Before immersing myself in this two-CD set, full to the binary brim with the elusive exactitude of the Christian Wolff keyboard music, I bathe and float in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Art of The Fugue. It’s a way of getting ready; a preparation for sound through sound; a cleansing in sound clean, in preparation for sound clean: a rite, a ceremony… yes, a bit like a Japanese tea ceremony. It’s important, if you take sounds seriously. You cannot just rush in from a day at work, turn on the laser show and assume that you’re going to be enlightened. It doesn’t work that way. When I hike in the Lapland mountains, it usually takes me a couple of days to get attuned, to merge with the inherent tempo of the mountains, glaciers and valleys; to really appreciate the wisdom of happiness and the wild silence of stillness. Such is the case here, at the gate of the lofty space wherein Mats Persson, Kristine Scholz and Christian Wolff extend the complex geometry of Wolff’s compositions: jagged progressions of ebony and ivory and asymmetrical mirrors reflecting incalculable realms of existence intellectual, existence mineral and before-the-thought-destroys-it-all existence; lavish rides across the plains with the Erlking…

Frederic Rzewski on Christian Wolff’s music:

Wolff explains that he always knew other pianists, like David Tudor and Frederic Rzewski, which is why he wrote so many pieces for two pianists; more than most other contemporary composers. He says that this isn’t the only reason. He was interested, for instance, in the interaction of two players.

Track 1. Duo 1 (1957) [4:18]

Wolff wrote Duo 1 for himself and Frederic Rzewski, while they were studying at Harvard. Wolff wanted to write in the rigid manner of Darmstadt, but didn’t have the time to be that specific in his notation, which is why he invented a system that he called structured time-spaces, which was a kind of mimicry of the complicated style of Darmstadt composers like Boulez or Stockhausen. The musicians found that rehearsals became very interesting with this method, and the architecture of the music unfolded at the very instant of playing. Please read more initiated explanations about this in the CD booklet.

Sure enough – as the paragraph above hints – this does sound remarkably like early Darmstadt and Donaueschingen rigidity, like the Boulez Sonates 1, 2 & 3 pour piano – but also, I do declare, like Cage’s Etudes Australes, though not quite that wild and disparate.
Peculiar atmospheres rise like humidity out of the playing of master musicians Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson when they touch upon the prepared parts of the piece, which for the most part is unprepared (sic!).

Wolff’s Duo 1 also opens fields of rest and consideration that are very distant in Etudes Australes, which allows for lots of oxygen and some Tai Chi under lofty tree crowns of urban parks; the distant traffic of busy street circuits just a mist around the periphery. Scholz and Persson simply establish points of reference in this open musical maneuver of the senses.

Track 2. Exercise 22 (Bread and Roses for John) (1982) [4:13]

This was written for John Cage’s 70th birthday. The Exercises for two pianists are four, all in all, and they’re all included in this collection. Exercise 22 is constructed around a song written in 1912 for a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with an unusually strong female participation. The title of the piece – Bread & Roses – was the motto of these women.

Oh, this is as different from the preceding peace of mind as can be. It begins head-on in a staggering, jerky march figure, accentuated by bangs and stomps and other percussive events, and the players use their vocal abilities too, in vowels and consonants, exclamations and wheezing saliva spurts. It bangs here, it thuds there, and the melody wanders around the room like a worried cat trying to find a way out, dropping kitchenware to the floor in the process. It swings, it rock and rolls- and when the music leaves the keyboards entirely and retorts to percussive hands-on piano body tappings and bluesy vocal humming, Wolff has taken us far from where we thought we’d be – and we like it!

Track 3. Duet (1960) [8:06]

Björn Nilsson, in his rich liner notes, characterizes this piece as “a fumbling abruptness – the esthetics of the awkward”! I like that! The players perform on the same piano, thus getting entangled in a physical play in which they influence and are influenced.
Christian Wolff has remarked that he has helped raising four children, and during those early years he could only compose in shorter stretches of uninterrupted time, which is why the compositions from these years are made up of a patchwork of highly structured units.

This is music with ample use of pauses and rests, as well as the occasional extraneous performance practices, like playing the strings directly, by hand, in plucking and stroking motions. Sometimes it’s a little like moving around in a magnified old-style alarm clock at the bedside, when you involuntarily happen to touch cog-wheels and swinging pendulums, causing metallic sounds to echo through the hull of the clock, like the sounds of workers inside the hull of a giant ship in the shipyard. The occasional whistling renders this touch-and-go world an absent-minded, cross-eyed, tickling feeling that is distantly related to the emergent summer orgasm of outdoors sex…

Track 4. Exercise 21 (Oh Freedom) (1981) [5:36]

The subtitle alludes on the song Oh Freedom, which was sung by the black regiments during the Civil War. Björn Nilsson observes that this Exercise differs from most other, with it’s two contrasting sections; one atmospherically reminiscent of Satie’s Furniture Music; the other more in line with Wolff’s disparate writing.

