Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 13

In the following decades our music, variously, changed. Feldman’s and Brown’s rather less so, Cage's and mine more, especially by the end of the 60s, under the impact of, and our waking up to, like many others then, the social and political events around us: the civil rights movement, the re-emergence of the left, the Vietnam War. But that’s another story.

It was suggested to me that this talk about the music of the 50s might also look to the present. Well, what I've been saying inevitably comes from the present as I experience it. The experimental music of the 50s seems to be hanging on, though still at the margins – where there are other musics too, say, folk music, most jazz, early music (Western). Even mainstream classical music is being increasingly marginalized by the overwhelming force of commercial pop music. (Perhaps more positively one could say that the overall state of music is one of the widest possible heterogeneity, driven by ubiquitous recording technologies.) The earlier music of Cage and the later music of Feldman have become classics of a kind, though, depending somewhat on how and in what circumstances they are performed, there is still an experimental aura around them. Feldman’s pieces of extreme length – up to six uninterrupted hours, for all the beautiful music in them, constitute a severe challenge to any normal concert situation and to usual listening habits. Cage’s music of the 60s, if properly performed, still has real grit in it and remains tough to assimilate, as does his late work, though beautiful in its quiet sparseness; in its ascetic repose it runs strongly against current mainstreams. Earle Brown’s open form pieces, elaborated by the 60s, though their idiom became standard by the 80s, still have a lightness and freshness, partly because he initiated the idiom, and because the forms can really be audibly and variably open.

A feature of the 50s (and 60s) music that I haven’t mentioned so far is the considerable body of pieces that were accessible for performers who were not virtuosos (so, apart from the virtuosic music written for David Tudor). Cage and Feldman played the piano, as do I, all of us with very modest technique, and quite a lot of the music reflected our performing abilities as well as our wish to be able to play our own music. When we devised new notations, in addition, and performing requirements, these would be new for all performers, trained and untrained musicians alike. This aspect of the music has continued to be useful, in alternative performing situations and in teaching contexts, because of its openness and flexibility, its mix of requiring discipline and free inventiveness and resourcefulness, its focus on listening, in detail, to sounds, both one’s own and others’.

Much (though by no means all) of the music currently being made – certainly what gets most supported economically and promotionally – seems to me to be a music of accommodation and recuperation. It is sometimes made with great skill and flair, especially in the treatment of instrumental color. But one can hardly hear it as experimental. Experimental, nevertheless, is where I’ve thrown in my lot, believing it to be always necessary, if only as a reminder, however oblique, that the world around us might be different, might be better.