Christian Wolff
"There’s a kinship out there. It’s the folkies, the far-out jazz, and the New Music scene."
Originally published by Bomb (Spring 1997)
Christian Wolff was the youngest member of what is now known as the “New York School” of composers, which coalesced around John Cage in the 1950s. Initially Cage’s student, it was Wolff who gave Cage the fateful present of a copy of the I Ching — the Bollingen edition had just been published by his parents, Kurt and Helen Wolff, founders of Pantheon Books. Wolff’s work at the time pioneered the use of indeterminacy in composition, with open scores that require radical interpretation on the part of the performer. Wolff left New York in the early ’50s for studies in classics and comparative literature at Harvard, and in the 1960s went through a political radicalization that brought him into contact with a group of younger composers, including Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, who worked to incorporate political content into their music. His ties to the New York School remained strong, however, as evidenced by the following exchange between Morton Feldman and John Cage in a 1966 radio broadcast — Cage says, “One of the most useful things that could happen for the musical life now is a concert that would let people experience Christian Wolff’s music.” And Feldman replies, “Christian is becoming a symbol for me [of] the way… I really would have wanted to have been myself.” Nonetheless it remained far too difficult for the general public to experience Wolff’s music until recently, when the European label Hat Art and the American label Mode Records each launched a series of CDs featuring his music. Christian Wolff is professor of classics and music at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the following conversation took place.
Damon Krukowski: It seems to me that there’s a paradox in indeterminate music with relation to performance. On the one hand, the music doesn’t exist until it’s performed; but on the other, each performance is so different that you could say the music only exists in so far as it’s independent of performance.
Christian Wolff: Well, that’s a very Platonic view. I think you’re giving the performing instructions a privileged status which I might quarrel with. I’ve always thought of the score as a means to an end, and I would say that the music exists entirely in performance. You could say that the music that’s performed isn’t going to happen unless there’s a score, so the score’s certainly a necessary condition of the music, but it’s not a sufficient condition of the music. So in that sense I don’t really see a paradox. It’s an interesting issue because it’s one that links what one thinks of traditionally as “regular music,” say a Beethoven sonata, and something like a completely indeterminate score, of which my work and any number of John Cage’s works are an example. We’re still on the same spectrum as the Beethoven sonata because as you imply, the sonata will sound different every time somebody plays it and therefore what is the Beethoven sonata?