Transcript of Christian Wolff Seminar back

An Excerpt (only a portion of the seminar was recorded)

Christian Wolff: [talking about his orchestra piece John, David] So, what I have here are numbers from 1 to 80, which are the
result of chance procedures. Sometimes I get two numbers at once, so that I might have a section which has, say, 32 sounds,
and another one that has 18 sounds. I would orchestrate each separately, keeping in mind the availability of instruments, and
then just run them together, and some of the time I would have one of the sections floating free, so to speak, and the conductor
would simply cue where it starts. The 32 sounds might be running, while the 16 sounds could be cued anywhere after the
beginning of the 32, and then it would run by itself. It may even be in a slightly different tempo. When it's all done, the 32 sounds
continue, and the conductor has to sort of keep track of that. So that's a kind of time-space layering in the piece.

The other condition, and I don't remember all the details of it, has to do with (I don't always adhere to it, but most of the time I
do) the possible total of 80 "songs" (or sections, you may say) which are divided into groups of 9 or 10, and each group is given
a specific characteristic. I don't remember all the details, but it has a fairly simple order, so that all the low numbers, songs from
1 through 9, are loud. And then, another set involves very long sounds. Another set involves loops or some kind of repetitive
pattern. I think you'll be able to hear these things; that's why I mention them. There are about 6 more groupings, but I don't
remember it exactly. [Laughs]

Student: When you say loops, do you mean rhythmic groups?

Wolff: Yes. Some notion of repetition. Sometimes it's very direct; you'll hear it.

Student: So just to clarify about the sounds; you'd say 4 events, 4 sounds that can be repeated?

Wolff: Yes, in some cases. Sometimes, if the number in the song is divisible, say 32, then an 8-note phrase could be repeated 4
times, for instance.

Student: So 32 could be, like, 32 eighths?

Wolff: Possibly, yes.

Student: Christian, you said you had categorized the sets of songs by instrumentation?

Wolff: No, not instrumentation. It's only by these sort of generic characteristics.

Student: So then, dynamics and what else?

Wolff: What did I say-this grouping.

Student: Yes. Degree of repetition.

Wolff: Degree of repetition. I can't remember exactly at the moment how I did it. If I look at the score for a while, I might be able
to remember. I have this problem. I don't know about the rest of you, but once I finish a piece, I tend to forget

Student: How it was written?

Wolff: how it was written. [Laughter] It's not as though I want to be difficult about it; I don't know why, I don't remember it.
There's a limityou are young, so you haven't had this experience yet, but I find that the older one gets, [Laughter] there's a
limited number of ideas you can retain in your circuitry up there. You may not notice it. I noticed it first in my teaching, actually.
(Christian Wolff was a professor of Classics at Dartmouth College from 1970 to 2000.) I taught a course on X, right? And I've
made notes and all, and so forth, and I put those away. And five years later, I go back to this material. Initially I read the text that
I'm going to teach, and so forth, and I come up with what seem to me brilliant new ideas, and then I look at my notes from five
years ago-it's all there already. [Laughter]. So it's been there all along.

I believe that when you're composing, it really helps to be able to encounter things as though they are first-time ideas. If you
kind of forget how you've done something, then if you do it again, at least you do it in the spirit of thinking that you're doing it for
the first time. I mean, you're kidding yourself a little bit, obviously, and you do have explicit conscious recourse to earlier stuff,
but nevertheless, that little element of not knowing exactly "Did I do this before?" you're dealing with a certain freshness of
attitude.

Petr Kotik: It's interesting to hear you say, "I don't remember how I did it," because most of the time I also forget how I did
something, as far as methodology. I have a vague idea, but I forget the exact procedure. It seems to me that this is a different
attitude from the way of thinking about making music as it is known since Schnberg, especially in Europe. It's funny, because I
always thought that there's something wrong with me [Laughter] when I don't remember how did I put something together. And
now when I hear that you are in the same situation, it makes me feel better about it. Did you ever think about it this way, were
you ever surprised about the fact that you can't remember exactly how did you do certain things? Maybe it's important to
remember it after all.

Wolff: This is how I feel: If somebody wants to analyze a piece of mine, great; that's fine. But I don't have to do that. It often
happens that when somebody comes to visit me. He works very hard trying to analyze my piece, and says, "I understand that
thing there, but why did you use this interval here?" And I have this terrible moment where I cannot remember why did I do it. I
think about it, and sometimes I can figure it out. Usually I can reconstruct in principle what I was doing at the time when I
composed the music. I know that I had a reason for everything that I did.

Kotik: Why should we stay involved in the work, which has been finished?

Wolff: Petr, that's a different issue

Petr Kotik: Well, once the work's finished, it's over. What I mean is, one is focused on the work which follows, and the past is
not that interesting any more.

