|
|
viewing 1 To 15 of 15 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CD
|
|
ANGELICA 055CD
|
In May 2022, at the age of 88, Christian Wolff performed once again at AngelicA, nine years after the monographic concerts the festival had dedicated to him in 2013, which was documented on the CD album Angelica Music, (ANGELICA 030CD, 2020). Among the greatest and most singular living composers, for the opening of the thirty-second edition of the festival he presented a world-exclusive program, alongside two of his long-time collaborators, the percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky and the drummer Joey Baron, and an Angelica orchestrA of seven electric guitars, made up for the occasion around students and teachers of the Conservatory "G.B. Martini" of Bologna led by Walter Zanetti. Spanning over 58 years of the composer's production, the program offered on May 7th revolved around Sveglia, a new composition for seven electric guitars commissioned as a world premiere by the festival. Renowned up to that point as a pianist, it was apparently Wolff's interest for several rock bands of the time who pushed him to buy an electric guitar in the mid-'60s, and the first of his compositions to incorporate this instrument were the three Electric Spring of 1966-67. In the 2000s he also composed three pieces for solo guitar (two of which were recorded by Sergio Sorrentino, guest of Angelica orchestrA at this time), but he had never composed for an ensemble of guitars only, as on this occasion. Largely completely notated, but with a series of compositional features left open (i.e. no specification of tempi, dynamics and spacing of musical elements), Sveglia also includes short quotations from other compositions (Bach's Brandenburg Concertos n. 3 and 6, and a motet by Gombert), "that need not necessarily be noticed." The other piece composed specifically for the concert in Bologna (and for one held later in New York, at the space for experimental music from which it took its title) is Roulette, performed by Wolff with Schulkowsky and Baron.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
BT 099CD
|
Black Truffle announce its second release from New York violin duo String Noise (Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris), following on from their self-titled double-disc collection of compositions by Alvin Lucier (BT 061CD, 2020). Here, they present A Complete Anthology of Solo and Duo Violin Pieces by legendary American experimental composer Christian Wolff. The youngest and in some ways most radical of the composers of the New York School (alongside Brown, Cage, and Feldman), Wolff has ceaselessly rethought his approach throughout the seven decades of his composing career, moving from early experiments in radical reduction through indeterminacy, improvisation, and leftist political engagement to reach the limpid lyrical fragments of his most recent music. Beautifully recorded across two days by Ryan Streber with Wolff in attendance, String Duo's complete anthology of Wolff's work for violin solo and duo covers the entirety of the composer's career, from his earliest published work to a major new work written for this recording. Written by the teenaged Wolff in 1950 during his brief period studying with Cage, "Duo for Violins" is a beautifully austere experiment in extreme reduction, using only three chromatically adjacent pitches without octave transpositions. This recording also presents premiere recordings of two other short duo pieces from the same year, recently rediscovered by Wolff in his papers, which use similarly reduced materials in a livelier, more dynamic manner. Moving forward to the 1970s, the solo pieces "Bread and Roses" and "The Death of Mother Jones" belong to the period in which Wolff was drawing on political music, in this case two early 20th century songs that celebrate women labor activists. In both, arrangements of the traditional melodies are followed by a series of technically demanding free variations in a modernist style. The lyricism of these pieces is carried into the more fragmented, elusive works of the '90s onward. In the beautiful "Six Melodies Variation" (1993), written in tribute to Cage, fragments of Cage's "Six Melodies" dissolve into anthemic snatches of the music of 18th century American composer William Billings. The sixteen "Small Duos for Violinists" (2021) explore the radically disjunctive style of recent major Wolff works such as "Long Piano (Peace March 11)", where short "patches" varying in style, density, and notation system are places next to each other without clear concern for conventional compositional principles. Includes extensive liner notes and wonderful reproductions of a series of Wolff's delicate abstract works in pencil, crayon, and water color.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
NW 80830CD
|
"Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968-71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers -- timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials -- were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musicians themselves. Charles Ives began to develop a different conception with (among other works) his String Quartet No. 2 (1913). It portrays four individuals who come together to have a discussion that turns into an argument (presumably over politics) and then its transcendental resolution in the mountains. With Ives and then others from the American Experimental Tradition (including John Cage), chamber music starts to become a place where differences are unleashed. Given his exploration of the ontology of people making music together, the string quartet, laden as it is with the tradition of unity, might not at first seem to be an obvious fit to Wolff's sensibilities. But his quartet music stems as much from Ives and Cage as from the European art music tradition. The four characters of Ives become four people playing music. In one piece he simply calls them '2 violinists, violist and cellist.' Sometimes they are asked to coordinate like a traditional quartet. But at other times (often in the same piece), they are pushed to the point of dissolution. Here we find a music that allows for the spontaneous expression of four musicians who are bound together by something more than the rule of the bar line. These are all world-premiere recordings."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
ANGELICA 030CD
|
2015 release. The last surviving member of the historical New York School, performing his own compositions on piano and melodica with percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, as well as performances of other Christian Wolff compositions by the British ensemble, Apartment House. Covering the period 1950-2013, these compositions trace the evolution of a composer through and after a period of revolutionary musical re-thinking.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
SR 480CD
|
These two discs reveal Christian Wolff as a composer fully exploring, in different ways, the continuum between music which is highly fragmented, embracing extended silences (composed or indeterminate), to that which is more progressive and seemingly driven, albeit taking in disarming and unconventional routes. As a body of repertoire, these works are remarkable for their freshness of musical thought and energy (John Cage considered Wolff to be the most "musical" of the experimental composers). Performer Philip Thomas (b.1972, North Devon) specializes in performing experimental notated and improvised music as a soloist and with leading experimental music group Apartment House. He is currently Professor of performance at the University of Huddersfield, co-director of Cerenem, and co-editor of Changing the System: the music of Christian Wolff (2010). Digipack; includes 16-page booklet.
Philip Thomas on the release: "In all my performances of Wolff's music, I aim for interpretations that both interest and surprise me, allowing the notations to lead me to new ways of playing and thinking about music, whilst at the same time trying to lead the notations toward the unexpected."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
NW 80796CD
|
"This recording is the first ever devoted to the orchestral music of Christian Wolff (b. 1934) and thus documents a little-known aspect of his wide-ranging work. John, David (1998) introduces in its second part a prominent role for solo percussionist, playing a wide range of pitched and non-pitched instruments, including marimba, glockenspiel, a variety of drums, wood and metal instruments and other sources, the exact choice left to the performer. Rhapsody (2009), in contrast, uses instruments of the traditional Western orchestra without percussion, divided into three separate ensembles and reordered into unusual combinations and relationships, both within and between the groups. In his essay On Charles Ives (1990) Wolff remarks that in the mid-1970s he had a sudden sense of his own work as 'an odd sort of mix of Ives and Satie.' He refers to Ives's 'readiness to draw upon whatever sources are useful'; the tendency to include altered versions of popular music and hymn tunes is a feature they have in common. The unlikely conjunction of Ives and Satie may provide a clue to such disparities as are evident in these orchestral pieces: Sections reminiscent of the density and complexity of Ives, of the simplicity and directness of Satie, and of the transparency of Webern, are juxtaposed without any need to mediate or explain how they are connected. The music is continually surprising, exhilarating, and challenging; it resists easy categorisation. Sometimes engagingly direct and transparent, at other times bewilderingly complex and profuse, it invites listeners to be alert to new kinds of musical experience, to suspend judgement based on more familiar models. There is a sense of immediacy that deliberately avoids any suggestion of a general plan or underlying theoretical principle; the controlling idea of a 'grand narrative' such as is associated with composers of the European avant-garde is explicitly rejected in favour of a variety of ad hoc procedures."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
