Stefan Wolpe, "Chamber Piece No. 2"

Notes from New World Records NW 306:

A NEW YORK SCHOOL: THREE GENERATIONS OF COMPOSERS

By Jeffrey Kresky

In 1972, Charles Wuorinen (NW 209, New Music for Virtuosos I) wrote in Perspectives of New Music (XI, 1; p. 6):

Stefan Wolpe's insights into composition were profound and original; I am indebted to him on both counts. His "originality" lay in his special notions of musical continuity, which root in tradition but branch unexpectedly and indirectly. His "profundity" lay in his use of traditional means, values, and materials to achieve his special continuity.

And Mario Davidovsky, Wuorinen's contemporary, recalls Wolpe's influence: "He was extremely important to all composers blooming in the early sixties. I think it was his unique harmonic language, his enormous rhythmic vibrancy."

Stefan Wolpe was a pioneer, one of those strikingly independent figures (like Varese) whose aesthetic development is extremely difficult to trace. Though one can hear in his pieces of the fifties and sixties (his final period, amazingly different from his earlier periods) certain echoes of his early studies with Webern and Busoni, the pedagogy seems not to be at issue in the style. Nor do we find clues of any useful kind from Wolpe's international and political wanderings, from Berlin to Palestine and finally to America, and in and out of a variety of convictions, periodically projected in groups of compositions, about the politics and sociology of music.

What we do know is that Wolpe came to New York, first in 1938, then permanently in 1956. It is during this period, with pieces such as Form for Piano (1959) (New World Records NW 308), the two Chamber Pieces (1964, 1965-66), and the Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments (1971), that a true, and very remarkable, Wolpe voice emerges. It is a tense, densely textured declamatory style, of the sincerity of Varese, but gesturally much more compact and unique in its virile phraseology. In its unusual brevity and in the complex sum of its thirteen contributing players, the Chamber Piece No. 2, heard on this recording, represents the typical Wolpe sound in all its brilliant vitality.

Arthur Weisberg

Not long after Wolpe established himself in New York, his music began to receive a very special kind of exposure. In 1962 Wuorinen and Harvey Sollberger (NW 254, New Music for Virtuosos 2) formed the Group for Contemporary Music, which, along with Arthur Weisberg's Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, was the first of many specialized (and at first university-based) new-music performing groups. Wolpe's music was presented by the Group with such regularity, and the Group's concerts were attended by New York-area composers of all ages with such consistency, that the influence of his unique sound on the ears and thoughts of those around him underwent an unusually forceful expansion. Wuorinen's personal enthusiasm was greatly instrumental in the influence that Wolpe's work came to bear. As early as 1963, Wuorinen wrote in Perspectives of New Music (I, 2; p. 59)-then a Princeton-based professional journal that functioned as the theoretical counterpart of these performing groups, for much the same audience:

"One may turn perhaps to ... Stefan Wolpe, who combines serial pitch organization with gestural and dramatic formal conceptions that in the most generalized sense are related to [Elliott] Carter's ideas. ... It is possible that Wolpe's influence on young composers may ultimately prove to be very great."

Much of Wolpe's music was published by the New York firm of McGinnis and Marx; Josef Marx, a friend of Wolpe's and a great champion of his music, was for many years general manager of the Group for Contemporary Music.

JEFFREY KRESKY, composer and theorist, received his B.A. at Columbia and his Ph.D. at Princeton. He is assistant professor of music at William Paterson College in New Jersey and is the author, most recently, of Tonal Music: Twelve Analytic Studies (Indiana University Press, 1978).

Stefan Wolpe Discography, ca. 1980:

Chamber Piece No. 1. Arthur Weisberg; Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Nonesuch 71220.
Form for Piano; Broken Sequences; Form IV. Robert Miller. CRI 306.
Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments. Mario Guarneri, William Kraft, cond. Crystal S-352.
Piece for Two Instrumental Units. David Gilbert, cond. Opus One 9.
Piece in Two Parts for Five Players. Frederick Prausnitz, cond. Argo ZRG-757.
Piece in Two Parts for Flute. Samuel Baron. Desto 7104.
Quartet for Tenor Saxophone, Trumpet, Piano, and Percussion. Arthur Weisberg, cond.; Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Nonesuch 71302.
Solo Pieces for Trumpet. Robert Levy. Golden Crest GC-7045Q.
---. Gerard Schwarz. Desto 7133.
String Quartet. Concord Quartet. 3-Vox SVBX-5306.
Trio. Group for Contemporary Music. CRI 233.

