Understanding Stefan Wolpe's musical forms.(Critical Essay)

IF NOTES ARE ASSEMBLED, a course of direction becomes tangible" ("Any Bunch of Notes: A Lecture," 296). (1) These words from Wolpe's lecture "Any Bunch of Notes" suggest two important directions in his thinking about musical form. The last word "tangible" reaches Out toward visual forms and the temporal aspect of painting, where each new brushstroke reconstructs and re-energizes a web of visual connections and the balance between form and empty space. The opening "If notes are assembled" (where the conditional includes a tantalizing if oblique reference to charged silence--what if notes are not assembled?) suggests the remarkable individuality of Wolpe's musical forms and his ideas about form, ideas as distinctive and charismatic as his ideas on pitch-class circulation, proportions, and the music itself.

This paper engages aspects of form in Wolpe's music, informed by his writings. It has three parts, devoted to conceptual issues, theory, and analysis. Part One explores Wolpe's ideas about form and some of their practical implications. Part Two develops a vocabulary and theoretic framework that support detailed analysis and critical study of Wolpe's musical forms. The reach of this theory is extremely broad, encompassing much contemporary music as well as common practice tonal music. Excerpts from Form for Piano (1959) illustrate these theoretic concepts, revealing subtleties of form that elude other approaches and providing a basis for stylistic comparison between compositions. Part Three presents a detailed analysis of several passages from Form IV (1969), the only other work Wolpe composed for piano solo after 1955. Closing remarks integrate Wolpe's ideas on form with their theoretic representations, and consider points of stylistic comparison and contrast between Form and Form IV based on aspects of asso ciative organization revealed by the analysis.

I. CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

In music parlance, "form" has two common meanings. The first involves classification in terms of a repetition scheme, often articulated by tonal relationships as in ABA', sonata form, rondo, etc. Clearly, where Wolpe is concerned this will not get us very far. Large-scale returns are rare in his music, and on the few occasions they do occur it seems Wolpe did not think of them in the standard sense. (2) His writings avoid schema at all levels, even the terms "theme," "motive," and "gesture." In "Thinking Twice" (304), he instead refers to "organic modes," "genenc sets," "organic tasks" and "organic habits," (3) a phrase that connects nicely with "growth habit" in botany, a term that recognizes "the plant [as] a dynamic organism, forever augmenting and modifying its shape" (Bell 1991, 314).

If the musical work possesses a certain content, a significance, if it means something, its meaning is inherent in the work itself and is equally present in the whole. The content here cannot be external to what we call form; it is immanent in this form. ("To Understand Music," 9)

Wolpe's choice of words suggests that for him "form" is primarily a verb; it only becomes a noun when patterns of relation are abstracted from temporal process. This is closer to a second common meaning of "musical form": t he totality of events in a musical composition, or the "shape of a musical composition as defined by all of its pitches, rhythms, dynamics, and timbres" (New Harvard Dictionary of Music, 1986, 320). In his 1953 lecture "To Understand Music," Wolpe clearly identifies meaning in music with musical material, and form with content:

Significantly, though, Wolpe identifies musical form not with the events per se, but with their patterns of relation unfolding in time. His view of form--or, music formation--is eminently contextual and processive. Later in the same lecture he writes: