source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 01:44:06 -0800 Subject: hidebound post-Webern serialist/aleatorists like Daniel J. Wolf From: Daniel Wolf <106232.3266@compuserve.com> MacLaren wrote: **...hidebound post-Webern serialist/aleatorists like Daniel J. Wolf...** Once again demonstrating that he has an amazing capacity to write before getting his facts right. Although I will defend to the death the right of musics to exist and composers to compose in **post-Webern serialism**, whether Continental or Babbittonian, or **aleatoric**, in the Boulez mode and I will attempt to help people understand such musics, some of which I have studied closely, I have never composed in either fashion myself. Whether I am **hidebound** or not, I really do not feel competent to say. I identify myself with a strain of American music that is often called *experimental*, my teachers (Mumma, Lucier, Young, Wilson and some lessons with Harrison, Feldman, Cage, Wolff and Jo Kondo) are important figures in this tradition (which to my ears goes back to Ives, Seeger, Cowell, Partch) and none of whom has had what could be considered a mainstream place in the academy. Even though I have all the traveling papers of a good academic, my pedigree is still considered a bit radical to be a **safe choice** to a University music department seeking a harmony and counterpoint teacher (although my training in those subjects is as rigorous and traditional as can be). (If anybody hears of a University looking for a composer with a Theory Dissertation from an Ethnomusicology program, please let me know!). Fortunately, I am able to make something of a living as a composer and scholar in Germany, where there is great interest in American experimental music and the US academic traditions are virtually unknown. Here, I am viewed as an American - or specifically Californian - composer, and I am not seen as competition to the local traditions. (BTW - although I have been here for more than seven years, the whole _Musica Negativa_ tradition - of post-War, post-Adorno, Germany - is largely beyond my capacity to understand, let alone explain. Microtones do play a role in much of this music (i.e. Lachenmann, Spahlinger), but largely as an **alienating** or **distancing** element). (If members of the list would like more information regarding microtonal practices in central European musics, I will be pleased to provide what I can). Pitch usage in my music - whether deliberately or not, I cannot say - straddles a fence between tonality and atonality that makes it rather uncomfortable to label. I never accepted the way of listening to serial musics that was neutral towards interval qualities, nor did I accept a necessity for process (or **minimal**) musics to use pitch materials familiar from tonal music. Instead, I was attracted to the spatial aspect of intervals in Just tonal spaces, in that the ratios stood for distinct divisions of tonal and physical space and that it was possible to hear or otherwise sense these relationships. To this end, I have made (a) a series of sound installations with very dense chords of precisely tuned standing sine waves, usually in relatively prime ratios to one another, and (b) many instrumental works in which these relationships are projected into a more conventionally _musical_ context. In some cases, I have mapped underlying just materials onto 12tet, in other cases, I have made the underlying array intonationally explicit. If anyone is interested, a cd with my string trio _Figure and Ground_ will be released in mid-1997 (coproduction of Hessischer Rundfunk and Magnetic Records). My scores are available from Material Press. Daniel Wolf, Frankfurt MATERIAL PRESS / LUDWIG-LANDMANN-STR 84B / 60488 FRANKFURT / GERMANY Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 11:06 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02683; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 11:08:08 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA01515 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id CAA25133; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 02:08:05 -0800 Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 02:08:05 -0800 Message-Id: <199612030507_MC1-C99-5A43@compuserve.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu