Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 2

In January of 1950 Dmitri Mitropoulos conducted the first U.S. performance of Webern’s Symphonie, opus 21. John Cage and Morton Feldman attended. Both, overwhelmed, left the concert immediately after, found and introduced one another in the lobby of Carnegie Hall, and became close friends, passing their music and thoughts back and forth, intensively for about the next four or five years. (After that Cage would move out of the city, to Stonypoint, NY and by the end of the 60s Feldman was in Buffalo, where he lived and was professor at SUNY until his death in 1987.) A few months later, in 1950, my piano teacher, Grete Sultan, sent me to John Cage. I’d realized my lack of talent for serious piano playing and had started to compose on my own, and, she rightly observed, I could use some help. Cage generously took me on immediately. He set me exercises to teach about structure – his rhythmic structure scheme, a practical and elegant way of organizing a whole piece such that all the time spaces, both micro and macro, were in proportional relationships. He had me analyze the first movement of the Webern Symphonie. We did – attempted – counterpoint exercises (16th century, Palestrina style). And he had me just get on with my own composition. Which I did, while the formal lessons stopped after about five or six weeks. He said the point of the exercises and counterpoint was to learn how discipline is acquired and works. Then you were on your own. We continued to see one another, sometimes with Feldman, regularly. In 1952 Earle Brown came to New York with his wife Carolyn, she to dance with Merce Cunningham, he drawn by shared musical interests with Cage and having heard the New York based pianist David Tudor play Cage, Feldman, Boulez and my work. The term New York School, used for the artists, then poets of around this time, got attached to us – Cage, Feldman, Brown, myself – rather later, I think. It should include the crucial figure of David Tudor and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, already associated with Cage for some time and now embracing, and using for his dances, the music of the rest of us as well. (For myself, I’ve found in retrospect, that Cunningham’s dances, which I’ve been seeing since 1950, have had a strong effect, both inspirational and supportive or confirming; especially with respect to the dancers’ performing – the abstract patterning of movement realized by different, individual bodies (and souls, personalities) – and with regard to the structural rhythms of the choreography – its irregular, fluid, matter-of-fact and elegant ways of continuity, overlap and simultaneity.)

As for David Tudor, it is hard to imagine our musical scene without him. He was devoted to new work. He enjoyed especially difficult and intricate tasks. He had uncanny and new skills as a performer (the ability, for example, to differentiate the most extreme dynamic changes, at the highest speeds and across the whole range of the piano keyboard); he also had an exceptionally acute ear. His playing was sharp and precise, electric. He liked getting to the heart of what seemed intractably enigmatic, and he himself liked to be enigmatic, though in a quiet and matter-of-fact way. Much of the music we wrote at that time was, because of him, for piano. When we started making music with indeterminate notations, that is, requiring the performer to make choices and realizations not, in various ways, specified, it was his musicianship and ear and imagination for sound that was our point of reference. By the mid 60s he had stopped playing the piano and devoted himself to live electronics, with his own invented circuitry, becoming a composer-performer.