Christian Wolff
with Ev Grimes
Hanover, NH
December 30,31, 1985
April 26, 1986
[also September 21, 1984, acquired]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Side a pp. 1-14
Family background in Europe--growing up and school in France--father's and grandfather's musical backgrounds (Brahms and Joachim)--early musical life in U.S.--Busch Quartet--Serkin and Busch in Vermont--listening to records and radio--studying piano--first attempts at composition--Eric Katz--awareness of modern music--hear Juilliard String Quartet play Schoenberg, Berg, Webern--Bartok Quartets, Viennese sonorities--piano lessons with Greta Zolton--Varèse, neighbor in Greenwich Village--Zolton sends him to see Cage--Cowell's New Music Editions
Side b pp. 14-28
First trip to meet Cage, and Cage's apartment on Monroe Street--private lessons with Cage--analyzing Webern's Op. 21--Morton Feldman--David Tudor--For Prepared Piano--Earle Brown--Cage's work moving from intuitive procedures toward chance--Pierre Boulez--Satie--Cage's Sonatas and Interludes, String Quartet, and Concerto for Prepared Piano--brings Cage a copy of I Ching--Cage's Sixteen Dances and Music of Changes--Tudor and Wolpe--Feldman's interest in indeterminacy--returning to Europe and meeting Boulez--Boulez's Polyphonie X and First Piano Sonata--decision on further music studies--Harvard years: literature, classics, and the Music Department--concerts in New York--Copland dozes at a Tudor recital--New York Times review
Side c pp. 28-41
Gatherings at his parents' home: Cage, Boulez, e. e. cummings, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts--consulting I Ching for sex of Watts's yet unborn child--Cunningham performances--Cage depressed--Noguchi, the sculptor--Cunningham's use of For Piano One, For Piano Two, and Suite in dances--Cunningham's Suite by Chance--1952, when "electronic music sort of starts"--Pierre Schaeffer--dance by chance--audiences disturbed by Cunningham's work--facing up to disturbing people with his own work--Trio I--character of his music at the time, ca. 1952--La Monte Young--Nine--music analogous to sounds in nature
TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)
Side d pp. 41-51
David Tudor as performer and composer--Dixieland Jazz concerts in high school--Feldman's music--piano music of Satie--Fulbright to Italy to study Italian literature--composer Richard Maxfield--1950s New York visual artists: Pollack, deKooning and others--conflict over subjectivity--Rauschenberg and Johns--meeting Frederic Rzewski and David Behrman--"schizophrenic" concerts at Harvard
Side e pp. 52-64
Pitch, and the number of pitches in a piece--Duo for Pianists II--indeterminacy--cuing--Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI--composing as creating "situations" for performers--Korean War and draft--pacifism--service in Germany, and trips to Darmstadt--Cage's Cartridge Music--Nam June Paik, and his extraordinary response to Cage's Water Work--Adorno at a Tudor class in Darmstadt--meeting Cornelius Cardew--balancing teaching and music at Harvard, early '60s--Stockhausen visits Harvard
Side f pp. 64-77
More on Duo for Pianists II--variable sequences of musical units--For 1, 2, or 3 People--first recording, Time Records, with Earle Brown--Duet II--Summer--working with musicians Trampler, Sawyer, and others--Septet--performers in a democratic situation--his wife, Holly, and popular music--Electric Spring--sabbatical year in England, 1968--Cardew and AMN--Cardew's The Tiger's Mind and Schooltime Composition--audience participation and notation
Side g pp. 77-85
Prose Collection--Stones, and Cardew's The Great Learning--playing seventeenth-century keyboard music--Frescobaldi, Satie, and discontinuity--Edges--Hellenic Center, Washington, D.C.--political awareness--Burdocks and its origins (Pygmy music)--Scratch Orchestra--"Flying" section of Burdocks
TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)
Side h pp. 85-98
Dartmouth, 1971--Jon Appleton--first time teaching music--political conversions: Cardew, Takahashi, Rzewski--Accompaniments--political problems in his compositions--Changing the System--workshop performance with Ornette Coleman and other jazz musicians--audience alienation--Exercises--Steve Reich comments--Lines--String Quartet Exercises out of Songs--political music by non-popular, non-folk musicians--Hanns Eisler
Side i pp. 98-111
Avant-garde and political music--String Bass Exercise out of 'Bandiera rossa'--Cage and politics--Cardew's extreme political turn--Cardew-Cage conflict and its effect on Wolff--writing the Exercises for a regular group of performers: Rzewski, Mumma, and others--songs with explicit political content--dance with Cunningham--limitation to the aesthetic "anything could go with anything"--Neely Bruce--Wobbly Music--texts in music--still attempting to incorporate indeterminacy--music is "the moment of performance"--I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman--new focus on pitch
Side j pp. 111-122
Pitch and rhythm--including the audience--Brecht's Lehrstück--Braverman Music--Harry Braverman--rhythm and the notion of time and speed--problems caused by political content of music--benefit concert with Grosskopf in Berlin--Holly Near--"Hay una mujer desaparacida"--interest in feminism and the peace movement--Piano Song (I Am a Dangerous Woman)
Side k ( (pp. 122-134)
Notation--improvisation--virtuoso music and politics--composing for virtuosos and non-virtuosos--music and teaching Classics--Marxism--Sophocles' Antigone--teaching twentieth-century music--historical context
Side l pp. 134-138
Influence of family on his work--Dixieland jazz--rock music--Variations on Hallelujah, I'm a Bum--popular tunes in serious music--Copland's Appalachian Spring--Elizabethan keyboard music
TABLE OF CONTENTS (cont.)
