The close connection between the experimental music tradition and rock music had never been apparent to me until I attended concerts from the Barbican Centre’s marvellous American Pioneers series last year. During a two-month period last winter, we heard members from Pulp taking part in Terry Riley’s In C; a number of underground rock stars and trip hop DJs performing John Cage; John Zorn presenting a concert of chamber music; Glenn Branca a symphony for electric guitars; and the audiences themselves covered a broader spectrum than I had ever seen before in new music concerts in London. So it should come as no surprise, after all, that the rock label Mode Records has decided to make a complete edition dedicated to the American experimental composer, Christian Wolff, and that the present release is in fact Vol. 3. No surprise, that is, until you realize how deeply uncompromising this music is.
While Cage, Feldman and Young all eventually began to attract the attention of a broader listening public, Wolff has remained an obscure figure even in America. One reason for this could be that musical composition has had to share a place in the composer’s life with an academic career spent teaching classics at Harvard.
Maybe Wolff’s comparative neglect can also be explained by the nature of his music. Whereas his contemporaries Cage, Young and Feldman began to work on ever larger canvases, it is Christian Wolff whose work remains closest to the spirit of the early 1950s, a time when the term ‘minimalism’ still meant, in the composer’s own words, ‘setting drastic limits on one’s material’. And while Feldman in particular began to embrace harmony and instrumental timbre as expressive elements, the compositional impulse behind Wolff’s music has continued to be primarily linear.
As a result Wolff’s music is seriously lean. His compositional method may have originally been a reaction against serialism, yet his music sounds closer to Webern than to the lusher idiom of minimalists such as Riley, Reich or Glass. To appreciate this, you only have to listen to Tilbury 1 and Tilbury 2, which consist almost entirely of single pitches separated by silences. As these performers clearly recognize, the sparse nature of the material can also lend an extraordinarily intense expressivity to the music. When, for instance, we reach Tilbury 3 and the single notes are replaced by arpeggios being played at different speeds, the effect is as startling as if the players had suddenly started to breathe in helium.
I must confess I found the Tilbury pieces particularly difficult to evaluate because I am very familiar with the playing of their dedicatee, the great English experimental pianist and improviser John Tilbury. The music seems so imbued with his spirit that it is truly a mystery why no record company has chosen to record Tilbury playing Tilbury. The pianist here, Hildegard Kleeb, sounds plodding in comparison and her literal approach is compounded by a piano sound that has been recorded unbelievably close. From time to time, the trombone begins to sound threateningly near at hand, too.
None of the pieces on this recording is based on scores in the conventional sense, but consist of a set of instructions and ‘recipes’ for pitch material to be realized by any combination of instruments. For the reviewer this means a far greater range of interpretative approaches are possible than would usually be the case. But, then, I like to be put on my mettle. On considered reflection, I found all the Tilbury performances here fresh and engaging, and enjoyed the way the violinist and the trombonist allowed themselves the licence to ‘bend’ and ‘colour’ notes by emphasizing different partials above the fundamental tones stipulated by Wolff.
But what about Snowdrop ? Aesthetically, and in terms of compositional technique, there is surely very little to differentiate it from Tilbury 4. But there was something distinctly unmagical about the performance here. I could only concur with my neighbour afterwards who, in response to hearing Snowdrop through the wall, put his hands up later and said: ‘OK, Martyn, that’s it. We’re giving ourselves up!‘'