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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington
Enduring Individuality in the details is the backbone of strong experience.
--Whitehead
ON THIS OCCASION celebrating Stefan Wolpe's birth almost a hundred years ago, an occasion that gives us the opportunity to reflect on the force his scores, his words, and teaching continue to exert almost 30 years beyond his death, I would like to speculate on a characteristic of Wolpe's music that I think may be a source of attraction to those who take the time to listen to, play, and study his work. It is a mark of the generality of my talk that this characteristic will be called simply "particularity"--a character that might be ascribed to any vivid experience.
In thinking about the attractiveness of Wolpe's music I will focus on questions of temporality mainly because this is where my interest lies. In defense of the possible eccentricity of this focus I would argue that questions of time, or process, are especially valuable at this moment in our intellectual culture and that music can offer extraordinary opportunities for our exploration of such questions. (1) Moreover, I find clear warrant for focusing on time in Wolpe's 1959 essay "Thinking Twice." The problem Wolpe faces in this essay is perennial: how to be fresh and new when the past (or as Wolpe says, "history") in its fateful repetitions threatens to mire us in the old and worn. This is perhaps the human problem: how to stay alive in a specifically human way. Wolpe begins his essay with the following epigraph stating the theme of inescapable repetition: "No one can blur the evidence of light's ravishing speed. No one can dissuade an apple from falling as no one has the strength to withhold his own breath." For the relentless laws of nature Wolpe gives us Einstein's light, Newton's apple and an image (perhaps Rilke's) of breathing. This last image is, of course, the most poignant. We cannot break the sequence of our living breath--nor will the world be stopped. And yet, the new world is so massively like the old world just past that the slender element of novelty can seem to be the most fragile thing in the world.
Like other modernists, Wolpe sees repetition, the past, and history as dangerous, as a threat to creativity. But unlike many of his contemporaries, he does not advocate denying the problem or dismissing repetition, the past, or history without a second thought. In "Thinking Twice" Wolpe is especially critical of a serial practice he sees as aesthetically deadening and unconscious of its own historical involvements even as it strives to be ahistorical. He writes,
...one's attitude must remain ever alerted by examining, rigorously and without fear, how much history one carries along with oneself, and whether this load, in effect, interferes with a radical attack on all genuinely fresh musical problems. The less history is repeated, the more unique is the moment's time and all that rests wholly on the moment's total dedication. A moment will crystallize as history after it has existed within all its momentary actuality. Then truly will the moment be rallied into the vast depths of time which history is: the ever-restored and ever-advancing moment. ("Thinking Twice," 276)
I should point out that Wolpe is being purposely ambiguous concerning the "scale" of events. What he calls "history" could be tradition or style or it could be the phrase or the sound just heard. In fact, it is all these things. But to simplify, I would like now to focus on the more temporally immediate (though by no means "unmediated") deliverances of the ear and try to come to a clearer understanding of "the ever-restored and ever-advancing moment"--a moment born out of the past with the stamp of uniqueness and freshness on it.
For the new musician in the 1950s, talk of history as anything other than a dream from which one must awake was risky behavior. Not that "time" was an unfashionable topic. Indeed, there was at Darmstadt much talk of "now" and "the moment." But much of this talk was of time mathematizied--an internal, structuring resource for compositional control. Wolpe's perspective is radically different. In a prose that often modulates into poetry he is concerned with a musical material deeply embedded in culture and with the possibility of turning this very embeddedness toward the creation of a vivid, new material. Wolpe's concern is not merely intellectual--the articulation of a stance toward history and tradition. It is a pragmatic concern, expressed in a vast body of work, to bring again and again an alluring freshness and depth to music's ever fleeting moment.
The quality of Wolpe's music I will draw attention to here is the vividness or particularity of its detail--the creation of luminous moments alive with individual, particular character. Such particularity is by no means Wolpe's alone, but I think Wolpe cultivated this quality with an intensity and consistency rare among his contemporaries. (In this regard, Morton Feldman, in his own particular way, followed Wolpe's example quite beautifully.) In "Thinking Twice" Wolpe writes by turns eloquently and cryptically about what I am calling particularity, relating its emergence to such categories as heightened sensitivity brought about by extreme contrast or (in Wolpe's words) "adjacent opposites" and the space-like simultaneity of manifold relations and meanings. I would like to turn some of Wolpe's very general remarks toward a specific engagement with Form IV: Broken Sequences.
But first, some words about the tide, Broken Sequences. The word "sequences" here most narrowly labels the musical device of successive transposition which Wolpe does employ often in this piece--both in straightforward and highly deformed or "broken" ways. But the word "sequence" can also mean, more broadly, "succession" from the Latin sequi--to follow, as in "sequitur," or rather in this case, "non-sequitur." Broken sequences in this sense are discontinuities or displacements of various sorts--connections interrupted, delayed, or abandoned. We may think too of another, older musical meaning of "broken"--that is, composed of various, disparate kinds (as in the "broken" consort of heterogeneous instruments as opposed to "whole" consort of like instruments). And, lastly,...
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