Stefan Wolpe, "Chamber Piece No. 1"

Notes from Nonesuch H-71220:

Every culture and cultural era expresses itself not merely in terms of "style" (whatever that is) but through its media and means of expression as well. The chiaroscuro of the Baroque concertino-tutti and aria with continuo and obbligato, the homogeneous qualities of the Classical orchestra and string quartet, the mixed- blended colors of the Romantic orchestra and grand piano, are each characteristic of the age that produced them. Similarly, the "sound" of the 20th century-its most characteristic aural image-is the mixed chamber ensemble.

From the first decades of the century (the early Schoenberg and Webern chamber-orchestra works, Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat, and so forth) until the most recent developments in electronics and mixed media, the new "broken consort" has dominated new music and created its own musical and cultural forms.

It is in response to these conditions and new repertoire that a number of remarkable chamber series and ensembles, generally devoted in large part to contemporary music, have sprung up across the country. These groups, often based in universities, have no single fixed form but constitute a flexible unit out of which various combinations and sub-combinations of instruments-often with voice and/or tape-can be drawn. Drawing on the most brilliant and idealistic young performing and composing talent, these groups represent a coming-together of creator and interpreter unmatched in Western music since the 18th century.

The Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, one of the most outstanding of these organizations, was established in 1960 by conductor Arthur Weisberg. Since 1965, the group has been in residence at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. The personnel consists of some of the best of the New York players, these recordings offer ample testimony to their virtuosity and musicianship, as well as their ability to deal with-and their creative involvement in-the most difficult new music.

Stefan Wolpe, one of the most seminal figures in recent music in this country-or, for that marrer, anywhere-is still scarcely known to a larger public, undoubtedly because his mature work was accomplished in the United States rather than in Europe. Wolpe was born in Berlin in 1902 and lived in Palestine from 1933 to 1938, when he emigrated to America. His early work includes an extraordinary list of operas, ballets, large-scale choral works, songs, symphonies, chamber and keyboard music, much of it seems to belong to the Gebrauchsmusik and socially-conscious trends of the '20s and '30s. In the '40s and '50s, Wolpe suddenly moved with great force and originality into new areas of musical expression. The dynamism and creative energy of these works provide an exact musical analogy to the contemporary work of the abstract-expressionist painters with whom Wolpe associated and who provided his main (if not his only) public at the time. The canvases of Kline, Pollack, and De Kooning have brought fame and fortune to their artists while the equally important and vital work of Wolpe-of only spiritual and not, alas, financial value-is still little known.

Wolpe's influence, through his teaching, his ideas, his music, and his vigorous presence on the New York scene, has been very great. His work itself will become known, not through the traditional media of concert performance, which (in spite of certain efforts on his behalf) remain a basically hostile environment, but through recordings.

Wolpe's Chamber Piece No. 1, written in 1964, is in a single long movement with a unified tempo that never varies until the last few pages (which contain a brief ritard and a slight final speed-up). Nevertheless, within this unchanging quarter-note pulse there is a great rhythmic variety composed right across the bar lines and the beats as well. Everything is set out with the greatest exactitude, and the piece is scored not only in notes and rhythms but in the most subtle doublings of instrumental colors-extremely difficult to realize precisely, by the way. The play of energies across the fractured surface of this work seems quite complex and abstract, yet not far underneath there is a kind of unique fantasy and wit, not the least manifestation of which are the intentional, sly quotes from Webern and Bartok.

Stefan Wolpe, "Piece in Two Parts for Six Players"

Notes from Argo ZRG 757 (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Series 13):

Piece in Two Parts for Six Players

Piece in Two Parts - scored for violin, clarinet, trumpet, 'cello, harp and piano - was first performed in New York in 1962, at a 'Music of Our Time' concert, for which it was commissioned by Max Pollikof. The conductor was Ralph Shapey. A study score is published by British and Continental Music (London).

