A Conversation with Charles Wuorinen

A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLES WUORINEN JAMES ROMIG N SEPTEMBER 1, 2017, A FEW MONTHS AFTER his 79th birthday, I visited Charles Wuorinen at his brownstone on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We spent the afternoon chatting about his impressions of—and his contributions to—the world of serious music, and later we were joined by Ashlee Mack and Howard Stokar for a dinner that lasted late into the night. The interview that follows is a distillation of our long and wide-ranging conversation. It was lightly edited by each of us shortly after transcription. * * * JR: For better or worse, you’ve been described and defined— throughout your career—as a twelve-tone composer. In a 1963 issue of Perspectives of New Music you stated that twelve-tone composition was “the familiar and hardly-conscious language of young composers.” You even went so far as to say that “pitch serialization is no longer an issue.” This, obviously, is not the case a half-century later; was it truly the case in 1963? O 12 Perspectives of New Music CW: I don’t know. It seemed that way to me, however limited my perspective may have been. The circles that I moved in, and the evidence that I had from outside—journalistically and in other ways— suggested that it was the case. It’s always bad—and I haven’t done it much since then—to say what is the norm, because of course it always turns out, at very best, not to be permanent. Beside that, the whole question of what is the prevailing mode of composition, or whatever, is no longer of any interest—because there isn’t one. I still think it’s extraordinary that for the last hundred years composers have not been able to come to an agreement on what constitutes compositional value. This interview today got me thinking about Perspectives of New Music, which used to be—when it started out in the early 60s—something that, for example, journalists of the New York Times, or people in the big institutions—the operas and orchestras—knew about and were slightly intimidated by. What that means is that there still was, at that period—now fifty years ago—a residual sense of respect for high culture. That is now completely gone, and so discussion of any of these things is, I think, pointless. JR: Do you think the reason that the twelve-tone concept is so misunderstood, and has in most circles fallen out of favor, is that it was often referred to as a style as opposed to a method? CW: I don’t know. That was the sort of the thing that music critics might say, but I think the main problem is that twelve-tone composition is simply too much work. People, especially at the end of the ’60s, with the sustained assault that occurred at that time on all forms of authority—whether legitimate or illegitimate, including intellectual and artistic authority—I think people got the idea that all of this stuff was just too much trouble and things could simply be done intuitively, which of course meant repeating the clichés of the moment that came into one’s head. I don’t think it amounts to much more than that, especially because even during the Schoenbergian period, and before, there were already so many different ways of approaching the composition of music using ordered interval sets that it would be misleading to call it a style. That’s a locution that comes from people who haven’t composed—people who think that there’s Style X or Style Y and that you decide to use one or the other: you plug stuff in and off you go. Those of us who write music know that this isn’t the way it works. JR: I wonder if twelve-tone music, especially the twelve-tone music that you’ve created, is not as different from so-called tonal music as A Conversation with Charles Wuorinen 13 some people might think. You and I have talked about this sort of thing before: can music truly be “atonal” if it employs equal-tempered tuning...