Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - Christian Wolff, Page 9

It’s time to talk about the notion of experiment. Its causes are hard to pinpoint. The easiest to grasp may be to do with historical context. Culturally, (again, around 1950) a feeling of musical vacuum as far as vitally new work was concerned; politically and socially, a reaction of detachment from the massive tensions starting to be generated by re-emerging global conflict that was hard-line ideological and backed on both sides by the possibilities of nuclear destruction. This might seem unusual. Avant-garde art movements and their experiments are ordinarily associated with political involvement: the Russian avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century in tandem with the Bolshevik revolution; the communist connections of Dada and the surrealists in the 20s; and, at the other end of the political spectrum, the fascist associations of some of the Italian futurists. And there were more immediate contingencies: of place (New York) and for the musicians the visual art scene there; the encounters of individuals around the magnetic figure of John Cage, and Cage’s organizational energy; the life histories of individuals – Cage’s time of crisis, the youth of the rest of us, Feldman and Brown just at the start of their careers (David Tudor too), myself in late adolescence, a time to be making one’s own way, wanting to try new things.

As for the consequences of experiments in music around 1950, I’d like to consider the notion of experimental itself. Robert Ashley, one of the great experimentalists appearing not long after in the later 50s, along with Gordon Mumma, David Behrman and Alvin Lucier, also Toshi Ichiyanagi and LaMonte Young (coming to New York from Japan and Berkeley, California) and Pauline Oliveros (who at that time stayed in California) – Robert Ashley once remarked that the term “experimental music” gave him the creeps. (I have the impression too that Feldman and Brown avoided the term as well.) I think I know what he means: it got overused, it’s a too easy pigeon-hole, and it easily becomes dismissive. But I’ll stick to it. Cage used it, and reappropriated it in a 1955 article called “Experimental Music: Doctrine”, where “doctrine” referred to a section of the article that was in dialogue form in the manner of the Chinese Buddhist (Zen) classic “Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind”, a favorite text of his.

For a long time I’ve thought of myself as a composer of experimental music, though my music has undergone a number of changes. Throughout, the main thing has been a feeling that, whatever I did, it should have a distinctive identity. This was not a pre-set program, but a way of working. For instance, here is an instrumentation (a given ensemble wanted a piece, say) a given resource of possible sounds, and a possible space of time – the scale or dimensions of what might happen, and then there are, initially, a particular group of individual performers and performing situation. What can I do that will allow the possibility of things happening that are at once clear, have an unencumbered presence, and still have some mystery and surprise in them? And what can I do to engage and perhaps surprise the performers? How can I make situations in which their attention is engaged in such a way that their musicality is best activated, that their self- assertiveness disappears into the music; where intelligence and alertness are at work together with self-forgetfulness.