Word: wolff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wolff's solution involves a number of techniques, the most important of which deals with an extension of the row idea. In Schoenberg and Webern only pitch is set in order. Now the concept of "total organization" puts other musical materials into a row: dynamics, time, tonecolor all have their own rows, frequently connected with one another...
...idea of the row, or series, has so taken hold that post-Webern composers might better be called serialists. Wolff's rows for these piano pieces involve, among things, serial ordering of units of time in seconds, so that the performers require stopwatches...
Another major device is the degree of freedom Wolff affords his performers. While he may be mathematically precise at times, frequently he gives the pianist his head, allowing him to vary the written notes rhythmically or even choose notes of his own. In the shorter work he sets up a kind of game between the two pianists--each must follow a cue given by the other, and each has a certain number of alternatives for every cue. Wolff is writing for his performers quite as much as for his audience. In discussing this technique he does not refer to Western...
Again, a preoccupation with subtle combinations of tone color informed the short piano pieces by Bertram Baldwin and David Behrman (a violin also entered Mr. Behrman's piece for a while). There were row structures, not so elaborate as Wolff's, but complicated enough to be hardly perceptible. The avant-garde leader Boulez would tell us that structure has gone underground. But does this subterreanean structure really give shape to a piece, or does it happen accidentally, or not at all? In a short composition like Baldwin's it is easier to give a sense of cohesiveness; this piece, rather...
Serialists deal in extremes, and so, opposed to the pianissimos and silences of Wolff was a gusty piano piece by Frederick Rzewski, a remarkable fortissimo rush of runs, heavy chords and long trills in Rzewski's rather personal style. There is little nontechnical description one can give about such a work, except that it confirmed the impression of force and individuality made by Rzewski's earlier pieces last year. William Wilder's Duo for String Quartet, another example of minimal performance instructions did not quite come off, perhaps because the players did not take full advantage of the near-complete...