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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington
BETWEEN 1944 AND 1949 Wolpe composed an extensive series of compositional studies that have been collected as Music for Any Instruments. Many have titles that are concerned with particular pitch-class sets, but Two Studies for Piano, Part I from 1946 has a subtitle that points to a larger agenda: "Displaced spaces, Shocks, Negations, A new sort of relationship in space, Pattern, Tempo, Diversity of actions, Interreactions and intensities." The vision was of a music that disrupts homogeneous musical space with a dialectic between actions that are strongly opposed in character (pattern and tempo) and interreact (shocks, negations) in various ways. In 1947 Wolpe completed the tumultuous Battle Piece for Piano with a coda in which he superimposed three types of actions. The following year he noted in his diary: "To expand material endlessly and to gather together the exposed perspectives (dispersed from music brimming endlessly with riches and reaches) all in a new way on still higher planes," (1) The drive was t oward a music of abstract expressionism.
In the summer of 1949 Wolpe framed his emerging ideas within the four-movement design of the Sonata for Violin and Piano and the two-movement Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano. In the fall he began to sketch another new project that he called Set of Three Movements for Two Pianos and Six Hands. On the title page he wrote, "To these wonderful players of my music, to Irma Wolpe, to David Tudor, to Jackie Maxin." After arriving in the U.S.A. in 1938 Stefan and Irma Wolpe were very active as teachers in Philadelphia and New York City. Among their most gifted students were David Tudor (1926-1996) and Jacob Maxin (b. 1926), who became regular performers of Wolpe's extensive repertoire for the piano. He had previously written pieces for two pianists, but three pianists opened up new possibilities for realizing his emerging concept of diverse and complex actions in an abstractionist, constellatory musical space. During the next five years the Set of Three Movements became the basis for Seven Pieces for Three Pianos (1951) and ultimately the five movements of Enactments (1953).
The materials that remain of Set of Three Movements comprise eleven brief studies dated September-November 1949 and the first few bars of an early draft of the piece itself. (2) The studies apply techniques developed in the compositional studies of the previous years. Rather than "themes" as such, formative processes depend on the functions of pitch-class sets, spatial orderings, gestures, textures, and the rate of circulation of the chromatic. The first study begins with a coherent action in part III, a succession of [025] trichords combined with a succession of [04] dyads over six bars. This well-formed statement is countered by brief chordal interjections in parts I and II. In Study No. 2 parts I...
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