Wolff: Think of Stockhausen, with his ten volumes of writings. He tells you exactly how he composed every single piece he ever
wrote. [Laughter]

Student: Don't you actually think it was what you were talking earlier about, validating the music or giving it authenticity? In
other words, there is a method that a composer will use strictly so that he can form an environment with which he can work, and
there are other things that are used simply to make it a little more authentic or validated. And maybe the reason why you forget
how precisely the work was done is because once you've given yourself to it, it doesn't matter whether that way was valid or
authentic or not, it was simply a way to do it. And so

Wolff: It's possible. But don't forgetI mean, the truth of the pudding is in the eating. In other words, if the piece has come out
in a way that I think is O.K., then that's it. I've done it. It's true; you'd think that I would say, "O.K., if that one came out so good,
why don't I check out the system and do it again?" Do you think that it is strange that I don't want to do that?

Student: No, but there are composers that think this way.

Wolff: Think of Milton Babbitt or someone like Charles Wuorinen; Petr's right, when he asks this question. But then, it is true
that I associate more with Europe in the notion that one has to be systematized. There's a very strong sense of tradition here in
Europe, and one way to relate to it, even if you're changing it, is to show that you have your own method which is analogous to
the earlier method, and so on and so forth. I mean here [there] seems to be a stronger need to make historical connections. In
the United States it is different. The country has such a crazy history-it's so diverse in its origins as a country-that we seem to
have less need to justify things historically.

Petr Kotik: In the '50s, I remember it very well, the method very much justified the music.

Wolff: Yes, definitely.

Petr Kotik: And a lot of composers of my generation, we sort of tried to get away from it. The analytical program notes, for
example. My goodness. [Laughter] You had to explain everything in detail, and if you couldn't do it, then there was something
wrong with you. If you did explain your method well, if you offered the right explanation.

Wolff: Nothing else mattered. That's the danger, that you get so wrapped up in these ideas that you forget that you are making
something that people will listen to.

Student: Definitely, in the post-World War II [period], music moved in that direction, of creating systems as the means to justify
the end. But I think it's important not to forget that a lot of composers-Boulez especially-were drawn to a certain sound world,
just like everybody else is. They wanted to get a certain sound.

Wolff: And inventing a new method was the way to get it.

Student: Yes, that's it. If you look at, for example, at the Boulez-Cage correspondence, there's one specific point where Boulez
talks about working on-maybe it was Structures II-he said, "Right now I'm revising the piece and taking out the unfortunate
coincidences," which means, that even though he had the system, he wasn't just living and dying by it; he was going back and
saying, "Well, I'm hearing this major third here," or whatever, "let me take it out." And I think only later, Milton Babbitt, for
example, and others, struck a kind of [irrational] situation. I think that in the end, these types of discussions, justifications and
analyses, going back to what you were talking about earlier, about this limited circuitry that we have going on, and looking for
ways to open it up and evolve it in ways that can be meaningful and relevant.

Wolff: Yes, right. I think that's one thing. There was a tendency in the '50s, a point that Petr made earlier, which was to let ideas
and concepts predominate. The good composers obviously transcend that. At the second level, you have pieces that are
basically about certain ideas and concepts, and as soon as you realize what is it about, it becomes evident from the music that it
is just a demonstration of a theorem, so to speak.

Student: The main point is that the real composers are able to transcend a method, no matter what. The obvious example is Le
Marteau Sans Maitre. For me, to listen to the piece, I couldn't care less if it was totally serialized or not. I would never guess that
such a piece could be based solely on a method.

Petr Kotik: There is another issue here, maybe also a central issue: Why are we using these methods, and not proceeding
intuitively on our own, without any tools or devices outside of ourselves? These systems we are talking about now, Boulez for
example, we are talking about outside devices. Beethoven didn't need any outside devices.

Wolff: Well, he had.

Petr Kotik: I don't think that he had any less of a system. The difference is that he was able to internalize his method in such a
way that he didn't need any outside device.

Student: What's functional harmony, though? [Laughs] It's a system.

Petr Kotik: Yes, and you can internalize all the rules of harmony and counterpoint, so that you don't need any outside device,
such as graph paper, I Ching, or whatever. You cannot internalize I Ching. You cannot internalize graphs. But you can
internalize harmony, which is perhaps as rigorous as all the other methods. To my knowledge, nobody ever asked [the]
question, "Why are we using all these methods that can't be internalized?"

Student: What if a composer, with a specific task of writing a new piece of music, is inventing his or her own new system as
part of the creative process? How is that, in itself, external? There is already a sense of

Petr Kotik: You're talking about a different thing. My question was not whether the system is original or adopted.

Student: But what is external [in] it?

Petr Kotik: By external I mean something where you need a device outside of yourself. Dodecaphony is external, for example.
You have to watch for the twelve tones to appear in certain sequences and for that, you have to write all your calculations on a
separate piece of paper. That piece of paper is external. You can't proceed without having that piece of paper around. Chance
operations based on I-Ching is external. Beethowen didn't need any such devices.

Student: What you are saying implies a sort of intellectual/emotional schism.