A speedy progression, tripping along like women in staircases, running up an down, spaying out towards the sea, hoping and praying that their men’s ships might be approaching from out on the open expanses of vulnerability and fishermen’s sustenance. Yes, worried and hasty music, tumbling and swaying, listening and looking.

Track 5. For Kristine and Mats (from Christian) (1994) [2:23]

This is one of Wolff’s so-called Postcard Pieces; short works written for family members of friends. Wolff has constructed this piece from the letters of the dedicatees Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson, either from the letters that equal a note, or in a notational calligraphy: “an arrangement of pitches that are shaped like the letter – Augenmusik.”

The information above is meaningless in the sense that it doesn’t give much hint on how the result might sound. The only way to find that out is to listen, and that’s why we’re here, right?
Even listening doesn’t really clarify anything. It’s like sitting in the sun, seeing some occasional bird fly by in the corner of one’s eye, while a light gust of warm summer air may fondle you hair like once your divorced wife. In short, it’s balcony-in-June music in late life, without identity, as is, nothing craved, nothing served – simply over-heard; a music completely unto itself: the listener an eavesdropper!

Track 6. Snowdrop (1970) [19:56]

Now this is a stranger… Originally composed in response to a request for a harpsichord piece, but actually constituting a through-composed version of Tilbury 4! As Björn Nilsson remarks, it consists “solely of modal scale fragments and single, longer pitches”. The pitches can be read in either bass or treble clef.

The make-up of the composition has a down-to-earth practical background, as did Duet, which was composed as it was because of the interruption of children. In this case the idea was to write something that could be played by any instrumentalists available, thus preparing for maximum chance of having the work performed! This explains why the composition – and other compositions as well from the period – has an open instrumentation, with the possibility of either bass or treble clef. Wonderful Mother Practicality!

Nilsson explains that this is the first time that the musicians “have the same material and are invited to play slightly out of phase”.

(When I listened to Snowdrop for the first time today, in my combined bed room and study, with the mid-June sun shining in – hot – through the open door to the balcony, facing south-west, I fell asleep on my bed, tired from my bike exercise and my mounting number of years. Before I actually slept, I drifted gradually into a state of hovering; body held firm by planetary gravity, mind soaring, adrift, and these out-of-phase, chasing-each-other progressions of the keyboards danced in front of my inner sight like inexpressible motions of black and white, slightly reminiscent of winding DNA. I had a serious spatial outing through the falling-apart and coming-together dimensions of Snowdrop. I know Kristine and Mats from the several times we met, and now I saw their faces in my half-dream, as they tagged along, disjointed but happily, somehow)

Christian Wolff says that much of his music is written in response to other music, not as an imitation but as a response – and in this case he’s responding to minimalism! He mentions Terry Riley; how Terry’s music was like fresh air, a sense of auditive cleansing – and he responded to that in Snowdrop.
He explains the title too. The piece was written up in Vermont at the end of winter, when the flower Snowdrop is the first to appear (just like in Sweden, where the reviewer resides).

It starts softly in your right ear/speaker, but is followed-up/reflected in your left, right away – and this illusionary trick of giddiness continues, catching you off-guard every time, disturbing your balance in the most exquisite way. Long silences are followed by almost – but not quite; that’s the point – simultaneous re-starts. Sure, I can hear some Riley in here, in fact, so much that it inspired me to withdraw from this writing for a while, into the sunny circumstances on my midday balcony, listening to Terry Riley playing some of his greatest piano music ever: Harp of New Albion, in just intonation… and as I sit there I watch a storm of elm seeds sail by, blown off of nearby tall elm trees (Ulmus glabra), dancing in the sun and in The New Albion Chorale that emerges from Terry Riley’s finger dance across his just intonation Bösendorfer Imperial keyboard. It all comes together in a wondrous intensity of here and now: intensity and relaxation in a tumbling tour-de-force of wind and sun and seeds and tones. I love those experiences, so important to me; center of life, loving excuses for existence.

Mats Persson’s and Kristine Scholz’s playing comes across in splendor and beauty and a microcosm of bulging, bending reflections. If they hadn’t been playing so many years – yes, decades – together, this playing – rising above the moment like reminders of eternity – would not have been possible.

