(This text is an edited compilation of three lectures that took place over several days. Petr Kotik was present at the first lecture, and Alvin Lucier at the second.)

Christian Wolff: I just arrived, and I’m fairly disoriented, so I’m not quite sure how to proceed. I’m certainly not going to lecture. If you have any specific ideas, just tell me and I’ll be happy to talk about it. I wonder if it would be useful for me to give you a little biographical sketch. Maybe that would be a good idea.

My background, initially, is European. My parents were German and Austrian, but they left Germany in 1933, partly in protest against the regime in Germany at the time—Hitler had just been elected—partly because my father had a partially Jewish background. They came to France, and that’s where I was born, in 1934. I grew up as a kind of little European person, but not for very long. We left Europe in 1941, just as the war was breaking out, and came to New York City. In a way, that’s almost the most important fact about my biography, that I was lucky enough to land in that place. I grew up in New York City. In the meantime, I’ve managed to work my way up the eastern part of the United States, and now I live pretty much in the country: in northern New England, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I moved from being a city person to a country person. But initially, it was New York.

My parents had good friends in the musical world. Both my parents were publishers, but my grandfather, whom I never knew, was a professor of music and a composer in Bonn. He was in a circle of musicians on the edge of people like Brahms. My father still [laughs]…it’s ancient history, but it kind of amuses me, especially given the direction which my own work took: My father met Brahms. When my father was about ten years old, he was introduced to the grand old man at the funeral of Clara Schumann. So that’s my attachment to the Western musical tradition: Brahms and Clara Schumann.

Kotik: It just shows how fast time proceeds. One of our family friends came to a concert I had at The Kitchen when it was still on Mercer Street in…must have been ’71 or ‘72. I saw her the next day and she said, “It was so interesting to me to hear this concert. I remember when I went to high school in Vienna, people used to say, “Tonight they’re playing this crazy composer Brahms.”

Wolff: Yes; Brahms was once considered avant-garde.

So when we came to New York we had musical friends—a circle of musicians, some fairly high-powered ones. The primary figure was the violinist Adolph Busch. I don’t know if that name means anything to any of you, but he himself had been a pupil—again, to take us back a little bit—of [Joseph] Joachim, who was the premier violinist in Germany back at the turn of the century. He’s the man for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto, though he wouldn’t play it because he found it too advanced. [Laughs]

Busch was very well known in Europe. He didn’t do so well in the States, but his son-in-law, the pianist Rudolf Serkin, had a much better career in the U.S. Those are the people from whom I first heard music. I was an only child, and my parents would take me along whenever they went to concerts and things. So, from a fairly early age, I was sort of saturated in the standard Western classical tradition, in the narrower sense of those days. Music, in those days, was basically confined: a musically educated or cultured person was expected to know the music from roughly Bach through Brahms. The 20th Century was kind of a question mark. That was the music that I listened to a great deal, and fairly quickly I wanted to do something myself. Initially I wanted to become a pianist, so I took lessons, and so forth. We were poor when we came to New York, so we didn’t have a piano and I had to find other places to practice; friend’s houses and things like that. But I worked very hard at it, and by the time I was about 14 or 15 I had a very good teacher, a woman called Grete Sultan, for whom John Cage wrote the Etudes Australes. I learned a great deal from her. She was very important to my education.

Now, there was another kind of music also in my background—much less central, but in the end, as the years go by, as I look back, really quite important, and that was Dixieland jazz. There were concerts every weekend in downtown Manhattan, and some of the really great names in jazz were there. My school friends and I knew they were good, but we didn’t think of them as these great names; we just went for fun. I heard that music and was very impressed by it; I liked it a great deal. I was surprised, because I had not taken any interest in popular music at the time at all; in fact, I disliked it actively. But this seemed to me a kind of alternative—another kind of music. What impressed me about it, although I didn’t think about it so clearly at the time, were two things: one was the virtuosity of the performers, not only virtuosity in the sense that they could play fast, but that they were constantly exploring what the instruments could do. They were making sounds with those instruments that I would never have heard in a classical concert. That interested me.

And the other thing about that music was the texture of it, which is a funny mixture of a fairly square and steady beat—the rhythm is very strong—but at the same time, the performing techniques or the texture of the music was heterophonic: They would take something that was basically one line, but everybody would do it a little differently at the same time. Do you know black gospel singing? It’s the same sort of technique, where you have the musical outline or “scaffolding”—the chordal structures, the harmonies, the melodic rhythm, and so forth—but people are constantly weaving in and out of them, improvising around a fixed line. Every now and again they’ll come together, at the beginning and the end. You can hear, behind it, the shape of it, but at the same time there is this extraordinary kind of free movement within those structures. As I said, I didn’t analyze it in those terms at the time. I realize now that it was probably the single most important textural or constitutional element for me in my own music, that notion of heterophony.

So I continued with piano, but I realized fairly soon that I just wasn’t good enough. [Laughs] I didn’t have enough talent to be a pianist, so I was a little bit desperate, because I had a notion very early on that music would have to be part of my life. It was like a vocation, if you will. That was absolutely clear. I might have to do other things to make a living, but music would be the central part of my life. I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to be a performer, and so, as a second-best, you might say [laughs], I took up composition. Again, in that spirit one has when you’re young, when you’re involved very deeply with something. Initially it’s passive, because you hear things or read or look at pictures. But pretty soon, you want to try it yourself, because if it’s that much part of you, then you want to be actively involved in it. Since I couldn’t be a performer, I should be a composer. I was quite na•ve; I had no formal instruction in music except for my piano lessons. I’d had no theory; nothing. Somebody, when I was quite young, had given me a little book called The Elements of Music or something, and it had all the basic information about notation, keys, a little bit about harmony, and instrumentation. I read that, and that—basically—was my practical musical education for writing.