Petr Kotik: True, composing is intellectual. If somebody says composing is not intellectual, he doesn't know what he's talking
about, or he's kidding himself.

Student: I wouldn't suggest that. There are composers working intuitively-Morton Feldman was mentioned earlier; maybe
there's a difference in degrees of how explicit the system is.

Wolff: It's a big question. It occurred to me a while ago that in the I Ching, or in Cage's chance procedures, that there's
something uncanny about it. It would appear on the surface to be totally rational; that this kind of chance operation is a
completely mechanical sort of chance, isn't it? As other people pointed out, it is sort of a post-serialization, as it were-the other
side of the same coin-and both methods were highly rationalized systems, in a certain sense. But what's so uncanny about
Cage is that, in spite of the fact that he's used these chance procedures, what came out was always Cage. The question should
be directed the other way around: Do we know of any composer who tried to use the I Ching, or chance procedures, and
produced music that was anything like Cage's music? I can't begin to imagine anyone. That's the weird part of it. Or to put it
another way, Cage didn't internalize the method in your sense, in the sense that Beethoven internalized the functional harmony
[system], but he knew exactly how to use it; he knew how to apply the system with such skill that, in a sense, he knew exactly
what he was going to get, what he meant to get out of it, and he was a very good composer, so he got very good things out of it.
That's that. Anyway, let's move on.

Student: I'm very eager to hear you continue about your piece.

Wolff: We will be here all night. [Laughter] So, let's just hear John, David, O.K.? I'll play a chunk of the first part, and then I'll just
fast-forward it.

Student: What were those chords?

Wolff: They come out of the shape-note hymn. There's slight distortion here. When you listen, you get the general idea. O.K.
That's that.

Student: What about the orchestration?

Wolff: That basically was ad hoc. I tried to make it as clean and transparent as possible. Hocketing was one of the possibilities.
There's a lot of moving back and forth between the instruments. And then when there were two songs going on at once, I tried
to distinguish them also by their color, another part of the instrumentation.

The other thing I had in mind-in a way extramusical, but I tried to use it musically-I was interested in having everybody in the
orchestra to have some presence at some point. So I made an effort to distribute the material among all the players as much as
possible. I thought, those poor guys at the back of the violin section. So there's a solo for the tenth violin player. [Laughter].

Petr Kotik: How do you feel about vibrato?

Wolff: I think, listening to this third-generation copy of the recording, it's a little worse than it is actually on the original record. I
would have preferred less vibrato. The conditions of the performance and the preparation of this piece were not so good.

Petr Kotik: You mean not enough rehearsal time?

Wolff: Exactly.

Petr Kotik: But saying "no vibrato" takes ten seconds.

Wolff: I know, but it would have introduced a whole dimension.

Petr Kotik: Not for the strings, they can usually play non-vibrato without a problem. But the oboe, she is trying to sound like.

Wolff: Yeah.

Student: Are you happy with this?

Wolff: No, no.

Student: This is the Donaueschingen performance, isn't it?

Student: Just a quick question about the melodic language. I know you said earlier there were a lot of different rhythmic and
pitch decisions. Can you elaborate a little bit more on it? I noticed, or thought I noticed, distinctly, two different melodies and
actually a lot of variety, which I really enjoyed.

Wolff: Yes, clearly. There was that. I was not shy about it. And there are a couple of songs in there, even before the percussion
comes in. The first long song, for the strings for example-that's sort of a Renaissance technique-I mean, it is a song, quoted
literally, except that the rhythm is grossly distorted. You can still almost hear at least the pitch movement of the song. The
trumpets have something like that too.

It's funny. Some of it is borrowed; some is not. I've used songs so much now that I can sort of fake it. [Laughter] Not fake it,
exactly, but I find myself dropping into that style. And then-I can tell you later a little bit more what I do with the songs-one thing I
use is a lot of transpositional procedures, often very simple. For instance, I keep the intervals of a song but simply invert some
of them. It's amazing what a small change does. You may have the first four or five notes of the song and just invert the next
one, and suddenly it moves the thing off into a totally different area. Then, once you're in that new space and you're ready to
continue, it doesn't take a whole lot more to keep it moving.

Student: Do you mean inverting just one interval and then continuing in the original tonality, or do you continue in an inverted
version of the song?

Wolff: Once I've made the inversion, then I'm already at a new point. I might continue with the intervals of the melody, but
they're transposed. They are in a different context, because once you made a move, suddenly it's off on that. But it's also true
that once I start to do these changes, I tend to do more of it than less. Let's put it that way.

Student: That part about characterizing what you're calling a song. Are the intervals vocally negotiable?

Wolff: Up to a point. I might write octaves for example; that's certainly possible.

Student: Did your recent songs have anything to do with your affinity for Ives?

Wolff: Not exactlyI feel a kind of affinity for Ives, but I use the song material in a rather different way. I never think of Ives.

OK. Let me talk a little bit about the current piece, and then we'll call it a day.

