At Judson Memorial Church on Saturday, March 9, an unconventional orchestra convened to play the unpredictable sounds of Christian Wolff’s BURDOCKS (1970-71). At once, Pauline Kim Harris bowed a resonant melody on her violin, Laura Cocks played a whistling tone on their flute, Jessie Cox created a sharp ring by bowing the side of his snare drum, and Ikue Mori used her laptop to make a cascade of twinkles. Wolff, the star of the evening, sat at the center of the stage, his back to the audience, and blew into his melodica to unleash everything from the most random noise to a tune we’d all know.
BURDOCKS acted as a representation of Wolff’s overarching ethos, showing how he gives performers agency: In BURDOCKS, they go anywhere and everywhere, even crawling on all fours. The piece came at the end of a marathon evening, which celebrated Wolff’s 90th birthday over the course of about three hours of music. As a whole, the retrospective concert was a vibrant look at Wolff’s immense impact as the last living “New York School” composer. Organized by the duo String Noise (Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris), ISSUE Project Room, and Judson Memorial Church, the evening felt like the ultimate tribute to Wolff, complete with a packed room of fans, world premieres inspired by the composer’s legacy, and a multigenerational slate of musicians performing onstage, which included String Noise (and their new ensemble String Noise Sounds), Jessie Cox, Sam Yulsman, David Behrman, Laura Cocks, David Cossin, Felix Fan, John King, Joseph Kubera, Ikue Mori, Marilyn Nonken, Kevin Ramsay, and Lucie Vítková.
Wolff’s music embraces indeterminacy, performer agency, improvisation, and the political. His scores are often sporadic, making ample use of silence; he leans into the power that lies in slowly expanding quietude, exploring what happens when just a couple of notes fill the air with stillness. His chamber music brings these ideas into the collective, asking players to listen closely to each other to assemble intricate layers. Simultaneously, many of his works build from protest songs, transforming them into experimental meditations, further interweaving his ideas of social consciousness into music that finds its strength in sparseness.
The 90th birthday celebration began with an array of Wolff’s pieces, opening with a performance of his earliest violin duo (written in 1950), which offered a glimpse into the composer’s inquisitiveness and commitment to the austere. Two other highlights of the first half included Bread and Roses (1976), a work for solo violin that unspools from the Bread and Roses theme (a song commonly associated with the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, MA), and Death of Mother Jones (1977). Both pieces begin with the protest theme and then become distorted with each repetition, and String Noise performed each with precision, showcasing their studied understanding of Wolff’s subtleties.
While the first half of the evening surveyed Wolff’s practice, the second half showed the breadth of its impact through a series of premieres and improvisations that began with Steven Swartz’ Cold Spring. The piece, which is inspired by Wolff’s 1950 violin duo, is a slowed-down chamber group meditation, drawing on Wolff’s inquisitive and explorative approach to sound through a series of mysterious hums that float and dissipate, knocking into each other and falling apart like magnets in motion. String Noise’ chamber ensemble, String Noise Sounds, premiered Ghost Swifts, which similarly jumped off of Wolff’s sparing approach into a sprawling web of considered group improvisations.
Wolff himself also premiered a piece, What If, which sculpted a loosely linked cacophony of sounds, including bowed cymbals and snare drum scrapes, retro synth bubbles, flute squeals, piano trills, violin filaments, and the nasally hum of the melodica. Later, Mori and Wolff improvised together, with Mori on laptop and Wolff on the piano; Mori’s melodies sounded like shooting stars falling from her keyboard and into the piano’s body, while Wolff responded with quiet plucks of his instrument’s strings and tiny taps, supplementing her melodies with a shimmer. In each of these performances, I particularly enjoyed watching the ensemble members glance at each other, timing their off-kilter patterns just right. The intuition of playing in a group was on full display, showing how each individual’s choices led to something larger, even in the most frayed edges.
Though the “New York School” may be considered one facet of the Very Serious avant-garde of the 20th century, Wolff’s 90th birthday concert reminded us that there’s still plenty of room for lightness within it. Many of his pieces end with a stray note or two, as if they’re barely finished thoughts, and he isn’t afraid to throw in a random melody for a few laughs. The room felt just as light, clapping and cheering with joy when each piece came to a close. Agency, after all, is the ability to take the music wherever it needs to go, whether that be towards the power of a protest song or to embody the silliness of a joke. In Wolff’s music, we are invited to explore—and once something is found, forget it, and find something else.