Note by the Composer

The structural order of pitches is such that certain notes or combinations of notes have a characteristic mode of behaviour. The patterns, shapes and aggregates of sound derived from this pitch-structure are associated with a constantly changing ensemble. The rapid unfolding of material is intensified by the rapid unfolding of the ensemble. Since the instruments do not have individual lines that are kept intact, no kind of linear solidity prevails.

My concern for varying the speed of circulation within the total chromatic field sometimes brings about a situation in which there are many notes but few pitches. Thus the internal organization depends on various contrasts other than the obvious external ones of dynamics and timbre. Static and evolving elements are juxtaposed and combined; certain structures remain on a level of generalities - like phrases in common use - while others are extremely specific in their syntax and consequences.

Stefan WOLPE

Excerpts from Wolpe's 'lecture-performance', 'Thinking Twice'

The form must be ripped endlessly open and self-renewed by interacting extremes of opposites. . . . One is where one directs oneself to be. On the back of a bird, inside of an apple dancing on the sun's ray, speaking to Machaut, and holding the skeleton's hand of the incredible Cezanne - there is what there was and what there isn't is also. Don't get backed too much into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reliability, this sort of prognostic security, drop it. It is good to know how not to know how much one is knowing.

One should know all about the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structures, and mix surprise and enigma, magic and shock, intelligence and abandon, form and antiform.

(The complete text appears in the symposium Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, eds. Schwartz & Childs, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1967.)

Stefan Wolpe chronology:

1902 (25 August) Born in Berlin of Russian parents
1918-22 Studies at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik with Franz Schreker and Paul Juon, is a protege of Busoni and later of Hermann Scherchen and Webern
1920 Melos for piano (first published piece); 5 Holderlin Songs
1923-5 Studies art at the Bauhaus, Dessau; travels extensively, and studies Gregorian chant at Poligny; returns to Berlin as director of music at the Volkstheater
1927 Schone Geschichten (for actors, singers, chorus and orchestra)
1929 Solo Scene (Kurt Schwitters)
1933-4 Two Studies for large orchestra
1934 Leaves Germany for Palestine, where he becomes Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire
1936 Nonet; Studies on Basic Intervallic Rows for piano
1936-8 Six Songs from the Hebrew; Oboe Sonata

1938 Emigrates to the United States, and becomes Professor of Composition at the Settlement Music School, Philadelphia
1939 Psalm 64; Israel and its land (cantata)
1942 The Man from Midian (ballet)
1943-4 Battle Piece for piano
1948 Professor of Music at Philadelphia Music Academy
1949 Violin Sonata
1950-3 Enactments for three pianos; Music for Brecht's 'The Good Woman of Sezuan"
1955 Symphony (revised 1964)
1956 Fulbright Fellowship
1957 Chair of Music at Post College, Long Island University
1960-1 Piece in Three Parts for piano and 16 instruments
1961 Nine songs from Brecht's 'The Exception and the Rule" Piece in Two Parts for Six Players
1962 Guggenheim Fellowship
1963 New York Music Critics' Citation
1964 Chamber Piece No 1 for 14 players
1966 Chamber Piece No 2 for 14 players
1968 Cantata for four solo voices, two speakers, and chamber ensemble
1969 From Here On Further for four players
1970 String Quartet
1971 Piece for Trumpet and 7 Instruments
1972 Dies in New York (4 April)

Stefan Wolpe, "Quartet for trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, and percussion"

Notes from Nonesuch H-71302:

The emigre Stefan Wolpe, who made his home in New York after 1938, produced his greatest works in this country (as might be asserted for Stravinsky and Schoenberg as well), and it was in the United States that his influence as a teacher was most marked. Wolpe's Quartet for trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, and percussion, written in 1950 and revised in 1954, appears now as a forerunner of the works of his last and greatest period, when the intense complexity of the music that he wrote in the mid-'50s-a complexity rarely exceeded in this age or any other-was refined into an extraordinary lucidity and concentration and a unique, elegantly discontinuous yet organic structure. The Quartet, while on the leading edge of that great effort of the '50s, presents a light and accessible side of the composer. Towards the end of the Germanically "jazzy" second movement, there are amusing puns on tonal-system usages, and both the behavior of the percussion and the octave-doubled "theme" contribute to a sense of play as well. The piece, as usual with Wolpe, also proposes new, non-linear modes of formal continuity; this is easiest to hear in the slower-paced first movement.