I started to try to compose, and of course, one starts by imitating. The first thing I tried to do…my favorite composer was Bach; I tried to write sort of like Bach. [Laughs] It was a disaster. I learned quickly that I couldn’t do it, which worried me a little bit. I thought, “Well, what am I going to do now?” But somehow I got over that. Again, as a teenager, which is about the right age for it, I suddenly got interested in new things. I had been saturated, musically, with this old music, the classics. Actually, there was a listening experience involved here. This is very hard to imagine, I think, for people of your age, but we’re talking about the middle to late 1940s, before 1950. This was before CDs; before magnetic tape. Even long-playing records were just beginning to appear in the late 1940s. So the accessibility of music was much smaller than it is now. Now you can listen to anything at any time. But in those days, it was really difficult to hear anything except what was being offered at concerts.

Incidentally, that’s important for me, too. My initial exposure to music was almost entirely through live performance. Nowadays everybody encounters music primarily through electronic means: an enormous amount of music, but you’re getting it all out of loudspeakers. You’re not getting the actual living performance situation in most of the music that you hear. That obviously has advantages, because you get to hear much more, and if you decide you’d like to find out what [Johannes] Ockeghem’s music is like, and it’s not so easy to find a concert where they’re going to [perform] Ockeghem, you can always get a CD and listen to it.

So there are advantages [to the new technology], but I think there are also serious disadvantages, because you forget what—for me at least—is the most important thing: the live performance dimension of music. It’s all very well to write a composition on a piece of paper, but that’s not music; you haven’t made any music yet. The music happens when it’s performed. That seems to me a basic premise. Unless you’re doing electroacoustic music, which is another story entirely. But if you’re doing instrumental or vocal music, it doesn’t really happen until the music is performed live.

To go back to my history here, we had been friends with people who in the summer would regularly take us to Tanglewood, a summer music festival which was primarily devoted to the classics, except that this one time, a famous quartet, the Juilliard, was invited to come up to Tanglewood, and they decided to do a program of the Second Viennese School—Schoenberg, Berg, Webern—and that was the first time that I’d heard that music. It just completely blew my mind; I was completely overwhelmed. I thought, “O.K., this is it. This is what I want to do.” I thought, “Bach—forget it. I can’t do Bach, and anyway, it’s stupid. He did it, and nobody’s going to do it as well again.” But this is something where I thought, “Maybe I could do this.”

There’s a nice story about John Cage where he explains about how when he was starting off, initially he didn’t know what kind of artist he would be. He did some painting, some music, some writing: He did various things. He tells a story about when he came to Paris, and he must have been about 18 or 19 years old, trying to figure out what he was going to do, for the first time he saw pictures by Picasso and Matisse, modernist painting. He looked at it and said he remembered thinking, “Yeah, I could do that.” [Laughs] He had no skills graphically; he couldn’t draw, make a portrait or anything like that. But he thought he could do this stuff.

I had exactly the same experience. You need to make some adjustments here, but I had exactly that experience when I heard this music by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. About the same time, I heard for the first time the music of Bartok—again string quartet music. I think this was the first time that his music had been presented publicly in the United States. Bartok’s pieces are standard classics now, but at that time it was new music, even though it was written many years earlier.

First of all, the sound of that music completely entranced me; secondly, it made me think that I could do that, too. So I just started to do it [laughs], without any instruction except this little book of mine that showed me how to write notes correctly, and showed what the instruments could do. They were fairly simple-minded pieces, but I found myself doing things like…I didn’t know about the 12-tone system, about serialism, but I somehow re-invented it, or a very simple version of it. [Laughs] In other words, what I seem to have had instinctively was some kind of notion that you can’t just write; in order to be able to write at all, you have to have some kind of procedure that makes it possible for you to make the material, to get from one point to another in a piece.

So, I did that for about a year or so. I even got some people to play my pieces. I composed some for piano. With a few exceptions, I wrote pieces where there was at least a possibility that they might be performed. I had no contact with other musicians, except for people like Serkin who, of course, didn’t want to hear anything about it. Serkin was a real puzzle to me because I later learned he had studied composition with Schoenberg. But for various reasons, he decided that he was never going to do any contemporary music at all. So that world was completely cut off from what I was doing.

The only person that I could talk to was my piano teacher, and I had imagined at the time that she was very traditional too, because we only worked on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and things like that. There was very little said about new music. I later learned that, in fact, she was a great champion of new music. She apparently did the first performance of Henry Cowell’s Piano Concerto in Berlin in the 1920s. [Laughs] But she never talked about it; I didn’t know about it. However, there was something special about her, apart from her gifts as a teacher and musician, and that was that she was living in a loft building in New York, and the other loft was occupied by the dancer Merce Cunningham. They were friends because they were neighbors, and so she knew John Cage. I would practice the piano less and less because I realized I wasn’t getting anywhere with it, and I would work more and more on my compositions. I would come in to the piano lessons unprepared, but I would bring in a composition to show that I was doing something. She finally said, “You know, this is silly, because I can’t help you with the compositions. You need to go to somebody who can work with you.” I said, “Well, who should that be?” I did know one other composer at the time, again through my family, and that was Edgard Varese, and I thought about possibly going to work with him. I mentioned that to her and she said, “No, I think I have somebody who would work better as a teacher,” and that was John Cage. So I got sent off to John Cage, and it was very nice, because I brought in these rather crude pieces, and he somehow thought they were interesting. [Laughs] He said, “O.K., we’ll work. I’ll take you on as a student.”

