Browse by Artist: WOLFF, CHRISTIAN

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Kompositionen 1950-1972
Label:	EDITION RZ (GERMANY)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$38.50
Catalog #:	RZ 1023/24CD

"Finally I realized that the kind of sound made in an indeterminate situation includes what could result in no other way; for example, the sound of a player making up his mind, or having to change it. In fact, the indeterminate notation I've used is, as far as I know, the only possible one for the kind of sound I should like. And don't forget, we also like to be surprised ...and the rhythm produced by that situation is like no other rhythm." --Christian Wolff; Most of the pieces collected for this portrait of Christian Wolff document the composer's early activity and were mainly recorded around the time of their composition. Each recording exemplifies the sound gestures from their time. Housed in a digisleeve including a booklet in German and English.

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Early Piano Music (1951-1961)
Label:	MATCHLESS RECORDINGS (UK)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$35.00
Catalog #:	MRCD51

Early Christian Wolf piano music (written 1951-61), performed by: John Tilbury & Christian Wolff (pianos), Eddie Prevost (percussion). Studio recordings from 2001/2. "During the period when these works were composed (1951-61), Christian Wolff was closely associated with John Cage. Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor (they are sometimes referred to together as the New York School'). Feldman later remarked that he was profoundly indebted to Christian Wolff ('I think of him as my artistic conscience')... First impressions may be of a music unlike any other: abrupt, delicate, astringent, enigmatic, disconcerting. The effect is as of isolated objects in space, sounds which seem to come from nowhere and lead nowhere, appearing and disappearing unpredictably, framed by silences. Attention is drawn to the immediacy of each sound. The ear is finely tuned to precise details, a microscopic world in close-up. Expectations derived from other kinds of music are not much help here; one is encouraged to listen afresh, with special alertness, as in unfamiliar territory, searching for clues. Technically, the music arises directly from the mechanical action of the piano and emphasises its percussive character. The sounds are not joined up in familiar ways, the pedal is not used to give continuity, there is no legato phrasing, no illusion of the 'singing line'; instead there is a sharpness of attack, a stark exposure and isolation of individual sounds. The use of preparations enhances this impression: a method developed by Cage in the 1940s of transforming the sounds of the piano by the insertion of small objects (screws,, coins, wedges, wood, rubber and other materials) between the strings. The sounds are altered in a variety of ways, in terms of pitch, timbre and resonance; new timbral qualities are discovered, reaching out into the diverse sound world of percussion instruments."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Bread And Roses
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 043CD

Piano works (1976-1983), performed by Sally Pinkas. "Wolff came to prominence in the 1950s as an associate of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and the other American experimentalists of that period, later working with Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski. His work has gone through many transformations, including minimalism, interdeterminancy, open form and works connected with political issues... Most of the works are recorded here for the first time, as one of the first all-Wolff recitals to be issued. First in a number of releases of Wolff's music to be presented by Mode."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 069CD

"Wolff is considered a member of 'The New York School' along with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor. The superb performances come from The Barton Workshop, an Amsterdam-based ensemble founded by composer-trombonist James Fulkerson. Among the highlights: the 'Serenade' of 1950, an extraordinary individual work from a sixteen-year-old who had just introduced himself to Cage. It intimates the minimalist movement which was to come a decade later. 'For Morty (1987), written in memory of Morton Feldman, used three instruments that have a particular significance in Feldman's work -- the vibraphone, glockenspiel and piano. Its tender fragility reminds one of the unique sensibility of Feldman, while remaining music that only Wolff could have conceived."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Tilbury Pieces (Complete)
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 074CD

"The works on this disc, volume 3 of Mode's Christian Wolff Edition, belong to his minimalist, and open-form, styles. The 'Tilbury' pieces (1969-70) are named for the pianist John Tilbury, whom Wolff had recently met. 'Snowdrop' (1970), from the same period, was named for the snowdrops among the earliest Spring flowers found in the Vermont countryside where Wolff lives. They attempt to integrate a systematic way of writing with chance and the excitement of early minimalism from Riley, Glass and Reich along with their English counterparts Hobbs, Smith, Nyman and White. A reaction against Serialism, their sound motifs come in fixed cycles, now and again two or more sounds appear at the same time, coincide and collide, making chords. 'Tilbury 5' was written 25 years later at the request of the performers Roland Dahinden (trombone, melodica), Hildegard Kleeb (piano) and Dimiris Polisoidis (violin, viola)."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Look She Said
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 109CD

