Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff

Lecture given October 4, 2003 as part of the Recent Pasts 20/21 music series, 
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

Christian Wolff, composer

"Experiments in Music around 1950 and some consequences and causes (social-political and musical)"

To start with I’m going to rehearse a little history, for the sake of context – but with a warning. This history – the music scene as I experienced it around 1950 and after, in which a new kind of music emerged – is hard to recount without mixing what I remember of the time then and what I later found out.  John Cage once reported asking a historian how he did history, to which the historian answered, to Cage’s pleased astonishment, that he made it up.

There’s a comparable phenomenon in one’s hearing of music at longer time intervals.  It may well sound different, not necessarily better understood, but really different.  When we first heard Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata in New York in 1952, we were over- whelmed – by its force and a complex intricacy we hadn’t known could exist (Ives might have come closest but he wasn’t so utterly abstract). When I heard the piece again some 25 years later, it sounded like another sonata in the great literature of piano sonatas, not so far, I thought, from Brahms.

What could be heard in New York (where I was lucky enough to be growing up) around 1950?  The Bartok string quartets, performed entire for the first time in the U.S.  (Bartok had come in exile to New York in 1940 and died in 1945). A program of Berg’s Lyric Suite, Schoenberg’s 4th string quartet and Webern’ s Five Pieces for String Quartet at Tanglewood in the summer of 1948.  All this thanks to the Julliard String Quartet. Stravinsky’s music for Balanchine’s Orpheus.  Of course a standard classical concert repertoire dominated completely, going no further back than Bach or Handel, nor beyond Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss (maybe a little Mahler).  There was outstanding Dixieland jazz.  Unfortunately I had little awareness of the emerging newer developments in jazz, Bebop and Charlie Parker.  The popular music which I did catch on the radio – it was the era of the hit parade – seemed mostly awful to me.  I did see a few musicals, Guys and Dolls and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.