We worked together formally for no more than about six weeks, maximum. We had various exercises and things to do. After that he said, “The main thing about doing these exercises is that you learn the principle of self-discipline, and you seem to be able to do that. So why don’t you just go ahead and do your work, and we’ll meet and talk?” We became friends, basically, but we were no longer student and teacher. That’s the extent of my musical education.

Kotik: How old were you?

Wolff: Sixteen.

Kotik: The six weeks of lessons with Cage—was it once a week, twice a week?

Wolff: Once a week, I think.

So I had an unusual musical preparation, so to speak. The only thing you might say I had going for me was that I was very serious about listening. I made a point of knowing the literature well, so by the time I went to Cage, I had listened to a great deal of music, and I had studied it. I bought scores. I went to concerts all the time. This is the beauty of being in New York—something’s going on all the time. At most concerts, if you go at the intermission, you can get in for free. You just walk in. I saved a lot of money by doing that. I missed a lot of first halves of concerts that way. But I still heard a lot of music. It was just the way. Nowadays, you would go to movies or get a video; I would go to a concert and catch up on things that way. I was also taken to a lot of concerts by my parents.

So I listened to a great deal of music. And there was the radio. There was a fair amount of classical music on the radio in those days, so I also did that very systematically. If there was something I hadn’t heard before, I’d make a special point of trying to hear it. I was almost pedantic in my thoroughness.

But the Cage experience was obviously very different. Maybe that’s enough to say about that. What we did, if you want to know about the lessons themselves, they were very straightforward. We had basically three, or maybe four, projects. One of them was…picking up with the Viennese School, Cage, maybe a month before I met him, had just been to hear the Webern Symphony, Op. 21. He had been overwhelmed by that experience. In fact, it’s a famous occasion, because Morton Feldman also went to that concert and had been similarly overwhelmed. They both left immediately after that piece because they didn’t want to hear any more music; they were so impressed by hearing the Webern. And they were both outside the door of the concert hall, completely dazzled by this music, so they just introduced themselves: That’s how they met.
So Cage had immediately wanted to learn more about the Webern Symphony. You couldn’t buy it. There was a copy in the library. He went to the public library in New York, and he copied out, by hand, the first movement—in order to be able to study it—and brought it back. He had just begun the analysis of it when I came along. So he basically turned that over to me. He said, “Here, you work out this piece; figure out what’s going on in it.” So we did analysis, and it was analysis of the first movement of the Webern Symphony. Again, this [has] had an enormous impact on my work ever since. The textures of that music, and also something in it that struck me, which is a crossing of a system and something that isn’t quite a system. Because that idea is important to me, I might talk about it for a minute.

As you doubtless know, Webern, especially—more so than either Schoenberg or Berg—was the most systematic of the early serialists. In fact, the first movement of the Symphony is not only 12-tone, but it is a double canon; and in addition to that, it is organized as first movement sonata form. So it is in two parts: the first is a kind of exposition, and the second part is the development. He doesn’t recapitulate; that’s it. It’s the same sort of A-B thing you get in a sonata movement. When I analyzed it, I discovered that the sound is “floating”; it’s very static. It doesn’t move; it just sort of sits there. When you analyze it, you discover why. You all know about the 12-tone system. What he does in that piece is he fixes the register of the pitches, with one exception, I think. In other words, if the row requires an A-flat [illustrates], whenever an A-flat appears it always occurs right there. It doesn’t occur down here, or somewhere else: It’s always in the same register. On the other hand, you may have this A-flat occurring here, here, here and here; but each time it occurs, it is part of a different aspect of the row technique. In other words, it may first occur as the third note in the first row. The next time it might be the inversion of the second transposition of the row. Each time it occurs, it has a different structural function in terms of the logic of the 12-tone system, but what you’re hearing is just the same A-flat all the time.

So there’s a contradiction between, you might say, the ongoing logic of the 12-tone system and this fixed-pitch situation. I found that idea very beautiful. Basically, I don’t think Webern calculated that. In other words, these appearances of A-flat at various intervals were not something that Webern thought of in advance. Webern was worried about the numbers and how the system worked. Obviously, he liked the result; but the result, in fact, was something I don’t think he could have predicted when he first laid out the rows and planned the piece. That’s what makes the piece really work, and have this wonderful ambiguous, floating quality—this irrational or non-predictable (from the compositional point of view) result of these floating A-flats, and so on. Basically, the piece is kind of one chord with various changes rung on it. You could think, “Wouldn’t it be great to do a piece with one chord with various changes ringing on it,” and you could just write that, right? And it might be a very beautiful piece. I’m not going to say that it wouldn’t be. But somehow, the system behind the way those notes appear adds a whole other kind of dimension to the force of the piece. It’s a kind of dialectic, if you will, that exists there, that gives the piece a certain special tension or vitality. This notion interested me a lot—you’re going in one direction which is very clear, conscious, rationalized, but the result is actually somewhere over here instead. That’s something that I was impressed by very early on, by doing this exercise.

