Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 8

Cage, in the early 60s, was attacked by the communist avant-garde Italian composer Luigi Nono for his indifference to history. Cage struck me, of all the musicians I’ve met, to be the most detached from the traditions of Western classical music. I had the impression that, if he never heard another note of it, it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. This is not at all to say that he was unaware of that music. One of his first composition teachers, the pianist Richard Buhlig in Los Angeles, was devoted to Bach’s Art of the Fugue and Cage had paid attention to that. If he happened to hear some classical work on a concert he often had something perceptive to say about it. The one older composer to whom he remained devoted all his life was the outsider (who in some quarters is still not taken seriously) Eric Satie. Cage’s musical interests were entirely in the present, for other experimentalists. And, starting in the mid 60s, he began to express a strong sense of the social and political life around him, particularly in a series of writings called “Diary: How to Improve the World, you will only make things worse” (1965-82).

I’ve already mentioned Earle Brown’s background in engineering and mathematics. One reason for his coming to New York had been to take part in the magnetic tape project organized by Cage in 1952. He was then to work for Capitol records and Time-Mainstream, producing an important series of new music recordings, both U.S. and European. Except for his interest in jazz, I have no recollection that he had musical interests other than the current new music. I don’t feel as well informed as I’d like, but I assume that Brown’s year of private composition study introduced him to twelve-tone procedures; this was to be, with just a few exceptions, his constant way of working with pitch material.

As for myself, I grew up in an environment saturated with standard classical music, and because of my father (who had played cello and whose father had been a professor of music in Germany and a composer, in the circle around Brahms) I was often in the company of distinguished musicians devoted exclusively to that music. It was only on hearing, more or less by accident, Bartok, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and seeing the music of Varèse, Ives and other composers, including Cage before I had met him, in the New Music Editions put out by Henry Cowell, that I thought, yes, I could and wanted to do that too – not to imitate but to mark for myself a distinctive change from existing earlier music, classical and modern. My devotion to earlier music, though, continued too, and was to extend back to late medieval and Renaissance music as well. Unlike Cage, Feldman and Brown, I decided early on not to try to support myself through music. Strong interest in literature, especially poetry, starting with modernist poetry, somehow led me to study classics – Greek and Latin – and then to teach it. Musical activity would be continued as best I could. I was the only one of us who would go on to have a family (something I shared with two other younger composers, whom I met, one in 1956, the other in 1960, and with both of whom I became closely connected – Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew). (Rzewski and I have noticed how, once we had small children about, we developed structural schemes for our composing made up of collections of small units, such as could be concentrated on whenever, say, a quarter or half an hour might unexpectedly be free as a child suddenly fell asleep.)