GODREC 041LP
|
Christian Wolff on Berlin Exercises: "'Exercise' indicates relatively shorter pieces in which the process of work, of practicing and of trying things out within specified limits, in short a kind of discipline in process, are being attempted. I regard them as both exercises in composing and for performers, especially as the performers function as members of an ensemble." Performed by Ensemble Zwischentöne: Christian Wolff (piano, melodica); Hans-Ulrich Altenkirch (vibraphone); Ellen Fricke (voice); Robin Hayward (tuba); Rainer Killius (contrabass recorder); Aleksander Kolkowski (violin); Kurt König (percussion); Annette Krebs (guitar); Inge Morgenroth (tenor saxophone); Natalia Pschenitschnikowa (flutes); Helles Weber (accordion); Peter Ablinger (artistic director). Includes 28-page booklet with liner notes from Bill Dietz and fax exchange between Christian Wolff and Peter Ablinger, as well as some score examples and sketches.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
3CD
|
|
SR 389CD
|
3CD set housed in a digipak. As a body of repertoire, these works are remarkable for their freshness of musical thought and energy (John Cage considered Wolff to be the most "musical" of the experimental composers). Wolff uniquely blends experimental concerns with classical tendencies. In these pieces not only are older composers referenced (Ives, Schumann) but Wolff's love of clarity of line and transparency of texture betrays an empathy with Webern, Haydn and Bach. This aesthetic is, however, combined with a tendency toward discontinuity and fragmentation, isolated sounds and silence, and, perhaps most significantly, indeterminacy of notation. Notational techniques which appear in some or all of the works featured here include: "tablature" notations which prescribe which fingers to play but not which notes; notes without specified duration; notes which may be played in any clef and octave; the omission of any indications as to tempo, dynamics and articulation; and Wolff's characteristic "wedge," which means a pause or breath of any length. Christian Wolff was born in Nice, France, to the German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S. in 1941, they helped to found Pantheon Books with other European intellectuals who had fled Europe during the rise of fascism. The Wolffs published a series of notable English translations of European literature, mostly, as well as an edition of the I Ching that came to greatly impress John Cage after Wolff had given him a copy. Wolff became an American citizen in 1946. When he was 16, his piano teacher Grete Sultan sent him for lessons in composition to the new music composer John Cage. Wolff soon became a close associate of Cage and his artistic circle, which included the fellow composers Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, the pianist David Tudor, and the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage relates several anecdotes about Wolff in his one-minute "Indeterminacy" pieces. Philip Thomas (b. 1972, North Devon) specializes in performing new and experimental music, including both notated and improvised music. He places much emphasis on each concert being a unique event, designing imaginative programs that provoke and suggest connections. He is particularly drawn to the experimental music of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff, and composers who broadly work within a post-Cageian aesthetic. In recent years he has been particularly associated with the music of Christian Wolff, giving the world premiere of his "Small Preludes" in 2009, the UK premiere of "Long Piano (Peace March 11)," having co-edited and contributed to the first major study of Wolff's music, Changing the System: The Music of Christian Wolff, published by Ashgate Publications in 2010.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
NEOS 10723CD
|
Performed by: Sabine Liebner (piano). Features: "Tilbury 1" (1969); "Keyboard Miscellany" (1988); Tilbury 2 (1969); "A Piano Piece" (2006); "Tilbury 3" (1969); "Snowdrop" (1970). "Sabine Liebner is active primarily as a performer of New Music. She has made numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In 1998 and 2007, she received the Music Promotion Award of the City of Munich, in 2005 a music scholarship granted by the City of Munich, and in 2007 she was named a recommended pianist by the Goethe-Institut. In recent years, Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the 20th century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage and Morton Feldman."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
NW 80734CD
|