The current piece is for three orchestras, in accordance with a request from Petr Kotik. You should know that Petr Kotik is
responsible for this piece. The idea, as I understood it at the time, was that Petr had revived Gruppen, a classic three-orchestra
piece of Stockhausen. Gruppen is a hassle to put together, so he wanted more of a repertoire for three orchestras. I studied the
score of Gruppen and also listened to it, and decided that, first of all, practical issues-I haven't said anything about that yet-
trying to write for available resources, and possible performances, that's important for me! My first efforts, for example, in
indeterminate music, depended on the possibilities of available players. This factor characterized a lot of my early work; initially
it all came out of practical requirements. For example, Frederic Rzewski and myself were trying to make a complicated piece for
two pianos on a very short notice. There was no way we were going to be able to compose it on such a short notice. The
concert was already scheduled and the piece was on the program. What were we going to do? We came up with this scheme,
in which we determined time lengths and the material to be used within these time lengths, distributed freely within these time
lengths. The material might be a collection of pitches; for example, you needed to play only three pitches within the given time
length, say two seconds. The range of indeterminacy was very wide. You might have, say, a quarter-second to make five
sounds. So you pretty much had to know what you were going to do, because you wouldn't have time to think about it. You had
to be ready to do it and have it there. On the other hand, you might have 30 seconds in which to make three sounds. You'd have
a lot of space; you could wait, do it right away, spread it over the whole period, wait until the very end for the sounds-you had all
of those possibilities. And in rehearsing that, we discovered that you could do the ones where you had the time for and space
themdifferently-you didn't have to do the same thing each time-and as you proceeded, you inevitably would hear what the other
player was doing, and therefore you were almost inevitably tempted to play with it, or respond to it in some sense. So that if
something was happening in your 30-second space and you hadn't played yet, you might kind of wait to see where it's going, or
decide if you wanted to cut into it or latch onto it or make it deviate in some way. So that's what got me interested in the whole
issue of back-and-forth between players in a situation that was, in one sense, improvisation, and in another sense, not an
improvisation, with material clearly specified.

Now, getting back to the three orchestras.

Petr Kotik: And practicality.

Wolff: Practicality in the three orchestras was this: I said, O.K.: If I started with Stockhausen's setup of 109 musicians, maybe
we [could] get it together for this performance, we will do it this time in Ostrava, but when is this piece ever going to be done
again? [Laughs] And the amount of work that's going to be involved. That seemed to be inefficient and a drag. So, I thought, first
of all, I wanted to make something that would possibly get more performances later on.

Next thing, I was going to make a different piece from the one you just heard [John, David], which is, in a sense, quite
conventional. What I mean is, John, David has a score, it's all laid out and very carefully notated, the parts are perfectly in order.
It's written in the way an orchestra piece should be done. Here, on the other hand, I knew that I'm dealing with three orchestras
and that they have already performed a piece by Alvin Lucier. So, I created a different kind of a piece. We will see how things
will work out. I hope it comes out very well. Now, of course I don't know precisely how things are here with the orchestra, but this
time I'm really taking chances. [Laughs] With the piece in a way, I am going back to a way of working with a larger, or potentially
very large, ensemble, the way which I first did with Burdocks, a piece that was set up so that it can be done as a chamber piece,
or with a large group of people. Let's talk about it little bit.

Burdocks is a piece that has 10 parts, or 10 different compositions. I wanted each one to have a distinctive identity. And if you
have any notion of the piece, you can tell, "They're doing number six," or "They're doing number three," or "That's number two
over there," and so forth. On the other hand, it was also set up in such a way that you could make your own selection of the
different pieces. You didn't have to play them from 1 through 10, you could do them in any order, you could do them in any
combination. And you could do various versions of each one. You could do, for example, a performance which would be five
versions of number two. Imagine the various possibilities for permutations and combinations you can have. And all that
depended a lot on the kind of forces you had. The minimum number of players that we've done it with was about five, but it's
been done with up to about 60 or 65 players. The tape I have of that performance here must have at least 60 players. In this
case, it becomes an orchestra piece. You open, in a way, an interesting issue of dimension and scale. The chamber versions
tend to be shorter, more compact and concentrated. The large-group versions tend to be longer, and need time to unfold. The
first performance with the Scratch Orchestra, for instance, ran an entire evening. We did an intermission in the middle. They did
multiple versions of different parts, and so on. They did it with at least 60 people, which was fantastic. So there is that kind of
flexibility. Burdocks was written basically for the Scratch Orchestra, which was-amateur is probably not the right word-some of
the musicians were amateurs and there were also some professionals, sort of musical dropouts from the jazz scene and from
the classical scene. So there were people who could play very well or quite well, but there were others who were artists,
performance artists or whatever, who couldn't play anything, who could just make sounds and do various noises. It was written
for that situation, and for instance, one of the pieces-the last one, the number 10-you simply had this text instruction: "Flying,
crawling or possibly sitting still." That's all there is: The players have to work out what to do with that. You can see that a non-
musician could have quite a good time with it. [Laughs] A couple of the guys came walking in to the performance with small
wings attached to their shoulders. [Laughter].

