Christian Wolff

Introduction

1 Introduction “I have noticed something . . . about Christian Wolff’s music. All you can do is suddenly listen in the same way that, when you catch cold, all you can do is suddenly sneeze.” —John Cage, Silence of the many analogies made to music in our time, that may seem one of the oddest—a respiratory one, made not with contempt but admiration. John Cage is not always easy to read, and his meaning here has the ring of a Zen koan. But admirers of Wolff’s music may find in Cage’s epigraph, as Marianne Moore said of poetry, a place for the genuine. One often responds instinctively to Wolff’s music, its impulsiveness, its teasing gestures, its prickly resistance of logic. It is a music often more halting than flowing. But many of us are drawn to it involuntarily, inexplicably. That may suggest why, in an academic musical culture obsessed with reasons and explanations, theory and analysis, Wolff’s music has attracted less than its share of critical attention.1 Analysis craves methods and systems to which works may be subjected. Musicology craves consistency in a composers’ work, at least enough to bundle pieces into “periods” or “phases.”And teaching, of course, craves the things that are most easily taught. All of these cravings find little satisfaction in Wolff’s music. If Wolff has a method of composing it is to overturn methods from piece to piece. The constancy is change, often radical change even in the vocabulary of a single work.That is bound to work against the stability on which analysis must build. 2 c h r i s t i a n w o l f f | Introduction The restlessness of his imagination prevents him from settling into a Wolff “style,” or clearly recognizable idiom—except that he favors epigrammatic utterances , even blunt statements, though often as gentle as spare. They unfold, he says, in “a rhythm that has to do with being surprised.”2 If most musical rhythm is tied to dance—pulse divided and multiplied—Wolff’s grows out of a respect for the delicate, barely predictable rhythms of the central nervous system. His rhythms seem more neural than cardiological, not rooted in pulse but impulse. Performers and listeners must consent to respond to at least some of his music in an almost autonomic way. It is not to be savored by mental comparisons with music of the classical canon. It relies on new ways of behaving musically. But within small gestures one often finds floridity: “grace notes and fermatas, you might say, are the two models for [my] kind of rhythm.”3 Sometimes it seems as though Wolff’s music were in a latter-day French style—highly ornamented, but now with the main ideas, the ones ostensibly being ornamented, omitted. Ideally for Wolff, these ornaments will combine in a texture of collective spontaneity, “not so much an expression of the player (or composer) as a way of connecting, making a community . . . sometimes involving internally those fluid and precise, and transparent, lines or projections of connection.”4 Wolff has explained that he writes according to a fivefold “series of ideas.” The first, as we have suggested, is change. Wolff wants to make new things, even “strange”things.Next is teaching. One must convey new ideas to listeners; the ideas may be abstract or quite concrete—even starkly political, as we will see. Third is unpredictability. To embrace the world is always to embrace a certain randomness. And the spontaneity one feels in randomness should inform one’s music. Fourth is freedom. This seems intrinsic to his other purposes, of course. Yet Wolff must assert its fundamental value as an idea in musical behavior. The fifth idea is noise. One should explore (and ultimately challenge) that category of sound.What may seem disordered may simply manifest, when close attention is paid, a more complex form of order. Noticeably absent from Wolff’s series of ideas are “beauty” or “craft.”Though the latter may inform a work’s construction and the former derive from it, Wolff subjugates them both to the larger ideas that propel his music. Or, put differently, essential beauty and craft appear in the ideas themselves. Wolff spent decades as a professor of classics at Harvard and Dartmouth. The very word “classics,” of course, implies a standard of taste that can be verified by traditions, even hierarchies of cultural power. That Wolff should pursue “classics” for a career, then, might seem...