Another thing we did in the lessons with Cage was, he taught me about rhythmic structure. This was the big problem I had, and I think it is arguably one of the basic problems when you write a piece: How do you put it together? You can get an idea, like you want to have these chords, or this particular texture, or this or that. But the question is, how do you make a piece out of that? That’s what I didn’t know how to do. The pieces I brought to Cage were mostly very short. I would run it for a bit, and then it would just stop and I wouldn’t know what to do next. This is still a question for me. In some ways, it’s the basic question about composing: on one hand, what do you do next; and on the other hand, how long do you keep doing what you’re doing? When is it time to stop? You get into something, and then you think, “O.K., enough? More? Lots more?” Those of you who are composers know that this is something very basic.

Cage noticed immediately that I had a problem with structure. He said, “What you’re doing is fine, but you have to learn about structure.” At that time Cage had been using—and had developed for some time—the notion of a rhythmic structure. It’s a highly rationalized system based on numbers. Some of you may know this very well. The best thing about it, I think, was that it involved a system of structuring, of making a form, which was not dependent on what you could call content. In other words, it was making time spaces, and that, basically, is what you based your compositional procedure on. It was fairly rigorous, because it involved time proportions. The way he initially found it, I think, was he would just start a composition and look at what he’d done, and decided that it came in phrases of different lengths—for example, two beats, two beats, seven beats and one beat. So you have a phrase that has these subdivisions. Then he would say, that’s going to be the basis of the structure of the entire piece, and he would then do this two times, then three times, then seven times, and then once. These would be the larger sections of the piece. The smaller phrases would have these proportions, and the larger sections would have the same proportions, simply because you’ve done that twice, three times, seven times, once. It’s a very elegant idea. I worked with it, but I got tired of always doing the same phrase length over and over. Cage got very good at it, always making very slight variations. In the same way, Western classical music, and popular music, too, is based on eight bars. Everything is subdivisions or multiplications of eight: eight, sixteen, and so on. This is a sort of variation or expansion of this idea that coordinates the details with the larger proportions of the piece.

That would be the basis of your structure, but what’s nice about it is, nothing is said about what will represent these numbers. You could use this to make a tonal piece. [Illustrates] You could modulate at this point, for instance. This could be in one key, another key, another key, to distinguish the sections. Or you could do it entirely in terms of tone color, or combinations, or whatever. You could make any kind of music whatsoever using this structure. So, it was a wonderful teaching tool, and also, it very much helped you with this notion of “what; for how long?” Because you knew, when you were here, you had to do two, then three, then seven, etc.

As a principle of composition, it’s really great to have, as it were, a task; a problem that you have to deal with. Then the whole interest becomes how will you deal with it, how will you solve this particular dilemma? It’s a little bit more interesting, for me at least, if the dilemma is given, if it’s not something you cooked up. You do cook it up to the extent that you have the structure to begin with, but once it’s set up, then you have to deal with what you’ve got. Sometimes you get into difficult situations. You have to figure out, “What am I going to do now to fulfill the requirements of this particular scheme?”

So that was the other thing we did. And then, finally, I’ll just mention in passing that Cage also was basically—it’s interesting to see how many composers have been autodidacts—self-taught, not having been to conservatory. A striking example is Schoenberg himself, who never went to conservatory. He was basically self-taught. He took some private lessons—I think with Zemlinsky or someone like that—but basically never had any formal musical training. I think he studied violin, or some instrument, but basically, as a musician, he was self-taught.

Student: I think he played the cello.

Wolff: Thank you. I knew it was a string instrument. The interesting thing about Schoenberg, of course, is that he was self-taught and then became probably one of the greatest teachers of music of the 20th century. [Laughs] Sometimes it seems like he became a serious music educator to compensate for his own lack of musical education.

Kotik: You may think about it the other way around. Do you really get an education in school? [Laughs]

Wolff: That’s the question. The whole issue of music education is very interesting, and not so simple.

At any rate, Cage himself had had a very bizarre and casual musical education, but when he decided seriously to do composition—and this is something that characterizes his work, or even his life—as he said himself, that he “always went to the president of the company.” Or he tried to get to the most important person. He decided that Schoenberg was 20th century music’s most important person and, therefore, he wanted to study with him. He prepared himself a little bit; he took some lessons before. Then he presented himself to Schoenberg, and Schoenberg took him on as a student. I think he studied with Schoenberg for two or three years. Schoenberg had no interest whatsoever in Cage’s compositions. He wouldn’t look at them. [Laughs] All they did was counterpoint exercises for three years, and for long stretches of time on the same cantus firmus – for example, six months on the same tenor line. [Laughs]

Cage, at some point, mentions something else about music education, which you can sort of infer from hearing about how Schoenberg taught: The impression was that Schoenberg would make the study of music so disagreeable, so hard and unpleasant, that if you survived it, then you were probably O.K. as a musician. It was like a sort of boot camp; military training. It was so dreadful that if you had the energy, the will and the determination to go on after that, you were probably going to be all right as a composer.