"Since 1987 I have been making duos for percussion with another instrument. The first was a memorial piece for Morton Feldman, For Morty, in 1987, with piano. Then in 1990 Rosas, commissioned for the pianist Marianne Schroeder and the percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky. A few years later I met Robyn and began a working association with her that has now been ongoing for twenty years. Apart from a series of solo pieces, there have been duos, with viola (for Robyn and Kim Kashkashian), Violist and Percussionist (1996); with trumpet (for Reinhold Friedrich), Pulse (1998); with cello (Rohan de Saram), One Coat of Paint (2004) -- the title of a John Ashbery poem; and most recently (2012) For a Medley (a duo of percussionists, with Joey Baron). There is also a shorter duo with melodica, written for myself to play with her, Duo 7 (2007). The thread is percussion and the remarkable and distinctive playing and musicality of Schulkowsky, but also the other musicians, all of whom have extensive associations with her and are of course of special distinction themselves. The whole set, which now extends over 25 years, reflects my compositional trajectory over that time, and provides a series of exceptional, indeed, for me, ideal performances." Performed by Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion; with Frederic Rzewski, piano; Kim Kashkashian, viola; Joey Baron, percussion; Reinhold Friedrich, trumpet; Rohan de Saram, cello; Christian Wolff, melodic.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
RZ 1023/24CD
|
"Finally I realized that the kind of sound made in an indeterminate situation includes what could result in no other way; for example, the sound of a player making up his mind, or having to change it. In fact, the indeterminate notation I've used is, as far as I know, the only possible one for the kind of sound I should like. And don't forget, we also like to be surprised ...and the rhythm produced by that situation is like no other rhythm." --Christian Wolff; Most of the pieces collected for this portrait of Christian Wolff document the composer's early activity and were mainly recorded around the time of their composition. Each recording exemplifies the sound gestures from their time. Housed in a digisleeve including a booklet in German and English.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
NW 80699CD
|
"Doleful melodies and melancholy wistfulness are the characteristics of Dakota Suite's singer/songwriter Chris Hooson. They also constituted the main inspiration for the most recent album, The End Of Trying, which was released on Karaoke Kalk in early 2009. The melodic and, in the case of the solo piano music, timbral materials from which Christian Wolff's (b. 1934) music is made are rarely unusual; these are ordinary, everyday things. However, Wolff's rhythmic invention is of great range and variety: complex polyrhythms, speech-like-rhythms, the music flowing at a freely fluctuating rate or proceeding in a plain, straightforward manner, silences. This mix of unusual and ordinary results in a music unlike any other. And, in a piece of such length as Long Piano, the ongoing appearance and accumulation of a great number and variety of short passages results in the constant renewing and refreshing of the listener's perception. This is the world-premiere recording of the composer's largest solo keyboard work to date."
"[Long Piano] seems to me like a kind of geological agglomeration. My hope is that it forms a possible landscape on one extended canvas. At first I just started writing and kept going. My tendency is to work in smaller patches. After the piece was finished I saw Jennifer Bartlett's wonderfully engaging and cheerful work Rhapsody, first shown in 1976. It's a 154-foot sequence of an arrangement of 988 one-foot-square silk-screened and painted enamel plates running around at least three walls of a gallery space. An extreme instance of what I've got in mind. I had decided not to use the commonest procedure for long keyboard pieces, variations (e.g., Frescobaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Rzewski), but sometimes there are series of patches that use tunes (for instance, the very old standby 'L'homme armé' and the round 'Dona nobis pacem') for material. The piece has 94 numbered patches, a few of which are blank (silence) (in Bartlett's piece there are the occasional blank squares). The 57th to 67th patches refer to eleven larger sections of a square-root rhythmic structure, each of which has eleven subdivisions whose time proportions are the same as those of the larger sections. The piece also incorporates partial versions (more or less 'parodies' in the old music sense) of Schumann (the Toccata and one of the Kinderszenen) and Ives's Three-Page Sonata." -- Christian Wolff
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
NW 80658CD
|
