CHRISTIAN WOLFF has always been at the center of international intellectual currents, and from the start, his life has been shaped by art and politics alike. Born in 1934 to Helen and Kurt Wolff, the German publishers of Kafka and Trakl, the seven-year-old Wolff fled with his family to New York after the Nazis shut down his parents’ press (they proceeded to found Pantheon Books with other exiled antifascists soon after). Acquiring US citizenship in 1946, Wolff was John Cage’s student as a teenager, becoming an important figure among the “New York School” composers—Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown—who embraced graphic scores, indeterminacy, and other modes of experimentation.
Wolff was largely self-taught; Cage was the only composition teacher he ever had. The two remained friends until the latter’s death. But whereas Cage was sometimes hostile to improvisation, Wolff embraced it. During the late ’60s, he was a kind of adjunct member of British free improvising group AMM; later he would record new versions of this work with Sonic Youth on 1999’s Goodbye 20th Century. Meanwhile, he maintained an academic career, teaching classics at Harvard from 1962 to 1970 and classics, music, and comparative literature at Dartmouth College until 1999, and publishing articles on Euripides and Greek tragedy. As the ’60s turned into the ’70s, he endeavored, in dialogue with artistic comrades Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, to bring experimental art and politics closer together. Changing the System (1973) remains perhaps his best-known work: a piece in which the musicians must determine for themselves how to coordinate as an ensemble, raising the question not just of how to organize music, but how to organize society (“the point,” Marx wrote, “is to change it”).
Now nearly ninety, Wolff has continued to compose, his music taut, thoughtful, and beguilingly strange, its textures sparse and sometimes demanding, filled with complex rhythms and tensile silences. For the opening event of October’s Monaten für Zeitgenössischen Musik (Month for Contemporary Music) in Berlin, Zinc and Copper—the low brass ensemble of Robin Hayward (tuba), Elena Kakaliagou (French horn), and Hilary Jeffery (trombone)—commissioned new work from Wolff programmed alongside pieces spanning over fifty years. As the musicians noted in a bilingual German-English Q&A, the concert responded to the reverberant acoustic of the huge, turn-of-the-century Neo-Gothic Zwingli-Kirche: what guest percussionist and long-term Wolff collaborator Robyn Schulkowsky jokingly described as “crazy music for a crazy room.” Zinc and Copper generally focus on microtonal work: Wolff’s ear, as he wryly noted, isn’t “good enough” to fully hear microtones, but the spaces between tones, notes, and timbres have always been the territory his music has inhabited.
The concert unfolded as one long piece, with musicians moving between sheet music stations around the church. As Schulkowsky commented, the audience would have “more fun” if they didn’t try to follow the program and just listened—but the divisions were generally clear. Earlier in the set, the ensemble offered exercises in breath and percussive affect, breathing into or tapping the instrument at ritualized intervals. The effect was of a kind of inscrutable precision, a system whose parameters could be guessed at but not quite fully accessed, the timbral range and melodic or amelodic stringency of the work spare and stark.
The mood changed when Schukowlsky, performing Wolff’s 2000 Percussionist II, moved to a pair of giant wooden blocks, played with hands, elbow, pebbles, and a giant hammer in a mesmerizing display that had half the audience twisting their necks to watch. In a subsequent piece, the musicians moved around and the music moved with them through the space. The music was generally quiet and spaced-out; occasionally, Hayward or Jeffrey would let out a sudden fortissimo that would practically roar out into the church’s reverberating roof. Jeffery would coax vocalized whispers and cries from combinations of hands and mutes; the brass instruments would merge as if into one instrument before moving away into their separate units, exercises in coming together and being apart, accidentally or intentionally, within the morphing contours of a system.
The final piece, Music for 3 Brass Players and 1 Percussionist, traces out a similar soundworld to recent music by Wolff, such as the piano concerto Resistance, drawing on traditions of socialist song within a firmly avant-garde context. Resistance quotes songs by Pete Seeger and Cardew, while the new work references Hanns Eisler’s ‘Vorwärts und nichts vergessen!’ Eisler’s Left-wing anthem carries particular resonance in Berlin, and with mind to the recent, worrying turn toward open fascism across Europe.
Although Wolff has written pieces to explicitly political texts in his time, he remains skeptical about the agitprop power of Neue Musik—or music alone. Yet he insistently returns to traditions in which musical experimentation is connected to political inspiration. In this new work, Eisler’s song emerges as a kind of ghostly presence: stretched, broken up, distributed, half-recognizable, yet offering a kind of anchoring field to a score that appears like a light on the path, glimpsed in a stumbling, hesitant walk.
The song doesn’t offer a “key” or explanation to the work, however. Above all, it’s Wolff’s own musical language—that language of presence through absence, of rigorous openness—that stays in the mind. When asked about the politics of his music, Wolff replied that, ultimately, it lies in an ethos for him central to the practice of experimentalism in art: the idea that you can change something. This ethos, he suggested, is a modest one. Music is not on the barricades, but it is one of the ways he can contribute something to the current situation, offering, in its own language and on its own terms, the possibility that new things might happen, that things could be different, and that the world could be better than it is.
“Wessen Morgen ist der Morgen? / Wessen Welt ist die Welt?” go the final lines of Eisler’s solidarity song. Springing to the stage to lead the ensemble on melodica in his recent piece Chorales for Dieter Schnebel, an exercise in unison melody, Wolff left us with a kind of parting gift, a melody whose tough clarity exemplifies the virtues of this music, something to take with us into an unknown future.
David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London.
