Christian Wolff: Early Piano Pieces

Muzyka Współczesna
premiera polska: 2008-10-02
seria wydawnicza: NOW SERIES
opakowanie: Triplefoldowe etui
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Editor's info:
For Prepared Piano (1951) was my first experiment with John Cage's invention (putting various objects into the piano strings to produce percussive or non-specifically pitched sounds) and a continuation of interest in percussion as such. I had been a friend of John's, after a brief time as a student, for about a year. But I'd known about the prepared piano earlier from scores in Henry Cowell's New Music Publications of Amores and Sonatas and Interludes, also about percussion scores - of Varese, William Russell and others, as well: as Amores music organized without reference to pitch as such. As a student I had been assigned by John the analysis of Webern's Symphony opus 21, whose transparent textures and, in the first movement, registrally fixed pitches (and so a quite restricted number of sounding pitches) made a great impression on me. I had then taken to writing with very small numbers of pitches (three or four for about six-minute pieces) whose combinations, single, vertical, overlapping, I heard as discrete sonorities. So, for instance, two melody instruments using three pitches (fixed, no register changes) made available 12 such sonorities; these I thought of as units of variable character with which I could make a kind of melodic line. I had also learned from John rhythmic structuring, the reflection of microstructural phrases' proportions in the proportions of the larger parts of a piece's overall structure.

For Prepared Piano consists of four pieces, each with a limited number of sounds or small sound complexes (seven, 11, 11 and nine), each sound also with its own unchanging dynamic indication, the sounds making up single elements of a linear (monophonically conceived) compositional process. This process takes place within a pre-set space, the same 25 measures in 4/4 taken as a square of 5 x 5 measures, for each piece. The sequence of composing, through, proceeds by various geometrical moves that are not only just sequential (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). For example, in the first piece the composing went from measure 1 to 6 to 11 to 16 to 21 to 22 to 17 to 12, and so forth, that is, down the first column of the 5 x 5 squares, then up the next. When performed, the music is read normally (measures 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on), which makes a result oblique to and, for me, a little bit surprising or indeterminate, with regard to the compositional process.

For Piano I (1952) is also restricted in its pitches (there are a total of nine) and uses a limited set of rhythmic complexes and of dynamics. The overall structure is accumulative, not pre-set, made out of a collection of 16 time lengths, each characterized by a density of sound (the number of sounds in a given duration, say, 10 within three beats, or none, i.e. silence, for seven beats). Which of these structural units is used, their sequence and sometimes overlapping is determined by chance procedure (derived from the I Ching, one of the very few times I've used this kind of chance).The reason was to allow situations balancing exact, given limits with free choice. More particularly it was to allow silence to appear in ways not directly intended and in this way free from willful rhetoric.

Except for a tape piece, For Piano I, For Piano II, Suite and For Piano with Preparations were all that I managed to write between 1952 and the first half of 1957, a time spent mostly away at college learning how to do classical philology. The pieces were all written because of David Tudor and his extraordinary virtuosity. There were hardly any other performance resources available at the time for us (that is, Cage, Feldman, Brown, and myself). Affecting the music too, directly and by reaction, was the European avant-garde, especially Boulez and Stockhausen, with its complex serial systematizing. When he saw my pieces with the restricted numbers of pitches, Boulez asked me, why so few? I next wrote For Piano II making a point of using all 88 notes of the piano keyboard. The music is made with pre-set pitch collections, having each various numbers of pitches in them (each pitch fixed in its octave as a particular sound), not using the serially transposable set of 12 and sometimes including serially forbidden octaves. The approach was, I thought, more pragmatic or musically ad hoc, open as regards to system rather than determinately global in the European way. I also shared with John Cage a feeling for the presence of silence or spaces where the composition required no sounds of its own, so as to be transparent with respect to its sonic environment, the world around it.

Suite (I) (1954) and For Piano with Preparations (1957) return, now within the context of the complexly textured music of that time, to the use of piano preparations. In the first part of Suite the preparations (there are 10 of them) are not used so that the following two parts become a timbral metamorphosis. For Piano with Preparations uses preparations (17 of them) and sounds made directly on the piano strings (plucking, scraping, snapping, etc.). Complexities of texture in these pieces result from structural schemes. Rhythmic structures are used geometrically, that is, with continuities following non-linear moves over a total structural space, not now only singly (as in For Prepared Piano) but in multiples, resulting in a kind of three-dimensional counterpoint of sound events where sometimes as many as four such events might overlap. These overlaps sometimes result in performing requirements that are impossible to realize in the required tempo, which led me to use at those points a tempo designation of zero, that is, simply any or free time, jumping, so to speak, outside the otherwise structure-determining time spacing. Intending to make in early 1957 a two-piano piece for Frederic Rzewski and myself in my then complexly written way, I realized there wouldn't be time to finish it for the concert we had scheduled. We devised instead a kind of double improvisation based on fixed time lengths, a rhythmic structure of widely varying length, within which we each independently could play freely using for each structural space a specified and limited source of material (pitches, dynamics, timbres, and individual sound durations).This got me started on a music at the core of which was the both free and specified playing of several performers who, under the playing circumstances, could not help but react to one another's playing. For Pianist (1959) was a somewhat paradoxical attempt to put David Tudor, as solo pianist, into situations where his playing might in part be determined by what he unpredictably heard, not now from another player but from his own playing. For instance, the score calls for a sound 'as soft as possible.' At the moment of playing the sound might be just that, or it might be a bit louder, or there might be no sound at all. Each of these results cues a separate path of material to be played next. The piece is made up of a number of paths or continuities, sometimes, according to cues that result unpredictably from the playing, bifurcating, overlapping and drawing the pianist into labyrinthian complications. The continuities are sequences of time lengths, fractions of a second to half a minute, within which numbers of sounds are given with varying degrees of specifications, for example, giving for a single sound only its amplitude or for several a choice of two or five pitches. The player makes final specifications, sometimes in advance, sometimes where there are longer time spaces at the moment of performance, and the specifications (choices) are almost always variable. The interchange between the score's fixed determinations and the player's use of its free spaces and loopholes, between the dependence on suddenly arising necessities and a freedom to choose in the course of playing underlies the music.
Christian Wolff, 2001

muzycy:
Steffen Schleiermacher: piano

utwory:
1. For Piano 1 (1952) 10:20

For Prepared Piano (1951)
2. I. 2:16
3. II. 1:41
4. III. 1:52
5. IV. 1:51

For Piano II (1953)
6. I. 5:16
7. II. 1:28
8. III. 7:07
9. IV. 3:10

For Piano With Preparations (1957)
10. I. 5:10
11. II. 2:15
12. III. 5:34
13. For Pianist (1959) 12:36

Suite (I) (1954)
14. I. 4:57
15. II. 2:48
16. III. 3:30

wydano: 2008-08
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