‘Dependency and ‘Freedom’ – watchwords central to music-making of the kind that Christian Wolff envisages in For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964). This is music which places huge demands on a performer’s mental agility and emotional self-control, the detailed instructions determining playing attitude rather than performance practice. From among the 10 sections – scored ‘for any instruments’ – ‘II’ combines voice and the aural dismantling of a hurdy-gurdy, with ‘VI’ a percussion solo of Xenakis-like force, and ‘VII’ a voice and body duo of inward communing. The last three sections feature violin and percussion, setting up dialogues whose intensity is palpably conveyed in this realisation by Malcolm Goldstein and Matthias Kaul. `

Each group of these pieces is proceeded by a self-contained work which illumines other aspects of Wolff’s craft. ‘Exercise 27’ (1988) is the second of his Peace Marches, in which the militaristic associations of the snare drum are not denied but diffused across multiple rhythmic patterns. It’s an extreme example of Wolff’s impulse to remove a sound-source from any recognisable context, whereas Bread and Roses (1976) makes elaborate but recognisable melodic play with a mill-workers’ song in a manner akin to that of Frederic Rzewski, and Edges (1968), with its very Cage-ian desig-nation as to ‘any number’ of players and instruments, draws on recognisable facets of the experimental music tradition – at least in such a strikingly imaginative reading.

While this may be music in which performing and listening are one and the same, the communicative zeal of the performers makes listening only nominally ‘passive’. Peter Niklas Wilson’s booklet note and an interview with the composer help to bring Wolff’s singular composing ethos into focus.