Side m pp. 138-152
[Separate interview acquired from Ev Grimes, recorded 9/21/84]
Music as a language and as communication--enjoyment by the audience--radio stations and records--music education--a social/political revolution--folk music--audiences in a concert situation--teaching and composing--his music teaching alertness and working with other people--teaching amateurs and professionals--Workshop in Experimental Music--public performance with students--proliferation of musics in our society--the responsibility for music--necessity for the composer--social and political responses
Christian Wolff
with Jack Vees
July 26, 1997
Royalton, Vermont
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cassette Side n: pp. 1-19
Impending retirement and teaching arrangement with Dartmouth--orchestral work for the Donaueschingen Arts Festival--Wolff’s works for orchestra--his penchant for chamber music--Peter Kotick [sp?] and the SCM orchestra--composing for community orchestra in Manchester--system of independent sub-groups in orchestra--references to spirituals and Billings in music providing accessibility--new orchestral work Spring--Frederic Rzewski’s new work--Spring originally intended as memorial for Cage--Spring’s second half of work for David Tudor--bringing his fundamental compositional processes to the orchestral medium (striving to distribute work evenly)--cueing system and autonomous sub-groups--thoughts on the future of the orchestra--Rzewski and the orchestra--issues of accessibility for performers and listeners--rethinking accessibility in 1970s due to political concerns--importance for accessibility of constant exposure of a work--possibility of crossing to the avant-garde jazz world--free jazz group “AMM”--public’s need for instant gratification and its deleterious effect on culture--interest in Early music (Josquin, Ockeghem)--New Age Music--openness of recent students toward different musics--danger of homogeneity in new music--more on early music--70-minute mass by Obrecht--recent interest in counterpoint.
Cassette Side pp. 19-31
Forty-voice piece by Tallis--counterpoint as means to end, controlling texture--early music composers writing without score--cross relations in later Rennaissance--Ockeghem impossible to analyze--connection between Early music and new music--mass as equivalent to 19th century symphony--church involvement in music in Rennaissance--Satie as continuing “early music,” anti-romantic line--Webern’s clarity of counterpoint and Isaac--analyzing Webern’s Symphonie Op. 21 with Cage--opinion on recent music--culture density and complexity of European New Music (Lachenmann, Nono, Kurtág) and American counterparts (Wuorinen, Carter)--American openness--Cardew and English new music--sweetness of English harmony--connection between visual arts and new music (Tom Phillips)--Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra and adult education--Howard Skempton--listening to new music at juries.
Cassette Side p: pp. 31-50
Wolff’s tape pieces: at the Tape Project in 1952 (Cage, Tudor, Brown, Ban, Feldman); at Harvard using indeterminate procedures; Snowdrop at Mills College--recent electronic piece with Christina Boughovski [sp?] for Lucinda Childs--on-and-off relationship with electronic music among many members of Wolff’s generation--losing interest in electronic music during early period--Cage’s Cartridge Music--Davidovsky’s Synchronisms--Stockhausen’s Kontakte--Robert Ashley’s electronic music studio at Mills College--creating a new piece at Mills with Maggi Payne and Bob Scheff--other colleagues in electronic music: Appleton, Mumma, Behrman, Maxfield--drifting away from electronic music at Dartmouth--evolving technology of electronic music vs. traditional methods: differences and similarities--Wolff’s systemic method of composition and it’s congeniality to computer music--love of beauty of sound--discovering sounds through sampling technology--percussionist Robyn Schulkovsky--her percussion setup at IRCAM--influence of Internet on musical communication--importance of social activity in music making and Internet--Wolff’s relation to percussion--work for Stuart Smith’s snare drum anthology “The Noble Snare”--indeterminacy in percussion music: leaving instrument choice to performer, using home-made instruments--writing percussion music for Christopher Shultis--New Music ensemble--Rosas for piano and percussion--new solo percussion work for Robyn Schulkovsky.
Cassette Side q: pp. 51-64
Recent increase in output--playing the piano (largely for private edification)--good fortune of working with extraordinary performers--difficulty of classifying Wolff--wide range of his interests--influence of working with intelligent and virtuoso performers on composition--necessity of a good performance for Wolff’s music--leftist political views and decrease in intensity of involvement--works with political overtones--Preludes, Black Song, Peace March--Ruth’s and feminist themes--Wolff’s politics as continual response to world’s events--why Wolff puts political beliefs into music, his suspicion of New Age aesthetic--minimal political effect of music--educational dimension of music--abortive attempts to create popular music with political overtones--recent projects--opera and music theater--interest in Greek drama--difficulty of setting texts--Euripides--Rzewski’s The Persians.