Now, I realized that this was not going to happen with the orchestra in Ostrava. [Laughter] The Janek Philharmonic is not
going to come in the middle.

Petr Kotik: Although we're going to perform a piece by the Czech composer Martin Smolka, where the conductors will play
badminton.

Wolff: [Laughs] Everything is possible then, but I decided to do this piece for a professional orchestra, rather than for a group
like the Scratch Orchestra. This piece has hardly any score at all. There's only one section which has a full score, and the rest of
it is either subgroups of the orchestra, or music which is, at least potentially, available to everybody.
Now, another thing: Partly for practical reasons and partly for musical reasons, I reduced the 109 players to 80. I'll tell you in a
minute how and why. The general principle was: 80 players, big orchestra, three spaces, three conductors. That's the maximum
situation for the piece. However, I also wanted to have a possibility to do the piece with a lesser number of people, a more
modest situation perhaps, all the way down to one musician. There is material here that can be done as a solo, and would stand
up as a solo. To generalize, I would say you can make reductions. The applicable principle is subtraction at any time. And now
musically, the reductions come from a practical perspective, but also from a musical one, which is: I like to write counterpoint,
realizing that it's really important for each single voice to be really good, so good that it would stand by itself as a solo. When
you do counterpoint-and you probably know this-you work very hard; let's say you compose a beautiful tenor line. And then you
add another voice, which sounds interesting. By the time you add a third voice, the tenor line seems kind of lost; you can't quite
hear it anymore. And it kind of breaks your heart to lose the original presence of that line. And you think, would it be nice to get
rid of all the other voices again, and just leave the tenor line all by itself? The line has to be that good to stand on its own. Now,
the big issue of course is, what is "good"? To me at least, it is something interesting enough, and worth having it go all by itself.

So that's the challenge: to make something that you can layer, add onto, and weave together; something that makes sense, and
works and so forth, but is also possible any time-if you want to pull one of the threads out-to have it all by itself. Now, there are
judgments that you have to make, obviously, because of the duration, and perhaps even the tempo. If you've got three
orchestras with all the space between them, and you're trying to do a fairly intricate counterpoint, you have to take it at a
relatively slow tempo, or you're just going to lose it. When you have a solo, then you're much freer as far as tempo goes. So
there are [variables] here, but the basic idea is that everything should be able to stand on its own. This is not to say that the
whole piece will work as a solo. [Laughs] The piece consists of 15 sections, so that's already little bit different than Burdocks.
And a handful of the sections are-I call them parasitic, they require that some other section is performed together with them.

Now, let's talk about the instruments. Stockhausen has 12 percussionists. For me, six seemed like plenty enough. Then I
reduced the strings. There are 25 violins in Gruppen, I got it down to 16. I kept all the viola players, the double basses, and I
threw out all the cellos. That decision with the cellos had to do with sonority. I found the texture clearer without the cellos. I
heard a couple of years ago, for the first time in ages, a live performance of the St. Matthew Passion which moved me
enormously. And I noticed how good the orchestral texture sounded. I was trying to figure out what made it so transparent, so
clean and clear, and then I noticed that there are no cellos there. There might have been one cello in the continuo group, but
basically there is bass and there is an organ. So you get the bass anchored this way, but there are no lines in that middle-lower
baritone register, and it cleans out the texture very much. It makes the other instruments sort of hang, suspended, very
beautifully transparent in the upper-middle register, and in the upper mezzo-soprano register. That's how I got the notion. I hope
the cellos don't mind.

Petr Kotik: Oh, the cello section will love you. [Laughter] They'll get paid, and they will have a break. [Laughter]

Wolff: I figured there would be some benefit.

O.K. Another thing with the instrumentation: I got rid of all of Stockhausen's keyboard instruments. In the percussion I [specify
only] generic metal, wood, and skin instruments.

As for the brass, the maximum version has six trumpets, eight horns, six trombones and a tuba. I thought that it would be an
interesting challenge, because the brass can blot everything else very much, so the question is, what do you do with that? I like
this kind of a challenge.

I don't want to walk you through the whole piece, I will just quickly describe a few sections. The first three sections are one-page
pieces. They can be used flexibly; the first one is really flexible. Actually, it is a piece that I made for Alvin Lucier's 70th birthday.
The melodic material adds up to 70 notes, with a notion of having one note for each year. I wanted to extend it so the piece has
two sets of 70 notes as the melodic material. I looked at the piece and I thought, "Well, why not try it for an orchestra?" The
natural extension of the idea is to have the entire orchestra play it, allowing the instruments to read the notes as written, which is
to say, combining treble and bass clefs. This way you automatically generate a harmony. Actually, what you have here is
heterophony. But it's a kind of heterophony that I like a lot because, when you read simultaneously treble and bass cleffs, you
get parallel sixths that are not quite symmetrical. They're either minor or major sixths. And when you read two lines, you get
these interesting shifts. The fifths become tritons and all kinds of funny things happen. It happens within a fairly narrow range,
but still, it's enough to keep you on your toes.

