Charles Wuorinen's Bassoon Variations

CHARLES WUORINEN’S BASSOON VARIATIONS MATTHEW BARBER FESTSCHRIFT FOR CHARLES WUORINEN GIVES an author the opportunity to reread their dog-eared copy of Simple Composition. I can think of few works that left more of an impression on me as a very young composer; prior to this occasion I had not taken it up in about a decade, and I had forgotten just how much of it I had internalized. Milton Babbitt, who playfully called it Semi-Simple Composition in lessons, encouraged me to read it my freshman year at Juilliard. At the time I was also a semi-serious bassoonist, and learned of a curious piece by Wuorinen for bassoon, harp, and timpani: the Bassoon Variations (1971–72), his fifth of twelve sets of instrumental variations. The piece, while difficult, would not have been beyond my ability to play, but I had no hope of convincing a harpist or percussionist to pedal their way through it. I think the percussionist Samuel Solomon, who lived in my dormitory suite, must have introduced it to me knowing that I would appreciate some twelve-tone bassoon music; for his part, he found the timpani part to be just on the edge of playability. In his book How To Write For Percussion, Solomon has this to say: “Melodic capabilities on timpani are limited, but not as limited as one may think; complex A 24 Perspectives of New Music pedaling is difficult but very possible. Charles Wuorinen’s Bassoon Variations takes timpani to its melodic limit. The average timpani part of Béla Bartók’s . . . or Richard Strauss’s . . . are good examples of melodic capabilities within reason.”1 I take the qualifier “within reason” to suggest that while the Bassoon Variations’ timpani writing is possible, a composer should not attempt this kind of writing— without the help of a timpanist—because they will most likely lack the requisite skill. The harp part is also very difficult, sometimes requiring one or more pedal changes per attack, but it is ingeniously written for the instrument. In any case, I find the choice of two of the most operose pedaled instruments to accompany the key-noisy and acoustically maladroit bassoon particularly inspired, as it gives the bassoonist room to embrace the incidental sounds of the instrument rather than to try to hide them as one is usually trained to. The combination is occasionally humorous, but always compelling.2 I mention Simple Composition above because of how much these variations depart from what I had taken to be the definitive Wuorinenian practice outlined in those pages. Most significantly, there appears to be no large-scale ordering of time-intervals, and surface rhythms only hint at a time-point organization; instead, rhythm is organized in broad polyrhythms and rhythmic motives. The Bassoon Variations reward careful study, and if it is not one of Wuorinen’s major compositions, I think the instrumental variations, taken collectively, are. I hope, given my past bassoonery, that this essay might inspire other bassoonists to find ambitious partners to program the work; I can think of no better gift, however small, to a composer who has loomed so large in my compositional unconscious. At the end of this essay I discuss the pedagogical value of these Bassoon Variations, as they are an excellent example for teaching twelve-tone composition in the classroom. THE BASSOON VARIATIONS’ ROW The Variations’ row, as with many of Wuorinen’s rows, is strikingly scale-like (Example 1); its interval succession consists only of interval classes 1 and 2, with a lone 3 at the end. This allows the timpanist to play through the scalar melodic fragments more easily—sometimes on single drums, as in other advanced timpani literature—as they will usually be re-tuning by a minor third or less at a time; other instruments can play them disjunctly for more variety in contour. The first hexachord is the octatonic segment [023568], which contains two Charles Wuorinen’s Bassoon Variations 25 [036] trichords spaced at a whole-step apart. Its complement, [023469], is the one hexachord that combines the [0369] tetrachord with a whole-step dyad. The two hexachords appear in their ascending prime form order, while a...