Christian Wolff is assured of his place in musical history as one of the New York school of musical experimentalists. In the 1950s and 1960s, he created a series of famously controversial works, often using graphic notation rather than conventional musical symbols. But his music is not just a relic of the 20th-century avant-garde. Now in his late 60s, Wolff is still exploring unfamiliar musical territory. In a concert by the ensemble Apartment House, the Huddersfield contemporary music festival surveyed his work of the past three decades.
Wolff's encounter with radical leftwing politics in the late 1960s left an indelible impression on his music, and many of his pieces are based on political songs. The works in this concert demonstrated the subtlety of his use of these simple tunes. Braverman Music, written in 1978, is based on The Peat-Bog Soldiers, a melody sung by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. The tune appeared as a melancholy viola solo in Apartment House's performance, evoking a world of pain and struggle. Yet in the rest of the piece, the song and its political resonances were fragmented and obscured. Shards of the tune were used as the basis for a set of free variations, but were soon swallowed up by the surrounding texture. Wolff plunders the song for its structural possibilities, creating a music that lurches from reference to abstraction.
Bread and Roses, a solo piano piece from 1976 performed by Philip Thomas, uses an American marching song for the basis of its variations. But the tune is so fractured and elusive that the work seems to deconstruct rather than celebrate the ideals of political protest. Individual moments are often startlingly simple, but the music moves in unpredictable ways, and the form it creates is complex and indefinable. It is as if the goals of the socialist struggle suggested by the song were considered to be unachievable.
Apartment House also presented the world premiere of Apartment House Exercise. There was a baffling beauty about this piece for chamber ensemble, which incorporates elements of improvisation in its 10-minute structure. Each of the players seemed to perform their part independently of the others, as individual lines collided and combined with one another. As in all of Wolff's music, the effect was both simple and strange.
As well as this celebration of Wolff, there were outstanding performances of Morton Feldman's music. Ensemble Recherche's programme of early pieces revealed how Feldman came to terms with Webern's influence, in the extreme brevity of sets of pieces for cello and piano. Even more remarkable was Nicolas Hodges's performance of For Bunita Marcus, an 80-minute solo piano piece: an amazing feat of concentration and endlessly varied quietness.