This marvelous recording of these elusive works features composer-supervised performances by a hand-picked group of renowned new-music exponents. "Your first encounter with the music of Christian Wolff leaves you with the impression you've just heard (or played, or read) something totally strange, unlike anything else you know. And yet, upon reflection, you realize it is at the same time something completely ordinary and normal, as familiar in its way as any number of repetitive actions characteristic of everyday life, getting up in the morning, going to school, work, church, washing the dishes, performing the daily tasks of home and family. Weird little tunes, sounding as if they had been beamed at some remote point in the universe and then bounced back again as a kind of intergalactic mutant music; recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns, somehow sewn together in monstrous pairings, sometimes reminiscent of the demons of Hieronymus Bosch, composites of animals, fish, flowers, and common household objects: there is order, but also constant interruption, intrusions of disorderly reality upon regularity and lawfulness, combining to create an effect of both familiarity and strangeness: Shklovsky's ostranenie. You could say this music is surrealist -- not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life's unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can't really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization)." --Frederic Rzewski
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
MODE 126CD
|
(Written for Sabat/Clarke); Duo for Violinist and Pianist (2 versions) -- Sabat/Clarke Duo. Composer supervised recordings. "Duo for violinist and pianist (1961) has structural parts which are repeatable and whose sequence is determined by cues -- a particular sound (e.g.) high violin pizzicato, very quiet low register sound on piano, or length of silence -- which, as a player, reaches the end of a structural part, determines what part must directly be played next. Each player, under determined conditions, proceeds independently (there is no fixed score relating to the two instruments). The cues from the one player to the other occur in the process of playing; neither players knows when what she plays will function as a cue, i.e. cannot control where the other player will play. The material of the structural parts is flexible and, if repeated, variable. Within time spaces (e.g. 4 seconds, 1/2 second, etc.) sounds may be chosen from variously specified sources, collections of pitches, dynamics, ways of playing and combined and distributed variably. There are also places in the music where individual sounds are coordinated between the players, for instance, violin plays a sound that must be sustained till the piano's next sound is heard (which is not for the violinist predictable), or the pianist must wait until the next sound from the violin ends, then play directly after. This may sometimes result in an impasse: piano cannot play until the violin stops playing while the violin cannot stop until the piano plays. This can be taken as the end of the piece's performance, as it is on this recording for the two versions of the piece played, in one case the impasse not happening till after some time, in the other coming much sooner. I think of the music of the Duo as resulting from the conditions of the piece's being performed, both fluid and requiring a highly focused and flexibly alert attention."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
MRCD51
|
Early Christian Wolf piano music (written 1951-61), performed by: John Tilbury & Christian Wolff (pianos), Eddie Prevost (percussion). Studio recordings from 2001/2. "During the period when these works were composed (1951-61), Christian Wolff was closely associated with John Cage. Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor (they are sometimes referred to together as the New York School'). Feldman later remarked that he was profoundly indebted to Christian Wolff ('I think of him as my artistic conscience')... First impressions may be of a music unlike any other: abrupt, delicate, astringent, enigmatic, disconcerting. The effect is as of isolated objects in space, sounds which seem to come from nowhere and lead nowhere, appearing and disappearing unpredictably, framed by silences. Attention is drawn to the immediacy of each sound. The ear is finely tuned to precise details, a microscopic world in close-up. Expectations derived from other kinds of music are not much help here; one is encouraged to listen afresh, with special alertness, as in unfamiliar territory, searching for clues. Technically, the music arises directly from the mechanical action of the piano and emphasises its percussive character. The sounds are not joined up in familiar ways, the pedal is not used to give continuity, there is no legato phrasing, no illusion of the 'singing line'; instead there is a sharpness of attack, a stark exposure and isolation of individual sounds. The use of preparations enhances this impression: a method developed by Cage in the 1940s of transforming the sounds of the piano by the insertion of small objects (screws,, coins, wedges, wood, rubber and other materials) between the strings. The sounds are altered in a variety of ways, in terms of pitch, timbre and resonance; new timbral qualities are discovered, reaching out into the diverse sound world of percussion instruments."
|
viewing 1 To 15 of 15 items
|
|