Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Trio Accanto’s Christian Wolff Album on WERGO

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Last month WERGO released a new album devoted entirely to compositions by Christian Wolff. My interest in WERGO dates all the way back to when I was collecting vinyl releases. Where Wolff was concerned, one of those albums was reissued as a compact disc, which I wrote about in August of 2012 during my tenure with Examiner.com. The recordings for that release had been made in August of 1971 (right around the time that I received my doctoral degree); and they involved some impressive performers including David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma, as well as Wolff himself.

The new release consists of performances by Trio Accanto, which is based in Freiburg in Germany. The group was formed in 1994 by saxophonist Marcus Weiss and pianist Yukiko Sugawara joined forces with percussionist Christian Dierstein. In 2013 Sugawara was replaced by Nicolas Hodges. The album is the trio’s fourth CD; and it features “Trio IX – Accanto,” which the group commissioned from Wolff with funding from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Trio Accanto gave the premiere performance on November 3, 2018; and the recording is based on sessions in 2020 between January 31 and February 2. The album also includes six of the compositions in Wolff’s Exercises collection.

Back in the early Seventies, I did all I could to keep up with performances of music by the New York School, which included John Cage and Morton Feldman. Wolff studied with Cage and became part of this group until he left to begin his freshman year at Harvard University. He majored in Classics and eventually received his doctoral degree, after which he taught Classics at Harvard until 1970. He then moved to Dartmouth College, where he taught Classics, Comparative Literature, and Music, retiring in 1999.

Reading what others have written about Wolff, I have consistently been reminded of the parable of the three blind men trying to describe an elephant. Each feels a different part of the elephant’s body, asserting a description that differs significantly from that of the other two. In that respect I would say that my own efforts to understand Wolff have been “blinded” by my paying too much attention to score pages and not enough attention to listening.

More useful is a Wolff quotation on his Wikipedia page. He asserts a desire “to turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity (performer into composer into listener into composer into performer, etc.), the cooperative character of the activity to the exact source of the music. To stir up, through the production of the music, a sense of social conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed.”

That assertion leaves me with mixed feelings about any recording of Wolff’s music. At the end of the day, listening to a “real-time” performance by Trio Accanto probably provides a better account of Wolff’s work than any “frozen document” of a “captured” performance. Indeed, even trying to describe the experience of listening to this new Wergo album probably runs contrary to the composer’s intentions. On the other hand, opportunities to listen to Wolff’s work are depressingly few. In my own case, my last encounter with a Wolff performance took place in February of 2019 when Adam Tendler gave a Piano Talks concert presented by the Ross McKee Foundation.

Ultimately, the act of listening to this album is determined (almost?) entirely by the dispositions of the listener. Because that act is so dependent on the “immediate present,” the experience of listening to a recording will probably never prompt the same dispositions. Perhaps Trio Accanto will provide an opportunity to listen to the immediacy of performance once we get over current pandemic conditions and European performers will once again be able to tour the United States.

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