So, Cage decided that we should also do some counterpoint exercises. Which at the time was rather bizarre, because Cage had absolutely no interest in counterpoint, and I wasn’t very good at it. [Laughs] We struggled bravely through three or four weeks trying to do it. Finally he said, “Let’s just forget it.” Cage didn’t have the Schoenberg philosophy of making the lessons as disagreeable as possible, and it was actually something that Schoenberg obviously thought of, too; that whatever discipline you study rigorously, the point of it is not necessarily to learn something that you will use eventually. This is one of the paradoxes of music education. You don’t study sixteenth-century counterpoint because you’re going to write Palestrina masses. You do it in order to learn discipline, how a system works within the musical context. It’s about learning discipline. The other thing I was doing was writing my own pieces, and I would invent my own systems for them. Cage said, “Well, you seem to know about discipline, and you seem to know how to apply and work with it, so we don’t need to do that anymore.” So after about four or five weeks, we dropped it. It was actually roughly at that point that we dropped the whole thing with me taking lessons—at least formally. I finished the Webern analysis, and I’d more or less figured out how to do the rhythmic structure. So at that point, we quit having lessons together, and I proceeded onward myself.

That’s the end of the story of my early musical life.

Kotik: Maybe it would be informative to end this period of your life with the following episode. I started to perform Christian Wolff’s pieces in Prague in the early 1960s. One of the first pieces we performed was your composition Nine. The musicians were quite confused about the music. I insisted that we perform it, and we did. One of them said, “How can this be any good, when the composer was 17 when he wrote it? Look at the year of composition, and look at when Wolff was born.” He put the numbers together; I had never thought of it. [Laughs] So you mentioned you were 16 years old when you started to study, and at 17 you had already produced a composition that was performed overseas by somebody who didn’t even know anything about you.

I thought it might be interesting to mention, in talking about this period.

Wolff: Thank you. I think I was very lucky in many ways. I’ve been lucky all my life. Luck helps a lot. Determination is good too; in fact, it’s essential. But you need some luck, no matter what. I was lucky in many ways—in coming to New York, for example. If I’d come to Birmingham, Alabama, or some place like that, I don’t know what would have happened to my life.

Kotik: You would have had to have different parents.

Wolff: Of course; I didn’t choose my parents. There are all these things over which you have no control that determine your life, or important aspects of it. There are limits to that. But in my case, I think, I was very lucky, born under some fortunate star, musically speaking.

What I did do that helped in making those early pieces, I stumbled across an idea that I might mention, because it’s still important to me in some ways. Looking back, I realize that it partly came about because of my piano lessons. You never know where you’re going to learn what’s important. What you think may be important turns out not to be important at all, and something else you don’t even pay much attention to turns out to be critical.

My piano teacher, as I said, was very good. She was very musical, that’s obviously essential. But she was very particular that when you played something, that you played the notes exactly as they were written. So, for example, one would hear very clearly the difference between this, and this. [Illustrates with a half note and a dotted quarter] You’re playing A for about two beats. You do it once, and you do it again. But actually, the musical image helps, because those two don’t look alike, and there should be a clear distinction between those two sounds. They happen to be the same note, the same instrument, but one should be able to hear the difference, even though they seem almost similar. She was very particular about that. It wasn’t fussy or pedantic, but she thought that if the composer had wanted the same sound, he would have written this again. But no, he wrote that, so he must have wanted something else. So you had to pay attention to that, you had to listen for it, and you had to hear it. The notion of thinking about sound in that kind of detail is something that I learned about early, without knowing that I was learning about it.

For composition (and again, I apologize to those of you who heard me say all of this before) there was this notion that…when Cage made me do the exercises to learn about rhythmic structure, he had me make one-line pieces, melodies, with a small number of notes, to be able to focus. An interesting compositional principle is the idea of working with very limited materials. So I got used to writing one-line pieces, like a flute piece, using a restricted number of pitches. The idea of working with restrictions was there. And you could say it was reinforced by Webern, where you work only with one tone row. There are many musics that have this dimension, which you could call minimal.

I then had the notion of working within these very severe restrictions, but I was more interested in the relationship with, say, two instruments.. The first piece I made like this was a piece for two violins, and I decided I would use only three pitches. [Illustrates] It was a six- or seven-minute piece. At first I thought, “O.K., what am I going to do?” I had two instruments, and I went to the piano and sort of listened to them in two voices. I realized that, out of those three pitches, I could make many different sounds, at least a number of them. [Plays three consecutive chromatic pitches] O.K.; three pitches. But two instruments, so… [Plays four dyads in seconds] That’s three more sounds. [Two pitches played together] does not sound like [two pitches played consecutively]. A totally different sound.

Then, however, there are more possibilities. [Dyad with upper note released earlier] Two together: one leaves, and the other one is left by itself. Then you can invert that, so to speak. [Dyad with lower note released earlier] The top one is left. A different sound. Then you have these. [Plays a variety of above involving all three pitches] So, by the time you’re finished, you actually have 12 sounds out of these three notes. It’s a question of listening, and seeing the combinations of sounds that they make.

For a while, I wrote pieces with extremely limited pitches. I then began to expand it a little bit. The piece Petr referred to was a piece for nine. Again, I got a little hung up on numbers. It was a piece that had a rhythmic structure of nine times nine. It had nine instruments, nine pitches, nine rhythms. This was the early days of serialism, when you were supposed to rationalize every dimension of the music. So it also had nine dynamics. That’s how that piece happened.