Track 7. Duo II (1958) [8:31]

The booklet:

Wolff wanted to write indeterminately. He found the solution to his wish in Duo II, by letting the sequence of parts be determined by what the two performers hear from each other. The cue might be a high sound or silence, for example. One part has no cue, and the players can use it if there is no cue, if they miss a cue or for some reason need to get out.

Wolff also says that he wanted to create situations that demanded the utmost focus and attention on the part of the performers, thus making it impossible for them to play in an automated way, by clichés.

I find myself sensing some sentient being that moves in invisibility, alerting me only by his occasional treading on the trail, his occasional foot reaching the ground. He stops ever so often, listens, I guess, plots a course – and treads… and the chords or tones of the pianos are the sounds of his walk across the topography: dots in the score, like the veering tracks of a hare across winter expanses of glittering white.

Track 8. Carman Whistle Variations (1972) [6:00]

Christian Wolff worked with Cornelius Cardew, Howard Skempton and John Tilbury when he stayed in England 1967 – 68. This was just before Cardew and his associates formed the now legendary and very important Scratch Orchestra, which – decades later – inspired Leif Jordansson and Pelle Halvarsson in Sweden to found the now very active mailing list and odd project gang Great Learning Orchestra, which has played a number of Cardew pieces, as well as works by Gavin Bryars and Dave Smith, while their latest adventure was a performance of the adapted music from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, at a concert in the Stockholm Culture House, with chainsaw and all!

In 1972 John Tilbury asked his composer friends to compose variations on William Byrd’s Carman’s Whistle. Skempton did, and Wolff. His piece comes in two sections; a chorale with separate repeats of eight, then three pitches, where after eight melodic parts follow, of varying durations, to be shuffled in various combinations, at least three appearing simultaneously.

A stooping figure in rain on an erasure by Swedish electronic music pioneer and visual artist Rune Lindblad: that is the analogy that enters my mind when I hear the first stanzas of this piano poem. Motion is evident, and the somber mood is persuasive, though it gets more carefree after a while, and the melancholic atmosphere a little bent out of shape, like someone wringing a wet towel in a mountain hut…

Eventually all these emotions get lost in a fresh, intellectual progression of tones that are liberating and stumbling, jolly, humorous. Everything is going in the right direction in this composition, from what I can determine! Something looming is lifting, the fog dissolves and the sun rises!

Track 9. Tilbury 2 (1969) [3:44]

Björn Nilsson describes the piece: “One page with sparsely spread sounds.”

As in the case of several other works, this piece – which is held in high esteem by Björn Nilsson - can be read in bass or treble clef, giving double choices for one note and quadruple choices for two notes and so forth. Nilsson also observes that, for example, a chord of three notes gives you eight possible combinations. The last indication that offers variety is that notes within parenthesis can be played softly or with alternation of timbre.

Light, bell-like tones take turn with brown, low rubber tones, like a slow-motion Sonatas and Interludes by John Cage, but I can’t really determine whether there is any preparation at work here; in that case slight. This is something you don’t listen to, but let be, let exist. You might hear it, but not when you’re listening. It’s not for listening, but maybe for hearing. In all the silences there may be something to listen to, and what you hear – i.e. the piano tones that do appear – may be markers to distinguish areas of listening in the midst of hearing… perhaps…

Track 10. Duo II, 2nd version (1958) [4:46]

The treading the trail of version 1 might have been replaced by the knocking on doors and windows here. The tones are very varied: hard, soft, struck, plucked, brooding, banging – and interspersed with the silences that we’ve grown accustomed to in Christian Wolff’s music. It’s a Zen-like meditation. It’s so still, but the Master may wake you up into enlightenment by a slap in your face! (“I’m gonna nock on your door, ring on your bell, tap on your window too – if you don’t come out tonight when the lights are bright, I’m gonna nock and ring and tap until you do!”)

Track 11. Tilbury 2, 2nd version (1969) [3:58]

The rubber is present, as in version 1, but there is more of a soft-spoken attitude here, like someone has been taught a lesson by the fruits of his own deeds, and Karma has created a more carefully treading sensibility, in respect for all that lives and all that doesn’t: a sense of happiness just to be part of the flow of the Universe, and nothing much has to be said, be played. To a high degree, this music is offered in place of silence itself, its direction pointing into silence itself.

Track 12. Exercise 20 (Acres of Clams) (1980) [4:58]

The subtitle comes from a song used by The Clam Shell Alliance, protesting a nuclear plant in the northeast of the US in late 70s. The song is recognizable to an extent unusual in Wolff’s oeuvre.