Stefan Wolpe, "Enactments"

Notes from Nonesuch 78024:

Enactments for three pianos (1950-53)

I. Chant (6:02)
II. In a state of flight (7.18)
III. Held in (3:53)
IV. Inception (3:02)
V. Fugal motions (11:09)

Cheryl Seltzer, Anne Chamberlain, Joel Sachs, piano

This recording was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Producer: Eric Salzman. Recorded June 7,10, & 11,1982 at RCA Studio A, New York. Editing: Ray Moore.
Mastering: Michele Stone, KM Records
Production Coordinators: Nancy Heimerl and Elise Keen.
Director: Keith Holzman

Stefan Wolpe was one of the most important and influential figures of twentieth-century music, particularly in the United States. A central figure who created seminal works that opened up new forms of expression, Wolpe had a decisive influence as composer and teacher, and was an intense presence on the New York musical scene. In the late forties and early fifties he developed a new and completely individual language parallel to-but quite distinct from-the other leaders of the post-war avant-garde. Along with Varese, Cage, and Babbitt, Wolpe deserves to be ranked among the great innovators of our time.

Wolpe was born in Berlin in 1902, emigrated to Palestine in 1934, and then to New York in 1938 where he remained until his death in 1972. Wolpe's outlook on life and art ranged far and wide, from intense expressionism to rigorous constructivism, from simple tonal music for the people (workers' songs, cabaret, and theater music) to atonal and serial music of great sophistication. One of his long-standing preoccupations was the paradox of the coincidence of opposites and his belief that when opposites are sufficiently extreme they become adjacent. In 1959 he wrote "One should know about all the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structure, and mix surprise and enigma, intelligence and abandon, form and antiform. "Indeed the communicative power and the expressive range of Wolpe's music spring from his capacity to contain the tensions of these opposites.

Enactments, composed between 1950 and 1953, is the culmination of Wolpe's first period in America and was celebrated in its day for its size, daring and extreme difficulty. Only very recently has it been performed complete as the composer actually imagined it. The work is the realization of a vision that he described in 1952 while nearing its completion:

"For a first time (for years) I see a vast orbit possible, to write music existing (as definite totalities of organic modes) under the most different conditions of complex behavior. I come close to my ideal of writing a language with a common-sense (and this in a sense of an all- union-of-the-human-tongue)."

En route to this goal in the late Forties, Wolpe composed dozens of studies culminating in the Seven Pieces for Three Pianos (1959) in which he explored the structural and expressive possibilities of various interval complexes. He also discovered how to create a non-motivic continuum, how to generate an open, mobile, constellatory space, and how to allow musical situations to interact, expand, contract and overlap. These studies are analogous to the calligraphic experiments of de Kooning, Pollock, Kline and Rothko when they abandoned figurative painting in the late Forties. Wolpe knew these painters well from his visits to the 8th Street Club in Greenwich Village, and his compositions of this period contributed an important musical analogue to the aesthetic of New York abstract expressionism.

Wolpe once defined music as applied actions, and Enactments is a theater of musical actions. "Enactments," he wrote "doesn't mean anything else but acting out, being in an act of, being the act itself." Each of the five movements is the unfolding of a single action.

I. Chant (crochet = 63). The central image seems to be ecstatic singing, being beside oneself, giving oneself up to chanting with open arms. Several ideas sound in the opening situation: an arch-like shape of striding eighths, a low trill, and a series of soft staccato chords. Concatenations and transformations of this situation unfold in a succession of large motions that spiral, sink, rise and never rest, but there is no sense of linear development up to and away from a rhetorical climax. Each situation is as developed as the others. It is a vast, exuberant roundelay in an unbounded space and time.

