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  • Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff
  • Rebecca Y. Kim
Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff. Edited by Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6680-6. Hardcover. Pp. xxiii, 259. $114.95.

The nine essays in this collection address a longstanding scholarly lacuna in the history of American experimental music. Christian Wolff, now the last living representative of the "New York School," quickly distinguished himself from his colleagues during the 1950s through methods more stringent and far-reaching in their provocation of real-time performer decision making, at times bridging musical action and political action under the cause of performer freedom. Only recently though has scholarship begun to shift its dominant focus away from his historical associations with John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown and address the totality of Wolff's contributions.

Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff analyzes the now seventy-eight-year-old composer's distinct identity within and beyond the legacy of his former cohort by examining an extensive oeuvre that goes well beyond the oft-cited works of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the book's detailed works list shows that of the over 200 works Wolff composed after meeting Cage as a high school composition student in 1950, approximately one-quarter have been written in just over the last decade. Editors Stephen Chase and Philip Thomas open this volume by noting: "there are numerous published interviews and writings by the composer, but almost no extended discussion on the part of others" (xxi). While there is some truth [End Page 120] in this statement, the bibliography also lists at least a dozen noteworthy articles and essays that constitute a preliminary historiography of Wolff scholarship.

Following a foreword by composer Michael Parsons, the book unfolds in four parts: reception and history, music, politics, and performance. Part 1 features essays by musicologists Michael Hicks and Amy Beal.1 In "'Our Webern': Cage and Feldman's Devotion to Christian Wolff," Hicks skillfully describes how prior to Earle Brown's arrival in New York in 1952, Cage and Feldman had compared themselves to their Second Viennese School counterparts Schoenberg and Berg, designating Wolff as their Webern. The mutual influences between the three were significant enough for Feldman to refer to Wolff as his "artistic conscience" and Cage's "North Star." Hicks consequently urges, "we should view Christian Wolff's ideas in the light rather than the shadow of his better-known schoolmates" (21). Specifically, Hicks contends that Wolff's abandonment of sound continuity convinced Cage to let sounds be themselves in the early 1950s, and he goes on to claim a near causality between Wolff's cueing techniques and Cage's shift from time-bound compositions to open processes by the end of the decade. Similarly, Feldman was "haunted" by Wolff's early pieces using limited pitch collections, though Hicks does not discuss why Feldman waited until the 1980s to address this in Three Voices (1982) and For Christian Wolff (1986). Beal's essay consists of transcribed and annotated excerpts from Wolff's 1972 and 1974 Darmstadt seminars and selections from her 1997 interview with the composer. This chapter illuminates the criticism of seminar participants in response to Wolff's emergent interest in political texts and contextualizes the broader reception of Wolff and his American colleagues in Europe.

Part 2 includes essays on the solo piano and large ensemble repertories. Philip Thomas surveys Wolff's mostly determinate solo piano repertory from 1951 to 2009. A pianist himself, Thomas comments on nearly all twenty-one works in the repertory, many of which Wolff has increasingly performed since the 1990s, ultimately characterizing Wolff's piano language as economical, texturally transparent, sometimes "awkward," and balanced control and freedom.2 James Saunders details Wolff's music for orchestra, from the early pieces to the newer works that are based on his creative relationship with Petr Kotík's S.E.M. Ensemble and Ostrava Days Festival since 2001. Like Thomas, Saunders is mostly descriptive, but he does address the aural and social challenges of cues and free group interactions in an orchestral context, for instance noting Wolff's...

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