The Student of the Master

In late 1951, John Cage attended a concert for the New York Philharmonic. On the program that evening was Anton Webern’s Symphony, op. 21, and a Rachmaninoff piece. Cage enjoyed the Webern so much, that upon hearing the audience’s harsh reception to it, Cage left the concert early. In the lobby, he met a man named Morton Feldman. As it turned out, he left early for the exact reason. That evening, the two men struck up a friendship that would last until Feldman’s death. And by means that I am way too lazy to get into right now, they along with Earle Brown, David Tutor, and Christian Wolff, Cage’s pupil, the New York School was born.

The New York School, as it was called mostly because the composers were all in New York at the time, was an arts movement that centered mostly around avant-garde styles of writing. It included a variety of arts factions, including poetry, painting, and dancing. However, they tend to focus mostly on Surrealism as well as Avant-Garde, possibly more so. For this post, we will focus mostly on the music-making part of this proverbial school, as they focus mostly on the Avant-Garde aspect of things (that and frankly they’re easier to comprehend). And of these composers, we will focus on a man who has had perhaps the most contact with and the best understanding of John Cage: his pupil, Christian Wolff.

A Frenchman by birth, he and his family fled to America in 1941 to escape Nazi persecution. There, his family assisted in making English translations of famous European literature.He began his studies with Cage in 1950 and became one of his closest confidants. In fact, it was Wolff who gave Cage the copy of I Ching that would influence Cage’s compositional style for the rest of his life. What the book proclaimed was that music should be “...released from intention, and that the sounds should be allowed to be free.” And Cage was not the only one to feel that way: By the time Cage had moved on from traditional notation, Feldman had already been using graphs:

But I digress.

Wolff was not as into such wild notations as was Feldman, but he did do some experimentation. Case in point, his Trio I, which had only the following pitches, G3, A4, A♭5, and C6, playing at slow and uncomplicated rhythms. Eventually, however, he did start getting into some more experimental notations, resulting in pieces like this:

This is an excerpt to the score of one of Wolff’s most famous works, For 1, 2, or 3 People. As you can see, though some minute traces of tradition are present, for the whole the notation is incredibly modernist and looks more like a piece of art than a composition (More on that on a later date.) But there is still one notable piece that should get special mention: the Exercises.

Now, to be clear, the Exercises are a series of pieces that are still being written to this day. Of these, Numbers 1-14 are meant to be played as a group and each subsequent one on their own. Regardless, though, they are still a fine example of performer control, as they have to decide how to take this:

And make it sound like this:

To be fair, I don’t have any other parts of the score, so I had to take the word of a Thom Jurek review from Allmusic. He says that there are a vast number of ways to interpret the piece, and not just because there’s no prescribed instrumentation, either. “Oftentimes the notation will be written on a single stave and can be played in either bass or treble clef...” and “Within octaves, transpositions of all kinds are allowed -- even when two instruments are scored to be playing together...” are two other features of these compositions. This gave the performers unprecedented control over how to perform the piece. Yet all the control the players are given also what makes this series so challenging. The players have to work as a team in order to perform this music well. And it all goes back to the notation.

The reason Christian Wolff had such a good relationship with John Cage was because of their mutual understanding of each other. They respected their current ideologies and learned new techniques from one another. And that, in a way, is what the American School did for Music: introducing other ways for music to be notations. Of course, this was still before the time where some compositions looked like they more belonged in an art collection than on a music stand. But that’s another matter entirely.