A footnote to Hasty, Whitehead, and Plato: more thoughts on Stefan Wolpe's music.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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RATHER THAN RESPOND DIRECTLY to Christopher Hasty's lovely and inspiring paper, I want to think about Wolpe's "ever-restored and ever-advancing witnessing moment" and Hasty's point that we may not know how to think about the "vividness of a moment that is new and now." Hasty's invocation of Whitehead's ideas of Beauty, and their connections to "process metaphysics," will play a covert role in what I have to say.

Let me begin by repeating something I've frequently overheard: that Wolpe's music, especially the late music, in its gestural and kinetic character, suggests that Wolpe is performing his musical thoughts and feelings in addition to merely making music out of them. I find this suggestion apt and insightful, but also elusive, for Wolpe's musical thought-actions often appear discursive, indicating that we don't really have a handle on what's going on. And if we care to describe and therefore understand something about how Wolpe's music goes, we may need to construct a new type of music theory--as if we didn't have enough--and in doing so, expand the limits of what music analysis can address and discover. This has been the case with the music of Schoenberg, which inspired Babbitt, Forte, and Lewin, among others, to invent and consider new ways to explore twentieth-century music. Similarly, study of the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and other common-practice composers allowed Schenker to discover principles o f organization that raised and answered questions about the nature of tonality and tonal forms. Certainly, important steps have been taken in this direction by the authors of these papers on Wolpe, and I will add my voice to imagine some other theoretic orientations that Wolpe's music might engender.

When I listen to Wolpe's music I am often struck by the way the musical gestures seem to be motivated autogenetically, not by the composer's invisible hand, but as if the music were a play of agents creating form; and...

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