Student: How do you deal with transposition for transposing instruments?

Wolff: You can play the material in any transposition you want. So the basses will be an octave lower, B-flat clarinet a whole
tone down, etc., etc. So it can sound, harmonically, pretty thick. And again, you can do various versions. If you've six
instruments, you just do it with six instruments. It could be exciting to do with the maximum number of instruments here, which is
80. Imagine all those colors that are possible to do with such a group. Then, you have the spatial possibilities of 3 orchestras.
Remember, you compose on a piece of paper, and everything is sort of in one dimension. You have to keep reminding yourself
that you're writing for something which will sound in two or three parts. You think, wait a minute, that's Trumpet 1 and Trumpet 3;
well,Trumpet 1 is over here; Trumpet 3 is about 40 yards away, all the way over there. That's a very important ingredient of
what's going to happen: something to keep in mind.
So, this is the first section. I think it's the only one Petr and I have talked about, so far. I had suggested a very modest
arrangement of it, maybe with six or seven instruments, but Petr wants to involve the whole orchestra. So we are going to go
"whole hog." [Laughs]

The rhythms are fluid. Occasionally, they have a definition-16th notes, for example-but the tempo is not indicated. The
conductors may have to sit this one out, except to help rehearsing it. The notation suggests phrasing, but duration of the notes
within the phrasing are free. And then there's sort of a suggestion-it's not compulsory-for the phrases to be used as natural
phrases, that is to say, for a wind instrument, the breath will determine the length of the phrase. You can make them long or
short within that breath, but you have to get to the end before your lungs collapse. And with the strings, the analogy would be
the length of a bow. It's not a requirement, just a suggestion.

The second section is similar, it's actually a variation on the first section. We're dealing again with 70 notes. But there is a
specific rhythmic definition in the pulse and, where needed, it will be conducted. Otherwise nothing else is specified. The
possibility that there are different tempi in the different orchestras is available, so you could get that kind of heterophony, slight
shifts of tempos, and so forth. There are going to be three sub-sections; possibly four. I am still working on it.

The third section picks up on the rhythmic idea. It has only rhythmic notation, no pitches at all. And the instructions specify that
the playing should be primarily characterized by non-pitched sound. Regular instruments become percussion instruments and
you get these rhythmical patterns that emerge from it. Occasionally, there's a harmonic sign over a note. That means to play an
identifiable pitch. That's number three.

The sections do not have to be performed in order. We still have to work out the order.

Number four is simply a piece for violins. It's for 16 violins spread over the three orchestras. I'm specifically thinking about
spacing and the location of the sound. And with the color of the same instruments, you can really hear the spatial situation
there. Again, I am getting into this vernacular music material. The first line is simply a quotation of a Shaker hymn tune. How
many of you know about Shakers? I'm not going to give you a lecture about Shakers, just in short: It's a religious group that
came, originally, from England. American music has been interestingly affected by the music-making of these various religious
groups. Not just those who came from England, but also from Moravia. I thought I would mention it because that's where we are
now, in Moravia. Moravians have their own music tradition that goes back, at least, to the 18th century in the American colonies.

So this is the Moravian side [Laughs] of Shaker melodies, whether it's an analogous group, I don't know. That's what's going on
in this section.

One can do the first piece perhaps without a score; that is, where the various sections are cued in performance and possibly
overlapped, they would run simultaneously, and so forth. Whether we want to do that, I don't know. I like a variety of
relationships, sometimes with several layers going on at once, and other times I like just one instrument playing.

Student: Excuse me. Do you decide all this before the performance?

Wolff: Yes, absolutely. You have to. We're dealing here with a professional orchestra. They have to know precisely what to do.
The whole thing is already pretty scary because there isn't a fixed score that has each part in a predetermined place. It would be
ideal to have a conductor simply say, like, for instance in Earle Brown's Available Forms, "We're going to do section six.
Everybody, let's go." But I think, under the circumstances here, it's kind of safer to fix the music beforehand. It's actually the
same with Burdocks, which I described earlier. We always made a definite plan for a Burdocks performance.

Petr Kotik: I would like to make a footnote: Many people have a false impression that a lot of music, like Christian's and
especially Cage's music, is sort of wishy-washy; that you can make major decisions at the last minute, or even on the stage.
Such a thing has always been a rare exception. David Tudor would tell you that everything he has ever performed by Cage has
always been pre-determined, practiced, established and played as if it was a score by Mozart. Everything.

Wolff: Since you mention Cage, and I have been around Cage; this piece has got, not everything, but an awful lot of stuff in it
from my past, it's all over the place. We are at the issue of content again. The piece has associations, a lot of them personal
associations, like Alvin's birthday piece. The next part for example, section five, is a kind of "Earle Brown" piece-in other words,
my version of an Earle Brown piece. And there are various other people who have presences in the piece.

