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COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Washington
Connections are a great drama, because we didn't know what a dead herring has to do with an aspirin bottle once we put them next to each other.
--Stefan Wolpe
IN A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE to Wolpe, Charles Wuorinen offered a tidy summary of the elder composer's achievement:
Stefan Wolpe's insights into composition were profound and original; I am indebted to him on both counts. His "originality" lay in his special notions of musical continuity, which root in tradition but branch unexpectedly and indirectly. His "profundity" lay in his use of traditional means, values, and materials to achieve his special continuity. (1)
The language is assured, and the formulation sounds complete. But in the decades since Wolpe's death, it hasn't proven easy to reconcile his "profundity" with his "originality," or to stipulate the nature of his special continuity. The master's own garrulous discourse of shock, all-inclusiveness, and simultaneity seems to repudiate temperate claims about his traditionalism. (2) When the "space-time continuum" appears in Wolpe's writing, it is mostly as an oppositional term, an antinode to "opposition," "fragmentation," or "combination." The composer's own fervid slogans (e.g.: the form must be endlessly ripped open . . .) may encourage his admirers to parse the rapid fire gestures of his music, or ponder its obstinate pc-set configurations, or admire the variety of family resemblances between its non-contiguous events. But, when it comes to the temporal continuum, Wolpe seems ever zealous to push us off track. (3)
In a beautiful meditation on Wolpe and Form IV, Christopher Hasty lays the groundwork for detente between the composer's poetics of fragmentation and his "special continuity." Hasty reconsiders some of Wolpe's characteristic, and characteristically enigmatic sentences in light of some of the more subtle aspects of his compositional practice. Reminding us that Wolpe's "all-inclusive moments" are not atomistic, isolated entities, but rather enacted events--exfoliating forms--Hasty accounts for some of the deft ways that the composer "focuses our attention on a vivid and fairly narrow present," however discontinuous or dissociative the musical surface may seem. Hasty shows how Wolpe's obstinate disruptions may breed deferred responses and relationships. Under the pressure of the master's "extravagant variation technique," even fundamental distinctions--"new" and "old," hence "same" and "different"--may seem evanescent. ("[C]hange is often so complex that we may wonder what we are, in fact, recognizing. Repetiti on is new also in the sense that what counts as repetition itself changes in different moments of the piece. . .") (4) Hasty cites a limiting case: a literal repetition of Form IV's initial ("alpha") motto, whose abrupt reappearance in measure 16 functions not to establish a formal boundary but instead to break things open further.
However, on the way to his conclusion, Hasty hits a snag and opens up his own form. The problem is the relationship between...
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