It is, I think, a musically useful idea. I got tired of it and [eventually] gave it up. A piece of good fortune: In 1949 or 1950, Cage was in Paris and met Boulez, and they were very good friends for a while. When my parents took me to Europe in 1951, for the first time since we’d come to New York, I told Cage about [our upcoming trip], and he said, “Oh, you must see this very interesting French musician, Pierre Boulez.” Boulez, by the way, was unknown at that time. Cage sent a letter introducing me, and I went to see Boulez. We spent a lot of time together, and he was very nice to me. I was just this kid from nowhere, while he was all of about 27 years old.

I showed him my pieces, but he was already so into serialism that, for him, nothing else was possible. He was completely doctrinaire about the fact that there was only one method you could possibly use. So, while he was somewhat interested in this idea, he didn’t really like it because it wasn’t 12-tone or serial. The way he put it was to say, “Well, why do you use so few notes?” [Laughs] So I went home again, and a little later I thought, “Well, O.K.” And I wrote a piano piece that used all 88 notes. I didn’t do 12; I never did 12. I wasn’t going to do that. But I was going to try to do something that would respond to this question. From then on, things changed, and I went off in different directions.

Just to fill in the gaps a little, there was what I described as my very earliest work, and then I went through a shorter transitional period where I was very strongly affected by the European avant-garde music of the 1950s: early Boulez, Stockhausen, primarily those two. In those days, people were into writing very complicated music. It was the era of total serialization, where you rationalized all the different parameters of music. I was interested in that, but I never used a 12-tone row. I made up my own pitch collections and used those.

I made quite a lot of pieces in that vein, mostly difficult, complicated piano pieces because, again, I had the good luck of having as part of my musical acquaintanceship the pianist David Tudor. I don’t know if you know that name, but he was a very important figure in the history of 20th Century music, and also a very good composer. He started out as a pianist and organist, and he was the person who first played the Boulez 2nd Piano Sonata in New York, in the United States. He then was closely associated with Cage, Feldman, and myself. At the time, in the early period, we had very few opportunities for performances other than what we, ourselves, would organize and do. It was difficult to get your work out. Most musicians were not interested in doing it, or were not even up to doing it technically. But David Tudor was devoted only to new music, and the more difficult the piece was, the more he liked it. [Laughs] So it was wonderful to work for him. So I did that. But after a while, his own direction changed. He lost interest in playing the piano and became interested in electronics and live electroacoustic music, and his composing work is entirely in that line.

Then I also had this one experience that I might talk about, where I was supposed to make a piece for two pianos, for myself and for Frederic Rzewski. Actually he’s going to come here, so you’ll see him. After David Tudor, for that period he was a very important pianist, a fantastic piano player. When we met, he was at the time 18 or 19, just coming to college, and I was a couple of years older. We got on very well, and worked together. We had scheduled ourselves on a concert to play this piece that I was supposed to write for two pianos, but I had many other things to do. I’ll mention in passing that early on, actually shortly after I met Cage, at first I thought I would go to conservatory. I thought I’d get a proper musical education and have that kind of musical life and career. But because of the Cage direction, I realized that what I was doing with Cage had nothing to do with what was going on in the conservatories, and to be honest, I was not interested in what they were doing in conservatories. I was interested in what I was doing with Cage. So suddenly, the notion of going to conservatory didn’t seem to make any sense. Incidentally, the conservatories or music schools in universities, at that time were really very conservative. They didn’t want to know anything about contemporary music written at that time, so I really didn’t see any point in doing that.

So we were going to do this concert, with the two-piano piece that I was supposed to write, in this idiom I was using—very complicated, intricate notation, and so on. It became clear that we wouldn’t have time to do it.

I was going to explain that I decided very early on that I was not going to make a professional career in music. To be a composer, in and of itself, was not a career. [Laughs] My model was Cage. When I met Cage, he was almost 40 years old. This is hard to imagine, but he had no success whatsoever. He was as poor as a church mouse. He occasionally got a little money from his parents. He did odd jobs – he worked in advertising for a necktie company. I thought, “I can’t do this. There’s no way that my music will ever provide a way that I can make a living, so I’m going to have to do something else.” What I did was a little strange, but I had by then gone to university and decided to study literature, and in fact, in the end I studied classics, Greek and Latin literature, and I ended up having an academic career in that field. That was my day job, so to speak. That’s how I earned a living. It was very hard work, so I didn’t have that much time to do music. That was the situation.

I had just started graduate school at university when I met Frederic and we had this plan. It was clear that I would not have time to make one of these complicated pieces, and that even if I did, we wouldn’t have time to learn it. And yet, we had scheduled ourselves and we were determined to do something. Finally we decided neither of us had ever done any improvising, so we didn’t feel comfortable with just improvising. We thought, “Why don’t we do something that’s more flexible, that’s like improvisation but more structured?” And we came up with this notion of getting material—say, collections of pitches. You could say like a tone row, but…I’ll just make one example. [Illustrates] This might be one pitch collection, and it will just be called “a.” And then there might be three or four more of these. These were made entirely by ear, or intuitively, whatever. They were like a tone row, except that they did what I learned from Webern – there were no octave transpositions; it was always these pitches. So they were fixed sounds, you might say. We might have made four or five of them.