Let me pause on that for a minute to talk about the title Ordinary Matter. It's a title that really appealed to me, and it seems like a
very modest title, but, in a funny way, it's very presumptuous. [Laughter] I ran across an article in a newspaper just as I was
starting to write the piece and I didn't have a title yet. The headline was "Calculating Contents of the Cosmos." It said "Ordinary
matter makes up only 4.5% of the universe." We're talking astronomy here. The article continued something like this: "Three
independent teams of astronomers presented the most precise measurements to date of the infinite universe, as it existed
approximately 14 billion years ago, exposing telltale reverberations" -and this is really quite nice-they called it "Music of
Creation." "The result represents a significant advance in scientists' efforts to understand what happened in the initial split-
second of creation, and how the universe has evolved since its original state. The observations provide a new basis for
calculating the content of the universe, confirming mounting evidence that ordinary matter, all the shining stars and galaxies,
plus people, computers, cats and so on, account for" - and this really impressed me - "less than 5% of the whole." If you want a
sense about smallness, here it is. [Laughs] "The rest take the form of disputed dark matter, 30%, and an even more enigmatic
dark energy in space, 65%." [Laughter]

O.K., that's the title. We've gone through number four, I should now get back to number five. This is a funny piece. I had the
idea-I actually worked it out, it's very simple-and when I actually came to notate it, it took me a half-page of single-spaced typing
to provide the instructions, while the piece simply consists of only four chords, each of them having 15 notes. There are 13
specified instruments, which are playing those chords. The strings are doing double-stops.

Basically, the piece consists of these four chords. Each set of the 13 instruments is in one of the three orchestras. It's actually
the same piece repeated three times, each time in a different location. The chords are cued by the conductors. Now, the
conductors finally get a chance to do something which affects, directly, the piece. They can cue those chords at time intervals of
their choice, which means that they are listening to each other-it's unlikely that they'll all decide to cue a chord together. By
cueing of those chords they play with each other's entrances. It's suggested that they have a reasonable amount of time
between the chords because there's additional material for each of the individual players, consisting of a maximum of about four
pitches, sometimes none at all, but up to four pitches. The players are allowed to improvise with those pitches, but they have to
be ready to play [the] chord note whenever it's cued. And then, the next thing that happens is that it will have to be decided,
whether you start, say, with chord 1 and then let the musicians improvise with their subsidiary notes before entering the chord 2,
or the other way around-whether the musicians start with the improvisation and you cut in with a chord entrance. The musicians,
playing their 4, 3, 2, 1 notes, can play as much or as little as they want, including not playing at all, but have to be ready at any
time to come in with the right note of the chord.

A final wrinkle: Each chord begins and ends together, so it's a sonic object, so to speak. But one of the four chords can be
sustained for a free duration after the initial attack, so the object kind of falls apart, so to speak.

Then number six is-finally-a piece that has an exactly notated score. Here it is-I haven't had time to copy the whole thing yet.
Strictly speaking, it's a 40-part counterpoint for 40 instruments, each instrument having its own line. The material is rhythmically
simple, and there are no specified pitches. Instead of a music staff, each instrument has a line. You have a note either on the
line or above it. When you're on the line you can choose any pitch, except it has to be lower than the previous one above the
line. When you're above the line, any pitch is O.K. which is higher than a previous one that was on the line. The simplest version
is just to play two pitches. What's crucial is the rhythmic dimension.

There is a connection to this piece which I might mention. The procedure of composing this section is something that I stumbled
on fairly recently. I mentioned earlier Renaissance and medieval music. There are these occasional musical wonders, one of
which you must know, is a Thomas Tallis motet called In Spem Alium, a 40-part motet. It's actually for eight choirs of five voices
each. Nobody knows why he did it or under what circumstances, but it is absolutely astonishing. The score looks like Ligeti.
[Laughter] The important point is-it is rare that all the forty voices are all active at the same time. The piece blew me away when
I first heard it, because it was such a wonderful demonstration of the principle in which a change of quantity can reach a point
where it changes quality. In Spem Alium is no longer about counterpoint. It's not, anymore, 40 parts of counterpoint. When
you're above about 20 or 30 voices, you have a texture of internally oscillating sonority. It's absolutely astonishing. That piece
has haunted me for quite a while.

What happens in the Tallis motet, because of all that voice-leading, is that the linear element gets out of control. With that many
voices you do have to make jumps. It's very hard to write continuous lines. So there are very funny things in the voicing-octave
jumps or fifth jumps-in order to avoid clashes. It gives it a very special sort of rhythmic flavor, which one does not normally get.

