instrument or sound to play, and even how to structure the flow of sounds in the piece. Or it could be any combination of these. The first half of the program features work completed in the last decade, a very productive period for Wolff—in terms of the number and in the fecundity of scores produced. John Heartfield (Peace March 10) (2003) is organized into two larger parts: the first has three instrumental sections (of which we are doing the first) and the second part is the Peace March, scored for voice(s) and “percussion” (which in this case is the instrument used in part 1 and cardboard boxes). The spoken text (printed after the Wolff bio) is the life story of artist and designer, John Heartfield. He was born in Berlin as Helmut Herzfeld, but changed his name to protest the anti-British sentiments in Germany during the First World War. He joined the Berlin Dadaists, became friends with Bertholt Brecht and later became known for his anti-Nazi collages during the 1930s and ’40s. Wolff’s mixture of text, percussion and notated music with various degrees of indeterminacy is reminiscent of Changing The System and other works that seek to address a listener directly. But these works stop (well) short of agitprop, as their musical processes still fall with in the world of experimental tradition following from John Cage. Trio V For James Tenney for piano four hands and one percussionist was dedicated to Jim in the month of his passing (August, 2006). I had the pleasure of watching these two distinguished experimentalists interact at CalArts, when Christian was a visiting professor in the spring of 2006. They wore their membership in the “heroic” generation of the American avant-garde lightly, but their shared sense of having been in “battle” together was also clear. Wolff has a variety of methods for turning names into music and that is certainly at work in this multi-section piece. Fall III (written in 2000 and revised in 2011) is a major work that consists entirely of rhythmic notation. In the great tradition of Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge and Musikalisches Opfer, two of his favorite classical pieces, Wolff has fashioned a complex music that leaves its instrumentation open. The twelve percussionists are therefore free to choose which instruments they will play from the vast barrage of forces available. The second half of the program features two of the confirmed classics of experimental music. For One, Two or Three People from 1964 is a seminal piece in Wolff’s output. It is important to note that he identifies the performers as “people” (not musicians, instrumentalists, performers, violinists, etc.). Performers are induced by the brilliantly conceived score (a network of symbols presented on the page) to think and act as people—who relate, work together and are dependent upon one another. Performers of this piece understand that it is their capacities as (thinking, feeling, acting, reacting) humans that are being brought into play. The music grows organically out of this interaction and sounds different every time it is played. Changing The System (1973–74) might be one of the few successful “political” pieces of music ever written. Why? Because it enacts the form of change that it announces as possible. Part of the text (which comes from an interview with sixties activist Tom Hayden, printed at end of program notes), reads, “It’s the system itself that sets the priorities that we have, that distorts the facts, that twists our brains and therefore the system would have to be changed in order to change priorities and to make it possible for us to really see what’s happening.” The musical “system” Wolff creates in this piece, does change priorities, away from music as a top-down directed activity and towards music as a process. It rules against clear beginnings and hard endings. It says the beauty is not the creation of the individual, but is found in the groping way a collective deals with the obstacles with which they are presented. In the intervening 40 years, have we come any further? —Michael Pisaro, April 2013 Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France, but has lived mostly in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, association with John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Earle Brown, Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew have been important for him. A particular feature of his music has been to allow performers various degrees of freedom and interaction at the actual time of performance. The music is published by C.F. Peters, New York, and a good portion of it has been recorded. A number of pieces were used by Merce Cunningham and the Cunningham Dance Company, starting in 1953. Wolff has also been active as a performer and as an improviser—with, among others, Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacey, Keith Rowe, William Winant, Kui Dong, Larry Polansky and the group AMM. His writings on music, up to 1998, are collected in the book Cues: Writings and Conversations, published by MusikTexte, Cologne. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Cultural Council, the Fromm Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award for music) and the Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and has received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Academically trained at Harvard as a classicist, Wolff has taught classics at Harvard and from 1971 to 1999 was professor of Classics and Music at Dartmouth College. TEXTS John Heartfield (adapted by Christian Wolff) 1891: Helmut Herzfeld born June 19 in Berlin. Oldest son of Franz Herzfeld, socialist poet and Alise Stoltzenberg, a textile worker and strike organizer. 1895: Franz Herzfeld sentenced to prison for blasphemy, flees with his family to Switzerland. Family forced to move to Austria. 1898: Parents abandon their four children who are then raised in foster homes and orphanages in Austria. 1905: Helmut and brother Wieland move to Wiesbaden where Helmut apprenticed to a bookseller.
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