What we did was make these collections of pitches. Then—and you can see where this is coming from, from the Cage notion—we made a kind of rhythmic structure, both concrete and abstract, which would give us time—say, five seconds. Then there would be two a. That would be that notation. You had five seconds, and within those five seconds, you would play two pitches chosen from this collection, a. You could choose any two, and you could play them anywhere within the five seconds, and they didn’t have to be played in order. You could also play them separately or as a chord together, or as a chord and have one sound past it, and so on. So whatever combination you wanted to make; but it could only be two, and it had to be from source a, and you did it within the five seconds. That’s the way the piece went. Then there might be seven seconds 0, and that would mean silence. Then there might be three seconds, seven pitches from a source b, and so forth. And each pianist had a different part, but they used the same kind of material; they were similar. The second pianist might have four seconds and two pitches from c, and so forth.

We tried that, and were very surprised to discover that it really worked very well. It made a music that, as far as the sound went, was just as intricate and interesting as the stuff that we were making when we wrote everything out. This was a revelation. An enormous amount of this labor-intensive process of making every single note, every notation and so forth, which would take weeks or months, suddenly in 24 hours [Laughs] we had made a piece which worked like this, and which we played, which was immediately available for performance.

That got me started on a whole new phase, because I really liked working like this. There were a number of features. One, again this theme of being pragmatic. This is very practical. It’s efficient, because you work fairly quickly. The other thing about it is that it was fun and interesting to play. We discovered something. Each of us prepared our parts independently, and then we came together and tried them out. Of course, you hear somebody doing something, and you may have planned to do something. Let’s say you’re here, and the other piano plays, for whatever reason, a B-flat. Just as you’re starting, you hear that, and you might have intended to play these two notes, but suddenly you think it may be interesting to have that B-flat repeat, so instead of playing the C-sharp, you suddenly play B-flat because that’s what you heard the other guy do. In other words, the way you’re playing—the way you’re partially improvising within this big structure—is also by response to what you hear. The same thing happens to the other player, so that you get a back-and-forth going, a dialogue, between you. That notion of interaction between performers is probably the single thing that has most characterized my work ever since. I do other things, too.

Student: You’ve already explained the practical nature of this. You mentioned earlier, when you were talking about growing up, the interests of the early jazz music you heard. Was this in your mind at all when you thought of this idea, or did it just relate in kind of a….

Wolff: Maybe in a completely subliminal way...no, I don’t think so. It was like a chord chart. [Laughs] Really, that’s what it is: It’s a kind of funny version of a chord chart. And you do riffs over it, with that material.

Student: Wouldn’t you think even just the thought of interacting with somebody….

Wolff: Then the interaction would be up-front, absolutely.

Student: …what you’re actually going to do, even though there are certain limitations and freedoms within those limitations, the idea of letting somebody else inform how you’re going to do this.

Wolff: Right. Exactly, yes. That’s very good. That’s basic to jazz performance and improvisation. If it’s two, it’s a dialogue; if it’s more, it’s a conversation. You basically exchange ideas, and you get impulses from the others. Occasionally, you lead off, too. There may be a lull, and you have to take over and initiate something, right? Then somebody else will respond, or somebody else initiates and you respond. So there is this constant dialogue going on among the musicians. It can be totally free, and then you’re in an open improvisational situation. Or you can decide to make a structure out of it, and give it a kind of scaffolding—only an outline, but within that outline you can do these various things. And the structure is important because, for instance, the time lengths, those would be determined by the rhythmic structure. Those would have a logic to them. You don’t hear that. As a listener you wouldn’t say, “Oh, yeah, now we’re getting to the proportion 2:4.” You obviously don’t hear that. But at the same time, it gives the piece a kind of coherence and shape which is subliminal, which underlies these free movements that go on within the structural sections.

So I got interested in that. The notion of interaction among the players. I’m still trying to catch up with myself here. This is very quick. I’m actually going back to my life as a composer. This is the next phase of it.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s I got interested—along with a lot of other people, for the first time in my life, seriously—in politics. This was the period of the Vietnam War, and of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. There were many things going on in the world that had a very strong effect on many people, myself included. I began to think more seriously about the question of what I was doing as a composer and what was going on in the world. Initially, when I started with the early avant-garde phase of the 1950s and 1960s, it was a very esoteric, self-enclosed world. In many ways it still is, but at that time it was self-consciously so. It had something to do with the fact that people thought we were crazy in the 1950s. They rejected what we were doing completely, and so we basically had to stick to that and make this world of our own, and not worry—at least I didn’t have to worry—about audiences. Because they were mostly so negative, I thought, “I’m just going to do my thing, and we’ll see what happens.”

Well, that sort of changed. Not in any direct way, but it changed in music generally because of the history of the time. This is the period, the mid-to-later 1960s, where we reached a kind of saturation point of complicated music. Everybody was writing this incredibly complicated music. It was getting highly chromatic, rhythmically extremely complex, and so on, highly organized. Then what happened, at least in America, was what is now called Minimalism. Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Phil Glass started to make their music, which was a complete reaction to that. Suddenly, instead of chromatic, it was modal. Instead of rhythmically complex, it had this steady beat. It had some influence from rock music at the time. And it had this very clean, electric sound to it. I now have mixed feelings about what those guys are doing, but at the time it was like a breath of fresh air—suddenly very direct. The other thing those guys were very clear about was the importance of performance. They all had their own groups. They did their own music; they didn’t rely on some institution. They didn’t have to beg somebody to play their music, and so forth. They just did it. It was very refreshing and very powerful. So there was that.

Also, by the way, people liked it. They actually enjoyed going to a concert. Before that, it was kind of a chore, like going to church or something, to hear Stockhausen, Boulez, and so forth. It’s really odd: It could be interesting, but it wasn’t a whole lot of fun. [Laughs] And something from this whole other dimension came along.

