Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 3

To return to the wider musical situation: there were for us at first three other important musical presences in New York. Virgil Thomson, because Cage had become friends with him and he, a distinctive, idiosyncratic composer and chief music critic for the Herald Tribune, had been, since Cage’s arrival in New York in 1943, supportive, with refreshingly open ears and mind. He and Cage then shared admiration for Gertrude Stein’s writing and the music of Eric Satie. I too was introduced to Satie’s music, by Cage, which, along with Webern, was to be one of my basic musical points of reference. It was through Thomson’s music and, especially, Satie’s that I first got a sense of how vernacular strains might be compatible with modernism. Then there was Henry Cowell, the energetic and eclectic experimentalist and tireless advocate of American (North and South) experimental composers, once Cage’s mentor on the West Coast, now in New York and teaching at the New School (where some of our work was first performed in 1950-51).

His courses were mostly about non-Western music, a subject almost invisible at the time. With his demonstrations of the variety of musical cultures, of ways of making music, and by raising questions of what might actually be thought of as music, Cowell provided a wide context for our own musical work. Then Edgar Varèse, greatly admired by all of us as the first, since the 1920s, to think musically and work with pure sonority, with sound simply as sound rather than as a kind of byproduct of the logics of pitch and harmony relationships. I should also mention the composer Stefan Wolpe, with whom both Feldman and Tudor had worked. Like Varèse he was a European emigré (as was I, just a little bit, arriving in New York from France, with my German parents, in 1941 at age 7). He had a lively, engaged mind that often and eloquently disagreed with what we were doing, but, unlike most of the music establishment at the time, he didn’t simply reject or ignore our work, but listened and argued with us. By the 50s he was writing a densely wrought, serially (twelve-tone) organized music. Earlier, in the 30s, in Berlin his music included left-wing political songs and incidental music for Berthold Brecht’s play “The Exception and the Rule.” Feldman told that once when he came to Wolpe for a composition lesson, Wolpe said to him that he should write music with the man-in-the- street in mind. Feldman looked out the window and saw Jackson Pollock walking by.