Now, about counterpoint in my piece: It's rhythmic, and the composition procedure reminds me a little bit of the kind of
procedure Petr was describing in his lecture earlier. I don't actually use graph paper, though I probably would save myself time if
I did. I make runs of vertical lines. And I have rhythmic groups: Let's say I'll have a sequence which is 2, 1, 4, or whatever; so
you make a space of 2, then you have a sound; a space of 1, then you have a sound; a space of 4, then you have a sound.
O.K.? That gives me a rhythmic movement. I still have other things to decide, and toward the end it changes a bit-for example, I
[tend to use] a punctuation to the point of entrances with sustain sounds from here to here to here. But in most cases, I proceed
after spaces 2, 1 and 4 as a kind of identifying points.

And then other things can be done. I can group it. Let's see-that's not going to be very interesting, but let's try it anyway -start
again from here, but come back to the beginning, so you have 1, 2 and let's go to another line, making a little bit of difference
there. And then you have 1 here and 1, 2, 3, 4 there.

There is a kind of a two-part counterpoint, which in fact is actually a fairly banal [Laughs] pattern, ba-bum-ba-bum, bum, ba-ba,
over that period. But something else might happen when I make this, if I loop it or if I combine it with another sequence. I don't
really know how it will turn out, except in a rather generalized way. That's the kind of thing Petr spoke about, and you can try to
find out yourself-at least I do, or we do-it is about methods you can only partially control. I mean, you do control them, obviously,
and you have to invent the system in the first place, but what you're actually doing is to create strategies, put yourself in a
situation where you're focused on the work, you're doing very precise things, but what's going to come out is going to surprise
you, or at least take you somewhere where you did not expect to be. If you do not like what happens, then you have to rethink
the whole strategy. But in this case-and sometimes I do come up with a pattern that I really don't think is worth it-but most of the
time, I've gotten the hang of it now, how to compose with this kind of a method that the rhythms that come out of it really delight
me, especially when I start piling them up one on top of the other.
Student: A very short general question. By working on the piece, did you have any idea, in general, about the way it will sound
before you have started inventing the methodology? Or do you proceed the other way-having invented the method, the rational
formula, you just let yourself to be surprised by the results?

Wolff: I'm going to evade you. I don't know. I tend not to think of a theory first and then [try] it out. I tend to I make up an idea,
ad hoc, and then proceed. Honestly, I really don't know. I may have had the idea about the music, and then just [try] the method
out a little bit. And then really work with it when I see that, yes, this is working out well; this is what I want. The rhythm is crucial.
In some sense, if you don't have rhythm, forget the whole thing. To understand rhythm, it is absolutely basic.

Student: Have you had this idea of the rhythm before you started working with the method, in order to achieve the difference or
movement?

Wolff: Yes. For me, it's so tempting to use all the irregular fives and sevens over three, and all of that, inventing all sorts of
intricate rhytms. What I'm trying to do is to get a rhythmic quality

Student: Diversity?

Wolff: within a very simple set of parameters. And this method seems to do it.

Student: The answer, then, as I understand it: You had had the idea that you need this kind of diversity by not following the
ordinary way of creating the rhytm.

Wolff: Right.

Let me just say something briefly about another piece, and then we can possibly hear and that piece as well. The piece is called
Fall, and it has an alternative title which is Phthinoporon, a Greek word. The piece is dedicated to Xenakis. I'm very moved by
Xenakis' percussion pieces. It took me a long time to get into his music, and now I'm really into it seriously, I love it. So that's
why the Greek title; he uses all Greek titles.

The idea about Fall has a sort of double sense. It could refer to a season, which is what the Greek word means. But the Greek
word has a very beautiful meaning which is not just Fall or Autumn in our sense; it literally means the falling away or the decay
of the summer season. So it has a whole kind of little story within it.

I don't know which came first. It's the chicken-and-egg kind of an issue. But the idea behind the piece relates to the notion of
decay and fall which is the very nature of percussive sound. Unless you roll, it's always dropping off, there's always a decay of
the sound. Same thing with the piano. The great dilemma for the piano is that the sound is always dying. [Laughter] There's no
way, once you hit a key, to make it get louder. And the same thing is with a drum-once you've hit it, that's it.

So the piece is about that. And I worked it into the piece, in the sense of the general structure. I proceeded more or less
intuitively, chunk by chunk, though here the texture's very monochromatic, it just involves drums. The texture's always such that
it's constantly thinning itself out, so that there's a musical fall or decay, as it were, because of the decreasing density of the
musical information. Then, by the end of the first part of this piece, there is a break where, suddenly, you leave this pattern
completely, and the instruments proceed independently and they [are] now literally using a decay-the length of the sound is
determined by the time it takes for it to die out. And that, of course, is completely dependent on two things: one, on the most and
least resonant part of the instrument that's being struck; and two, dynamics. Obviously, loud sounds will last longer than soft
sounds. And this is used in hocketing situations or simply to indicate durations. So it's that kind of rhythm, which is quite different
from this very completely metrical thing which you had before.

What interests me is the transition; two of the drummers are still within the pattern and the third one is on this freer thing and
eventually they're all in the freer thing. You'll hear that at the end of the section. It runs about five minutes.

[Plays recording of Phthinoporon.]

[End of Seminar]

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