But at the same time, there was this political business which was affecting a number of us, and a feeling that the music should have some kind of —I don’t know quite how to say this—but should have some connection to what’s going on in the world, however you might imagine that. And in some way, it should be more like what most people think of as music. Incidentally, this is also the period of neo-tonalism. Again, that impulse was everywhere, in some form or another. Some forms I rejected completely, and still do—the American composer best known for that was Rochberg: imitations of Schubert. In Europe, you had a similar phenomenon. That seemed to me totally dreadful. It was sheer nostalgia. And the trouble with imitating Schubert is that Schubert’s always going to be better. [Laughs] It’s a losing battle. Your music becomes a kind of commentary, if you will, on Schubert, which is O.K., but I could never see the point of that.

There was, anyway, the sense that one wanted to make a music that was somehow not so esoteric. And the other thing about the earlier music that I was involved in, it seemed to me not only esoteric but also very introverted. It had to do with these reactions among the players, but in a very kind of internal, inner-directed way. And I was interested in making a music that was more extroverted, that kind of moved out rather than in.

Of course, the question was how to do that. One way that occurred to me—not to me alone—which itself has a long tradition, was to try to connect the music up in some way with…it’s not exactly popular music, but….

Student: Folk music?

Wolff: Yes, folk music, but there’s a more general….

Student: Vernacular?

Wolff: Vernacular, thank you: That’s the term I want. Vernacular means something that’s…. A vernacular language is a language that’s spoken by everybody, as opposed to a specialized, learned language which is only spoken by a few specialized people. A language that was more familiar, generally. You might say or do things with it which are unusual and peculiar, but, at least initially there would be some kind of recognition that this was like the way we all speak and hear.

Student: So, more as a basis of materials?

Wolff: Yes, exactly. This was taken in various directions by various people. A well-known composer at the time, and a composer who should be better known, was an English composer named Cornelius Cardew—unfortunately, he was killed in an accident in his late forties. So he’s kind of disappeared from view. In some areas, he’s coming back. He took a more extreme view. He was, first of all, politically more extreme. He became converted to a sort of Marxist philosophy that had a specific political organization in Britain. He formed a rock band, and they performed at demonstrations. His own compositions, first of all, were sort of arrangements of political folk music, and then with variations more or less in the style of late 19th Century music, tonal, and so on. I somehow was not quite comfortable with that. That seemed to me a little odd. But the notion of using that material—a number of us were doing that, and that’s what I took up, too. In a sense, I’ve not given it up, but I do it in other ways, and often in such a way that, unless you happen to know the original folk tune very well, you will not recognize the tune from the way I use it.

There is a precedent in American music that I didn’t think too hard about at the time. Actually, classical music has “ripped off,” you might say, folk music since the beginning. Renaissance composers frequently used popular songs as the basis of a mass, as the cantus firmus. Beethoven used Russian folk tones in the Razoumovsky quartets, and so on. Everybody did it. Bach uses them constantly; the chorale tunes are not by Bach: they’re by Luther or somebody else. They’re vernacular music. So the notion of classical so-called art music using vernacular material is a very old one. So I came back to that.

Do you have any questions?

Student: Earlier you were talking about what was going on in Europe, with Reich and Glass and everyone around what you guys were doing. For a long time I’ve had this idea about that period of history, that it would be interesting for me to bounce off of you, because you were there.

When I look at that music, even to me, it’s represented as these very oppositional things. There were the people who were doing indeterminate, aleatoric things; then there were the sort of “complexity” composers in Europe; and then the minimalists. It’s sort of presented to you as being all against each other, or something. But to me, there are similarities—maybe they’re surface similarities, but they seem important to me, because there are examples of composers from all of those milieus that are very interested in process music, like Philip Glass, in their artistic-process aspects. The music of Cage, like Music of Changes and Boulez’s Structures, etc. And then also there seems to be this kind of rigorous, ardent desire to have radically defined some kind of sound world or sense of logical collection. Do you know what I mean? So I wondered, having been there, was there any sense that “yes, these guys are doing this, and we’re doing this, but there’s a kind of unity underlying it?” Or is this a retrospective, historical fantasy that I have about it?

Wolff: The short answer is no. We had highly oppositional ways of working. [Laughs]

I see what you’re saying as far as minimalism is concerned. I think there were differences. Interestingly—and I don’t know if I want to get into it now—but, probably, there were differences between the U.S. and Europe. Eventually, there were minimalist phenomena in Europe. The most famous was probably [Louis] Andriessen in Holland. The Dutch seemed to have picked this up somehow. They have this sympathy for America. And there were some English composers, too. But by and large, at least initially, it seemed to be a completely American phenomenon. Also, a lot of Europeans just rejected it out of hand. There’s always been this complaint about American music by Europeans that it’s too simple, that American music is too na•ve. That’s this image of America as this kind of simple land, which in some ways we are, but in other ways clearly not. As Oscar Wilde said, the thing about America (is) that it went from being primitive to being decadent without a transition through civilization. [Laughter] There’s a little bit of something to that. I think what’s happened is that we’re now at a stage where we’re certainly politically very decadent at the moment, but where we seem to combine those two things, the primitive and the decadent, at the same time. It’s weird, but civilization…I just don’t know where that went or what’s happened to it. ...


...full version in Ostrava Days 2003 Report