Classical Music | Ensemble Music

Recorded on 08/04/1997, uploaded on 02/05/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

(performed on synthesizers by John Ferguson, Rachel Iwaasa, Jonathan Mann, Mark Williams, Gregory Powell)

Christian Wolff was born in France and came to the USA in 1941.  He studied Comparative Literature at Harvard, where he earned both a B.A. and, in 1963, a Ph.D.  As a composer Wolff is largely self-taught.  In the fifties he was associated with the "New York Group" of musicians that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor.  While Wolff's earliest music (1950-1957) is traditionally notated and often extremely limited in terms of pitch (his Duo for Violins uses only three pitches), his music from 1958-1964 shows the influence of Cage's indeterminacy.  Beginning in the 1970's and continuing to this day, Wolff's music is highly political in content, aiming to promote ideas of democratic socialism. Currently he serves on the faculty of Dartmouth College as professor of Music, Classics, and Comparative Literature.

Like his colleagues Feldman and Brown, Wolff was not a "follower" of Cage; he found his own unique approach to aleatoric composition:  the technique of "cueing."For Five or Ten People can be performed, as the title suggests, by either five or ten players, on any instruments.  Each player reads his own part; each part comprises nine events.  These events contain various graphic symbols, which instruct the player to play various numbers of pitches (chosen freely by the player) in varying numbers of timbres.  The placement and duration of the sounds is usually determined by some type of coordination with sounds made by the other players, i.e. "cues." A typical direction, for example, might be to play two tones in two timbres, legato, beginning fifteen seconds after the next tone heard, and ending at the start of the next tone heard.  The most aleatoric element, then, is the omission of specific pitches and the lack of specific note durations, although both those parameters are, on occasion, roughly specified.  The most characteristic and interesting aspect of the music is the unique sound of the players reacting to each other, a sound made clear by the virtually total freedom of choice of materials.  The form of the piece is quite malleable as well--players may choose and repeat events as they wish, with only the requirement that at least once during the performance, the players must simultaneously begin at the left side of the page and read the nine events straight through from left to right.  In this performance, the players begin and end with the complete left-right run-through, with a "middle section" consisting of freely chosen events (A-B-A form).

The choice to play the piece on synthesizers is, admittedly, a radical interpretation.  Wolff probably imagined the timbral changes in the piece transforming, say, an ordinary violin tone to col legno, rather than an electronic flute sound to an electronic organ sound, or to some abstract electronic noise.  While the patch changes used on the synthesizers do result in a barrage of unexpected timbres that minimize the perception of each player's individual part, the complexity and wildly varied texture of the synthesized sounds creates a level of excitement that I feel is seldom attained by acoustic instruments.  Also, careful listening will indeed reveal both spatial and overall timbral individuality among the five players, and the use of various "genres" of synthesizers facilitates distinction as well--keyboards from the 1970's (Mini-Moog), 1980's (Casio and Yamaha DX-7) and 1990's (Ensoniq and Alesis) are radically different in character.