"This disc collects all of Wolff's large body of works for the bass, including a piece for solo electric bass guitar. Two of the works were written specifically for Robert Black, who prepared these pieces with Wolff. The composer attended all of the recordings sessions. Two works are for solo bass: String Bass Exercise out of 'Bandiera Rossa' (written for Fernando Grillo), and Look She Said (written for Robert Black), which is based on folk and fiddle tunes, including one movement where the bassist is asked to sing along with the harmonics being played. It is a tribute to Laurie Anderson."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Pebbles: Complete Works for Violin & Piano
Label:	MODE
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	MODE 126CD

(Written for Sabat/Clarke); Duo for Violinist and Pianist (2 versions) -- Sabat/Clarke Duo. Composer supervised recordings. "Duo for violinist and pianist (1961) has structural parts which are repeatable and whose sequence is determined by cues -- a particular sound (e.g.) high violin pizzicato, very quiet low register sound on piano, or length of silence -- which, as a player, reaches the end of a structural part, determines what part must directly be played next. Each player, under determined conditions, proceeds independently (there is no fixed score relating to the two instruments). The cues from the one player to the other occur in the process of playing; neither players knows when what she plays will function as a cue, i.e. cannot control where the other player will play. The material of the structural parts is flexible and, if repeated, variable. Within time spaces (e.g. 4 seconds, 1/2 second, etc.) sounds may be chosen from variously specified sources, collections of pitches, dynamics, ways of playing and combined and distributed variably. There are also places in the music where individual sounds are coordinated between the players, for instance, violin plays a sound that must be sustained till the piano's next sound is heard (which is not for the violinist predictable), or the pianist must wait until the next sound from the violin ends, then play directly after. This may sometimes result in an impasse: piano cannot play until the violin stops playing while the violin cannot stop until the piano plays. This can be taken as the end of the piece's performance, as it is on this recording for the two versions of the piece played, in one case the impasse not happening till after some time, in the other coming much sooner. I think of the music of the Duo as resulting from the conditions of the piece's being performed, both fluid and requiring a highly focused and flexibly alert attention."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	(Re):Making Music, Works 1962-99
Label:	MODE
Format:	2CD
Price:	$31.00
Catalog #:	MODE 133/34CD

'Violist Pieces' (1997) - for viola; 'Kegama' (1991) - for ensemble; 'Peace March 1' (1983-4) - for flute; 'Peace March 2' (1984) - for ensemble; 'Emma' (1989) - for viola, cello & piano; 'Digger Song' (1988) - for violin, viola, cello, percussion; 'From Leaning Forward' (1988) - for ensemble; 'Three Pieces' (1979-80) - for violin & viola; 'For 5 or 10 Players' (1962) - 2 versions; 'Exercise(s) (15,16,17, 18)' (1975); 'Dark as a Dungeon' (1977) - for clarinet; 'Schoenen met veters' (1999) - for ensemble. "The scores presented on this 2-CD set cover 37 years of Christian Wolff's composing, and present many different musical surfaces and syntaxes. The early 'For 5 or 10 People' is a graphic score from Wolff's most experimental period. It is presented twice, once for 3 players and again for 10 players. Since the 1970's, Wolff has chosen songs from the political protest movement as starting material for many of his works. These authoritative performances are by The Barton Workshop and James Fulkerson, who have had a long tradition of playing Wolff's music. Mostly first recordings."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Piano Pieces
Label:	NEOS (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	NEOS 10723CD

Performed by: Sabine Liebner (piano). Features: "Tilbury 1" (1969); "Keyboard Miscellany" (1988); Tilbury 2 (1969); "A Piano Piece" (2006); "Tilbury 3" (1969); "Snowdrop" (1970). "Sabine Liebner is active primarily as a performer of New Music. She has made numerous recordings for radio, television, and CDs as well as invitations to international festivals, both as chamber musician and as soloist. She has collaborated on projects with the composers Olga Neuwirth, J�rg Widmann, Franco Donatoni, and Christian Wolff, among others, and given numerous world and national premieres. In 1998 and 2007, she received the Music Promotion Award of the City of Munich, in 2005 a music scholarship granted by the City of Munich, and in 2007 she was named a recommended pianist by the Goethe-Institut. In recent years, Sabine Liebner's interests have focused on American composers of the 20th century. Her repertoire of American music includes Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, and Tom Johnson. She plays nearly all of the piano works of John Cage and Morton Feldman."