II. In a state of flight (crochet = 132). The movement begins with a quasi-fugal theme, but instead of following in turn with the theme, the other two pianos cut in and interfere. The theme immediately disintegrates into fierce contractions and unremitting conflict. There is not an instant of relaxation, but a remorseless intersecting of situations that accumulate a sense of almost paranoiac dread. At about the half-way point there is a brief pause on four softly repeated d's. Then, after a series of engulfing chords, there is a pause and the tempo slows for the long coda, which takes up the last third of the movement. In the coda the unison figure is played with dire intensity. It is deadening and terrifying, like stabbing bursts of machine-gun fire.

III. Held in (crochet = 56). The third movement begins with a sonority that continues in one form or another throughout the movement. Out of this sonority are spun linear filaments and fragmentary chords that float by singly and in clusters. The texture intensifies as fragments of lines and chords multiply and collide. At about the mid-point the density lightens and a linear variant of the source chord descends as if played on a dulcimer (the strings are struck by a small hammer). The density thickens again and then dissolves as the movement closes, delicately poised on the sonority with which it began.

In movements I, II and V the only unusual technique is the silent depressing of keys to permit the strings to vibrate sympathetically. But in movements III and IV Wolpe adds the devices of plucking strings, stopping strings, and combining plucking and stopping at the same time.

IV. Inception (crochet = 69). The material here is further refined as sounds accumulate, images emerge and tentatively grow. There are tremulous beginnings, stretchings, and shudderings. The source sonority of III reappears. Some images move freely while others get stuck (one autistically alternates pitches a and b). At the close, a three-note chord from the whole-tone scale sounds while eight g's are plucked in hushed expectancy

V. Fugal motions (crochet = 80). One piano begins this immense movement with a theme that recalls Chant (it opens with the same three notes). The second and third pianos enter fugally with refracted versions of the theme. Although the theme does not reappear in its original form, it is ever-present in innumerable fragmentations, transformations and extensions of the material. Episodes are born of trills, triplets, and more extended shapes and chord clusters. They fuse into and out of each other in continuously overlapping levels and shifting perspectives. As in the second movement, a held chord ushers in a lengthy coda in a slower tempo (the tempo of "Held in") which is dominated by repeated note figures, although here, they are vivifying rather than threatening. In it, Wolpe brings into one enormous framework two opposing motions: a motion toward concreteness, focus and integration versus a motion toward divergence, scattering and disintegration. He composes this fugal movement in the tradition of Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge," one of Wolpe's favorite pieces of music.

Enactments was for Wolpe one of his most important achievements. Eight years later he wrote, "The work is, with all its tumults, vortexes, flights, exuberances, simultaneities of multiple organic stages and states, terribly dear to me." In order not to be intimidated by its complexity, we must listen through to the inner core of its actions. The complexities exist because Wolpe believed that the greatest possible intensity must prevail so that art may have the power to transform life.

-Austin Clarkson, York University, August, 1983.

CONTINUUM(r) was founded in 1967 with the aim of expanding the audience for this century's music. Its name embodies the philosophy that new music and old form an unbroken tradition. CONTINUUM has performed throughout the United States and Puerto Rico- at Lincoln Center, New York, the Kennedy Center and Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and for the inaugural festivities of President Carter. CBS-TV, educational television, National Public Radio and the Voice of America have broadcast CONTINUUM events.

CHERYL SELTZER, piano, has been active in the performance of contemporary music since her studies at Mills College with composers Darius Milhaud, Leon Kirchner, and Lawrence Moss. In 1967 she founded CONTINUUM (then called the Performers' Committee for Twentieth-Century Music).

JOEL SACHS, piano, co-director of CONTINUUM since 1968, performs regularly as a soloist, conductor, and chamber-music player. A graduate of Harvard College, Mr. Sachs received his doctorate in musicology from Columbia University and was a Guggenheim Fellow. He is on the faculty at Juilliard.

ANNE CHAMBERLAIN, piano, performs as a soloist and with numerous ensembles here and abroad. She studied at the Oberlin Conservatory and Juilliard, and is a member of the faculty of Long Island University