Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 12

The articulation of such ideas around 1950 was Cage’s. I was also interested in Eastern thought, Feldman and Brown were not. What we did all share was the impulse to explore new ways of making music, which led us to devise a variety of new technical procedures. Cage worked out numerous different ways of using chance procedures, to distance a subjective self from the process of composition. Feldman introduced the idea of having performers’ choices of pitch open, not as a way of self-abnegation through indeterminacy, but as a notational procedure that shifted focus to sound entities, “weights”, as he called them. What mattered was less the specific pitch content of a sound than its register, which he specified as high, middle or low, and density (single sound, cluster, etc.), also specified. And, as always in Feldman, instrumental color was carefully chosen. I occasionally used chance procedures and, more often, ways of writing discontinuously, in order to narrow and so focus more sharply composing choices, and in order to avoid the rhetoric of willful choice. By 1957 I turned to locating indeterminacy at the point of performance. Chance was not used in the process of composing, but the performers were given choices to make from variously specified ranges of material (pitch, color, dynamics, location in a time space); and when there was more than one performer, they were required to play with specific reference to each other’s sounds, which sounds were arranged to appear in ways that were not predictable. This resulted in a music that was always variable with each performance. Brown was the first to make notational images that were entirely open to the performers’ interpretation – what was later to be called graphic music. He was looking for an immediacy of music-making comparable to jazz improvisation.

Putting on hold the traditional musical procedures, with their primary reference points in melodic line or thematic unit, metrical pulse, melody supported by harmonic aggregates and continuities, and the counterpointing of melodic lines, we devised other grammars and syntaxes. Unlike the serialist composers emerging at this time, we had a primary interest in a kind of found rather than constructed sound, and in sonority as such, the actual, present noise that any piece of music makes. We didn’t want to subordinate that to a closed compositional system, or to use a compositional system that could not entirely vanish into the final sound. We were also open, following on Cage’s use of percussion, to the use of almost any kind of sound or use of an instrument, not just those already certified as musical. We shared a feeling of space in the music, of sound projected on to a space, which often involved extensive use of silence and a feeling of suspended time. The music had no directional impulse and no narrative logic or continuity, and certainly no dramatic trajectories with buildups and climaxes; the latter might appear, but they were unmotivated. The music, one could say, operated in a field, or made up a sonic landscape (Cage had used the title “Imaginary Landscape” for some of his early percussion pieces, after the titles of sculptures by David Smith).

It might appear that this music did away with subjectivity; Cage seemed to insist on that. But one could also say that what we were rejecting was the rhetoric of subjectivity that has come down from 19th century romanticism (a rejection shared, for instance, with Satie and Stravinsky). In his “Lecture on Nothing” (ca. 1949-50) Cage said “I have nothing to say/ and I am saying it/ and that is/ poetry/ as I need it.” That surely indicates an individual expression of self too. For all the associations among us, we were all four, of course, inevitably, quite different, and enjoyed and freely exercised our differences; we were hardly a “school.”