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Re: [VT] Two Instruments (1958)
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djw-@snafu.de
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Oct 29, 2009 13:11 PST
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Two brief observations: The first is that although it is difficult to
determine "who knew what and when did they know it?, the pieces under
discussion here were not published, nor widely available in manuscript,
not widely played, if at all, and in all cases, would wait many years for
recordings or broadcasts, _if any_. Although he knew both names by
reputation, Young came to know some of Wolff's music following his trip to
Darmstadt, but only the cuing pieces and not the earlier gamut studies,
and he first heard Feldman's music somewhat later. The Trio for strings
was written before he knew music by either colleague. Neither Feldman nor
Wolff became aware of Young until he moved to New York.
The second observation is that, for all of the surface similarities, how
different the intentions and methods the three composers were. Wolff, in
discussing the early gamut studies, which I believe to be the most radical
of the works in question and have been treated in history books
surprisingly well considering their lack of performances or recordings,
insists that he never thought of them as minimal, as, for example, in a
piece with only three pitches, he actually worked with a set of twelve
configurations of those pitches. As Wolff himself has noted use of
species counterpoint exercises in his studies with Cage, I believe that it
is safe to locate a line of constructivist works from Seeger through
Cowell and Cage to Wolff and locate Wolff's compositional discipline
within that line. The Young Trio for strings, on the other hand, is, in
terms of pitches, a straightforward and Schoenbergian twelve-tone work,
focused on a particular chord, and is most innovative in its use of
essentially improvised extended (as well as highly contrasting) durations
and a wide dynamic range. Young's central premise, that of getting
"inside" a sound, made possible by extending the durations of local pitch
configurations is quite different to that of Wolff's project of
constructing a continuity from patterns composed of minor differences.
The Feldman represents an another aesthetic altogether, in large part an
intuitive rather than formal response to the minimal, as in at a minimum,
tendencies found in, for example, Webern's instrumental works. I do not
wish to discount the acoustical coincidence of chromatic clusters of pcs
in works of all three composers, nor the prevalence of static pitch
environments (more so, here, in Wolff than Feldman, with Wolff's caveat
about the set of twelve configurations, and in Feldman than in Young's
Trio), but the interesting question is not one of priority or of lines of
direct influence but rather why there appears to have been a common need,
in that musical moment, to work from such a particular set of constraints
and extensions?
Daniel Wolf
On Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:19:49 +0100, <gle-@ogreogress.com> wrote:
| | It seems several composers were working with similar ideas in 1958, but
the major history books almost always point only to LMY.
Joseph Zitt wrote:
| | If I recall correctly, Young's Trio bears a striking resemblance to a
slightly earlier string work by Christian Wolff. I don't have my
references
at hand, though.
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 12:18 PM, <gle-@ogreogress.com> wrote:
| | While working on mastering Two Instruments (1958) it struck me that La
Monte Young's String Trio, of the same year, is much less "minimalist"
than Feldman's masterful and haunting work. The music historians
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always
| | seem to get it wrong! Radio premiere coming in November.
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