CHRISTIAN WOLFF (b.1934): Trio IX for Tenor Saxophone, Piano and Percussion, Exercises 29-32 and 37 & 38 for 2 or More Players.

Description: A highly significant figure in the history of the New York avant garde, and the last surviving member of the group that included John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and David Tudor, Wolff was self-taught as a composer, and for years an academic classicist by profession. The half-hour Trio IX - Accanto is a recent work, from 2017, and it seems illustrative of Wolff's statement, from 2004, that "… everything around you – what you’ve seen, read, heard, whom you were with, talked with, thought about, what’s going on in the world, politics – is still an inevitable grid on which you work." The work sounds like an encyclopedic kaleidoscope of Wolff's life experiences in music, with bits of chorales and fragments of marches alongside delicate pointillism, modal polyphony, Bach, Union songs, Brecht, Eisler, and other "found objects". The Exercises are for any combination of at least two instruments (unspecified), and consist of motifs which can be played in any order, with a great many other parameters left to the performers as well. They are thus a textbook example of indeterminacy at its finest. In this performance the ensemble frequently use the percussion to introduce a strong rhythmic element, which perhaps makes the pieces sound more like "conventional" music than would presumably be the case in other possible versions from the infinity of possible interpretations. Apparently the performers avoided too much rehearsal or discussion of their choices before the recording, to facilitate what the notes describe as "asynchronous coordination: the musicians all look at, and then more or less play, the same lines in the score, more or less at the same time." Trio Accanto.