NOISEwolff - Jerome Joy website

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!!Stones (1968-1971) {br}{br} \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|tl '''MAKE SOUNDS WITH STONES, DRAW STONES WITH STONES, DRAW SOUNDS OUT OF STONES, USING A NUMBER OF SIZES AND KINDS (AND COLOURS) ; FOR THE MOST PART DISCRETELY ; SOMETIMES IN RAPID SEQUENCES. FOR THE MOST PART STRINKING STONES WITH STONES, BUT ALSO STONES ON OTHER SURFACES (INSIDE THE OPEN HEAD OF A DRUM, FOR INSTANCE) OR OTHER THAN STRUCK (BOWED, FOR INSTANCE, OR AMPLIFIED). DO NOT BREAK ANYTHING. '''{br}{small} (Christian Wolff, STONES, from: Prose ColIection, 1968-74){/small}\| \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|tl '''Produire des sons avec des pierres, en extraire des sons, utiliser toutes tailles et toutes sortes de pierres (et aussi différentes couleurs) ; la plupart du temps, jouer avec discrétion ; et, parfois, en séquences rapides. La plupart du temps, cogner les pierres les unes contre les autres, mais également contre d'autres supports (par exemple, à l’intérieur d’une caisse de percussion ou d'un tom retourné) ou d’une manière autre qu'en les cognant (en les frottant, par exemple, ou en les amplifiant). Ne rien casser. '''{br}{small} (Christian Wolff, STONES, from: Prose ColIection, 1968-74){/small}\| {br}{br} \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|tl ''« ^[The instructions of "Stones"^] basically tells you to make sounds with stones and it gives a few general suggestions, and one prohibition that you don’t break anything. You can do it for ten seconds, or for a couple of hours; 20 people, or one person can do it. There’s a tremendous range of possible performances, and yet I would say that I could probably recognize a performance of "Stones", for the very simple reason that stones are involved. It’s true I hesitated for a minute because there are now quite a lot of pieces that are made with stones. ^[...^] I would think what’s the most off the wall thing somebody could do given these restrictions, instructions, and notations. In others words, I tried to imagine what could be done that I would find unacceptable, and if I couldn’t imagine anything like that, or if I thought of it and thought that’s okay, too, then I figured it was all right.{br}{br} ^[...^] Which is not to say that it hasn’t happened that people have thought of things to do which have not crossed my mind and initially might give me pause. You know, I hear a rehearsal and I hear something and I say, how come you’re doing that ? Show me on the score; or, what is your understanding of the notation which leads you to do that ? And if the person can explain it and the explanation seems to me valid and still within the rules of the game, then okay. ^[...^] And that is important, because the problem I’ve had very commonly is that people will look at one of these open scores and basically say: Oh well I can do anything here, and throw the score out the window and just basically do anything. That has happened and that usually leads to disaster. I really can tell when that’s happened, and then I say, Whoa, wait a minute. In some respects, what you’re to do is very precisely indicated. In a classical score the pitches and the rhythms are very clearly indicated, but there’s a lot that’s not. Tempos tend to be negotiable, and expression. And in my case, or at least in my music of that period, the place at which you approach what’s determined is shifted.{br}{br} ^[...^] My idea was that the performer would take an active part and would find what he or she was doing interesting, not just in the sense that there was a model that had to be replicated as exactly as possible, but rather that there was a space within which the performer could operate which might produce surprises and allow for, one time I’ll do it this way, another time let’s see how it goes if I do it this way. So ^[...^] it’s true that I have no fixed image of how the piece should sound. There was no ideal performance in the sense of replicating an image that was in my head or that was represented by the score. There was no one perfect representation of the piece.{br}{br} ^[...^] I have also been interested in this notion of being musical with another kind of performer, people who have an interest in this kind of music but are not professional musicians at all. Perhaps they may not have even played a musical instrument but somehow want to be engaged with it. I have done pieces which are playable by people like that and have had very beautiful performances. ^[...^] So it’s more a question of how you play, the spirit in which you play, and the kind of quality of sound that you can get. If you let a child loose on an instrument they’ll just explore the instrument for the sounds it can make and they won’t worry about whether they’re playing the score correctly or whether this is the way it should be done. They can make very beautiful sounds in that process, and it’s that sort of spirit that I got interested in and wanted to capture.{br}{br} ^[...^] There are some musics out there which are arguably just private. Either they’re so conceptual that you read it and think about it and that’s it, or else it’s something you do on your own somehow. Obviously you’re free to do anything you want on your own—I don’t have any problems with that—but when I write the music I think of it as basically a first step in a social activity.{br}{br}^[...