Word: wolffe
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Christian Wolff '56 perpetrated another bit of non-sense such as earlier concerts have led us to expect of him. This time it was Duo for Violins (1951). The two fidlers were restricted to three consecutive semitones--D, D-sharp, and E-from which a maximum of six different sounds can be extracted; and for maybe a quarter of an hour they sawed back and forth on these same notes. There are at least three legitimate reactions on the listener's part: (1) he can try to stifle his snickers or laugh outright; (2) he can lapse into an utterly...
...very good name nowadays. Most of the student music has been or will be played at concerts of the Composers Laboratory, and the opportunity for two hearings is valuable as this music is often difficult to grasp at a single hearing. The Pieces for Prepared Piano by Christian Wolff, for example, seemed much more comprehensible than at the first performance; nonetheless their resources will have to be expanded, as the music is too static. The Three Songs, also by Wolff, were an evocative use of Soprano and Flute...
Christian Wolff's music is not easily accessible either. It is a decidedly esoteric product of the John Cage cult, although probably better than anything Cage has done. Mr. Wolff played four pieces for piano and one for prepared piano. The technique is pointillist; tones are widely dispersed over the keyboard range, and in their succession they seldom suggest melody in the traditional sense of the term--single tones and sonorities assume a significance in themselves, and the phrase or line is replaced by the aggregate of points. Whether the feeling of oppression from lack of variety which comes after...
...sawed off, while a Madison Avenue account man leaps out of his grey flannel suit at the first brrr of the drill on a heavily novocained tooth? Does a Chinese feel pain less than an Occidental? Probably not, according to Dr. James D. Hardy, who (with Dr. Harold G. Wolff and Helen Goodell) pioneered in measuring pain on a "dolorimeter" at New York Hospital. Using a lens to focus the heat from an electric bulb onto a blackened area of skin, Dr. Hardy has compared the "pain thresholds" of whites, Alaskan Indians and Eskimos. The Eskimos' readings were...
...much pain can a man bear? Nature, says Dr. Hardy, has provided him with a built-in ceiling. On the Hardy-Wolff-Goodell scale, pain is measured in ten degrees of one "dol" each. With their lamp heat, the researchers found that when the skin temperature got to 152° the pain reached its excruciating maximum. After that the pain stayed constant no matter how much heat was turned...