A rippling of a song, richly rippling out through four hands, trembling as if sung through old throats, the one piano sometimes lining out he melody while the other provides a bumpy rhythm, and the changing tempi or rather the intricate layering, pulls my thoughts into the vicinity of Conlon Nancarrow. Some whistling is allowed also! Proud music at times, native district proud!

Track 13. Duo II, 3rd version (1958) [2:30]

One deep note, followed by a high, and a deep, and a thudding exclamation… silence… preparedness – silence… and haphazard spurs or steamy puffs…

Track 14 (Track 1 CD 2) Two Pianists (1993 – 1994) [21:28]

This extensive piece was composed for Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski. Wolff explains that it is based on a three-part song called Parting Friends, predating the American Revolution of 1776, and usually associated with religious dissidence. Wolff says that the piece “consists of free, episodic variations, and includes quite a bit of fluid, multiple hocketing between the pianists” – i.e., the passing back and forth of sounds between the two players.

It may be observed that Two Pianists is the 2nd work of this double-CD release that reaches a longer duration. Most of the other pieces are much shorter. The 3rd longer work is Braverman Music below, divided into two parts.

When such a large piece towers in front of you, you’re bound to angle your ears differently; not just along the sides of your head as usual, but more in the shape of a runner bowing to get ready, or a skydiver staring out the airplane door.
You eat and drink differently before a long bike round, and you bring raisins along.

The beginning is quite melodic and withheld in the medium range of the keyboard, but that changes fast as higher pitches ramble and roll out of the body of the instruments. There is a kind of breathing going on, as slow, even pointillist, stretches follow the faster spurs, like waves if seen from a distance, heard from a certain state of observant mind.

Tones are allowed to grow and cease at their natural speed, until silence is louder than the last remains of vibrations, but then exceedingly fast figures in the higher pitches talk back like an angry child speaking to an adult.

It is very beautiful how spatial the music is, even when one single melody is going on, as the pianists sort of take charge of different shreds of the melody.

Progressions follow wherein the pianists kind of stumble on their own melodic extensions, reminiscent of Ernesto Diaz Infante’s masterwork Solus.

It is hard to characterize this piece. Many different things are happening – and perhaps, like in Stockhausen’s so-called operas – this is simply what is happening during a certain duration, what is collected and presented accordingly, associated plainly by the common place and time of its existence. That is perhaps why the music can sound like Percy Grainger at one instance, then like Nancarrow and then like… a drunk Stravinsky…

Track 15 (Track 2 CD 2) Exercise 19 (Harmonic Tremors) (1980) [7:46]

Written for Ursula Oppens and Frederic Rzewski, Exercise 19 also, like Exercise 20, contains the indication that the pianists are free to “double any part of what the other player is playing.” An addition is that the players also are allowed to “bend the rhythms a bit.”

This opens so softly, in a solemn love story from the turn of the century 1800 – 1900. Yes, here are impressionist paintings on the wall, glittering reflections on the water of river bends, leaves moving in a summery wind. This is all beauty, covering up the evidence of tragedy that rests at the bottom of each life, and the beauty piles up into huge weights of shining caresses, loving glances and weighty summers passing over the age of Man.

Track 16 (Track 3 CD 2) Sonata (1957) [4:06]

This work is written for three pianos, for a concert with pianists John Cage, William Masselos, Grete Sultan and David Tudor (i.e. four pianists on three pianos…). It has not been performed since the premier. The piece has some preparation indications.

Prepared pianos, prepared this-a-way, always remind me of Cage, but the execution is not Cagean, while the sound of the executed tones are. It’s like someone has taken the means of Cage and built something of his own, and perhaps, in a way, this is what has happened! It’s erratic, changing… relaxed… and then, BAM! – and still more time for thoughts.

Track 17 - 18 (Track 4 - 5 CD 2) Braverman Music (1978) [12:03 & 14:00 = 26:03]

Wolff wrote this work for “variable instrumental ensemble, instruments ad lib., four or more”. He adds: “Versions for one or two pianos can also be made.” Wolff further explains the background:

The longest work on the CD begins in a progression of firm steps, on paths leading out in different directions from a center of self-assurance and hard-earned peace of mind: the kind of hard-earned serenity you see in the gaze of the Dalai lama. This Wolff walk makes me think of Gerhard Rühm and his Ton-Dichtungen für Klavier, like Das Leben Chopins, or Reagans Humor, Die Amseln verstummen in den Städten, Pornophonie and Meditation über die letzten Dinge – all from the 1980s, released on a treasured LP on Berlin label Edition Block (EB 115/6), run by Ursula Block at Gelbe Musik.