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Ten Exercises
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80658CD

This marvelous recording of these elusive works features composer-supervised performances by a hand-picked group of renowned new-music exponents. "Your first encounter with the music of Christian Wolff leaves you with the impression you've just heard (or played, or read) something totally strange, unlike anything else you know. And yet, upon reflection, you realize it is at the same time something completely ordinary and normal, as familiar in its way as any number of repetitive actions characteristic of everyday life, getting up in the morning, going to school, work, church, washing the dishes, performing the daily tasks of home and family. Weird little tunes, sounding as if they had been beamed at some remote point in the universe and then bounced back again as a kind of intergalactic mutant music; recognizable melodic and rhythmic patterns, somehow sewn together in monstrous pairings, sometimes reminiscent of the demons of Hieronymus Bosch, composites of animals, fish, flowers, and common household objects: there is order, but also constant interruption, intrusions of disorderly reality upon regularity and lawfulness, combining to create an effect of both familiarity and strangeness: Shklovsky's ostranenie. You could say this music is surrealist -- not reproducing familiar forms, but revealing, behind these, life's unpredictability. You could say it is political; improvisatory; concerned with collaborative, non-hierarchical forms of social organization; but you can't really say what it is like (although John Cage came close when he said, after a performance of the Exercises in New York, that it was like the classical music of an unknown civilization)." --Frederic Rzewski

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Long Piano
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80699CD

"Doleful melodies and melancholy wistfulness are the characteristics of Dakota Suite's singer/songwriter Chris Hooson. They also constituted the main inspiration for the most recent album, The End Of Trying, which was released on Karaoke Kalk in early 2009. The melodic and, in the case of the solo piano music, timbral materials from which Christian Wolff's (b. 1934) music is made are rarely unusual; these are ordinary, everyday things. However, Wolff's rhythmic invention is of great range and variety: complex polyrhythms, speech-like-rhythms, the music flowing at a freely fluctuating rate or proceeding in a plain, straightforward manner, silences. This mix of unusual and ordinary results in a music unlike any other. And, in a piece of such length as Long Piano, the ongoing appearance and accumulation of a great number and variety of short passages results in the constant renewing and refreshing of the listener's perception. This is the world-premiere recording of the composer's largest solo keyboard work to date."
"[Long Piano] seems to me like a kind of geological agglomeration. My hope is that it forms a possible landscape on one extended canvas. At first I just started writing and kept going. My tendency is to work in smaller patches. After the piece was finished I saw Jennifer Bartlett's wonderfully engaging and cheerful work Rhapsody, first shown in 1976. It's a 154-foot sequence of an arrangement of 988 one-foot-square silk-screened and painted enamel plates running around at least three walls of a gallery space. An extreme instance of what I've got in mind. I had decided not to use the commonest procedure for long keyboard pieces, variations (e.g., Frescobaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Rzewski), but sometimes there are series of patches that use tunes (for instance, the very old standby 'L'homme arm�' and the round 'Dona nobis pacem') for material. The piece has 94 numbered patches, a few of which are blank (silence) (in Bartlett's piece there are the occasional blank squares). The 57th to 67th patches refer to eleven larger sections of a square-root rhythmic structure, each of which has eleven subdivisions whose time proportions are the same as those of the larger sections. The piece also incorporates partial versions (more or less 'parodies' in the old music sense) of Schumann (the Toccata and one of the Kinderszenen) and Ives's Three-Page Sonata." -- Christian Wolff

Artist:	WOLFF, CHRISTIAN
Title:	Burdocks
Label:	TZADIK
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	TZ 7071

"For half a century legendary scholar Christian Wolff has created a very personal musical response to John Cage's challenging experiments and three of his most distinctive compositions receive inspiring performances here by a collection of San Francisco and New York's best and most imaginative performers. Fred Frith, Joan Jeanrenaud, Bob Ostertag, Miya Masaoka and Stephen Drury are just a few of the remarkable players percussion virtuoso William Winant has brought together to pay tribute to the fascinating work of this conceptual visionary, who performs at the piano with an all-star ensemble on his most famous composition Burdocks."

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