^] But then I got interested in the question of reception and of audience. Partly because I would find that my friends and the people I talked to about politics would know that I wrote music, and they would be interested and I’d be a little shy about it. I thought, this stuff is not for them, I should be doing something that these people could have some response to. The way to make that music was the next question. We each felt there was a limit to which we could stretch ourselves and still do what we felt was the right thing for us to do musically, and within that kind of constraint make a music which was more accessible. Cardew formed a band, People’s Liberation Music, that played at demonstrations and in public places. In the end my feeling was, well I can’t do that so I’m just going to do what I can do and let the chips fall where they may. The folk material was interesting because it had these political associations and connotations, and even if my music was not particularly like the original or the model, at the very least it would allow you to draw people’s attention to that music and to its content. Probably my most successful piece in that line was a piece called "Wobbly Music" ^[1975-76^], which is a choral piece where the chorus first just sings three of these songs from early American labor history and then I do my thing with that material. It refers to the Wobblies, the IWW, which was easily the most radical movement that’s ever appeared in this country and was extraordinarily widespread. The ideas that they propounded were very interesting because they have a mixture of left wing socialism with anarchist strains. So that’s sort of the ideal situation, and I think there are limited opportunities for that. But there is an audience consideration from another point of view, where the music gets played, partly because of its own history but also because of the music market, and it tends to invariably be in New Music venues or festivals or situations that have no particular political identity. Then you notice that there are in fact very few situations which have a political identity and a mass setting. Pop music is the real alternative and arguably the most interesting political music to the extent that millions of people listen to it. And then you have groups like The Clash... But let’s get realistic, this was just not my scene.{br}{br}In the European avant-garde, formal procedures were meant to basically refine the musical composition and to give it this quasi-rationalist, hyper-rationalist character. Everything was accounted for. But another way of looking at using these formal procedures is as a kind of heuristic procedure... I try get formal procedures that lead me into spaces that I couldn’t foresee. So I’m still thinking in that older indeterminate way to put me into situations where I have to think of a solution that is really going to stretch me, that’s going to put me somewhere where I had not expected to end up. Looking at chance procedures, they’re philosophically based on the notion of the moment and all of these other things that Cage talked about, but they also help you discover stuff that you might not otherwise have thought about. And the whole problem especially after a while is there are just so many ideas available in your brain. I mean your circuits, they just have so much stuff they can produce and how do you get out of the cycles of that? You have to get something from outside to give you a push, and it could be contained in a technical procedure. I think of that story in Anna Karenina where this painter is stalled on his painting. He’s stuck. He doesn’t know what to do. He puts it away. Forgets about it. A couple of months later he finds it and a grease spot has fallen on it and suddenly he sees what he can do with this painting because of this totally random interference that has readjusted the view of it. And that is what I do, I try to create moments where those grease spots get dropped on the paper and push me to do something or see the thing suddenly in a different way. »''{br}{small} (Christian Wolff, Interview by Damon Krukowski, In BOMB 59/Spring 1997, http://bombsite.com/issues/59/articles/2060 ){/small}\| {br} \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t \|t [../files/articles/wolff/wolff_wobbly.jpg\|../files/articles/wolff/wolff_wobblyb.jpg]{br}{small}{cap}Christian Wolff, "Wobbly Music", 1975-76{/cap}, For SATB choir and (at least) one keyboard, guitar and 2 melody instruments (based on texts relating to Massachusetts mill strikes in 1912). Duration circa 30-35 minutes.{/small}\| {br}{br}{br}{br} {html} <DIV align="center"> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hTJ5ho5pa7g?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br><br> </DIV> <small>CHRISTIAN WOLFF, "STONES" — Performed by Kyrre Laastad, Tor Haugerud, Michael Duch and Christian Wolff at Gråmølna, Trondheim 5th of June 2012.</small> <br><br><br><br> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IV_1ktvGUgU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>CHRISTIAN WOLFF, "STONES" — Performed by Zeitkrazer, live at Donaufestival 2007.</small> <br><br> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9f9uN7EGQB8?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>CHRISTIAN WOLFF, "STONES" — Performed by Zeitkrazer, live at Donaufestival 2007.</small> <br><br> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ZIGmBg0tTU?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>CHRISTIAN WOLFF, "STONES" — Performance at the Festival "25. Tage Neuer Musik in Weimar", November 2, 2012 by the "Ensemble für Intuitive Musik Weimar". From left to right Matthias von Hintzenstern, Daniel Hoffmann, Michael von Hintzenstern, Hans Tutschku. (video Isabell Todorow).</small> <br><br> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/5lNfOox76EY?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <small>CHRISTIAN WOLFF, "STONES" — Performance at Shinjuku Bunka Center, October 31, 2012 by the "Ensemble for experimental music and theater". Midori Kubota, Satoko Kono, Masuhisa Nakamura, Takuma Nishihama, Takuya Watanabe, Tomoko Hojo, Tomomi Adachi. — <A HREF="http://eemt.net/" target="_blank">http://eemt.net/</A> </small> {/html} {br}{br} Autres versions :{br} * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYbREOY5NMQ {small}(Ny Musikk Trondheims, 2012){/small} * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUUFoC_06wQ {small}(Une autre version "anonyme" et utilisant le montage vidéo pour agencer des séquences et des articulations sonores.){/small} {br}{br}{br}{br} ----
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