Rühm’s method is to assign each letter of the alphabet a tone on the piano,

Christian Wolff’s Braverman Music – at the outset – thus without intent, in a most delicate way, refers to Gerhard Rühm’s Tone Poems.

The oscillations between the chords bend and bulge in their own Northern Light’s music, like the second, high-pitched melody that is liberated by Tuvinian or Mongolian throat-singing (khoomei) high above the base melody, like spiritual off-springs of something really good and down-to-earth!

The tempo increases after a good while, and the music leaps and jolts from piano to piano, in motions of two children playing hopscotch below your window. Intricate, multi-patterned, challenging - madly rhythmic!

Later (but still in section 1 of the two) the music is more cloud-like, heaving in smoky clusters. Further on its’ falling apart into disjointed tonal matter, like rock crevassing under the immense power of thousands of years of rain water turning into ice in the cracks.

Another of the chorales of section one is reflective in a mood and atmosphere you may recognize from Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte or Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune – but that is only in the atmosphere; not in any other, strictly compositional way. (In this way, many things, occurrences, event, ideas and lives belong together in the most unpredictable way, in a kind of unifying manner).

A last chorale explodes in sparkling, glimmering yellow mica graining over the two pianos in brilliantly rhythmical showers of sharp matter.

The second section of Braverman Music begins in a touching, naked exposition of the melody Moorsoldaten, without any embellishments, just as-is. Then it is varied and de-constructed, re-built, echoed and man-handled, in the total artistry and musicianship of Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz, who at times take turns right-left in single fast-spun notes or chords, creating an incredible musical excitement through the inter-piani space, stretching and thudding and bulging tensions of overtones and transparent clusters, the rhythmical patterns glaring with the intellectual show-offs of a juggling precision that leaves you breathless! This is the musical equivalent of the heated discussions at a Quantum Theory conference at Växjö University, where incredibly complicated mathematical calculations are delivered in the wink of an eye, under the breath, in a subordinate clause!

Throughout these complex and jagged expansions of ideas, order is evident: the framework of the compositional process visible through the transparency of a higher order. Amazing!

Track 19 (Track 6 CD 2) 70 (and more) for Alvin (2001) [9:25]

The Alvin mentioned is of course Alvin Lucier.

Wolff says: ”The piece actually has 2x70 pitches, because I want there to be more for Alvin…”

The piece is performed on three pianos here, involving Christian Wolff himself as a pianist in addition to Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz.
Wolff explains that he has used this piece as the first section of the three-orchestra piece Ordinary Matter (2001).

Spatially spreading tones rise like methane bubbles – or perhaps like the spheres of 1990s’ Macintosh screen-savers; slowly, persuasive, palpably. Extraneous noises are delivered as the players slap the piano bodies.

It’s meditative, introspective – but with that ironical glint, that humorous twinkle – and a sense of withheld, immense power breathing in the silence behind the music, in the space between tones: a grizzly lying on his back, playing with his paws in the sunlight.

Track 20 (Track 7 CD 2) Fragment (2001) [10:09]

Björn Nilsson, author of the extensive liner notes and also the producer of this release, notes that Christian Wolff has been reluctant to write for the piano in later years, instead favoring percussion – though (my point) piano can be regarded as a percussion instrument, clubs hitting the strings (not in anyway a new observation. Charles Ives always thought of the piano as a percussion instrument).
Nilsson calls Wolff’s new technique in Fragment “a kind of Tablature” wherein the rhythm is notated “for each of the ten fingers without specifying a single pitch, i.e. a 2x10-part counterpoint of rhythms alone.”

Nilsson: “Fragment is notable in exploring different degrees, shifting aspects, of unison playing, of the particular sound of two pianists playing the same material, in unison as well as projected in different tempi.”

Wolff further explains that the piece was written for Kristine Scholz and Mats Persson at the suggestion of Björn Nilsson. The title is explained when Wolff says that he didn’t know when to stop composing it, which is why he just let go at one point, leaving a… fragment!

The beginning is somewhat agitated, and I feel shreds of a newspaper falling over the score, torn up by someone who can’t bear with the un-importance of popular interest. Massive rhythmical progressions follow, hammering down nails at an incredible speed through the woodwork of the composition, while slower, hardwood intarsia figures are inserted later on: the kind of arboreal artworks I saw in an Annapolis waterfront display window once, in the swirling sound of spiraling gulls.

Björn Nilsson has some important last words, quoted here from the CD booklet: