Positively modern

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Whittall, Arnold

Positively modern On the music of Stefan Wolpe: essays and recollections Edited by Austin Clarkson Pendragon Press (Hillsdale, NY, 2003); xii, 371 pp; £30 PRK. ISBN 1 57647 083 0.

The music of Luigi Dallapiccola Raymond Fearn University of Rochester Press (Rochester, NY, & Woodbridge, 2003); xix, 303pp; £65, $90. ISBN 1 58046 078 x.

Sea of fire: Jean Barraqué Paul Griffiths University of Rochester Press (Rochester, NY, & Woodbridge, 2003); xii, 223pp; £50, $70. ISBN 1 58046 141 7.

STEFAN WOLPE (1902-72) and Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-75) were near-contemporaries whose positive responses to some of the 2oth century's most radical technical developments haven't managed to win them prominent positions in the musical mainstream. As for Jean Barraqué (1928-73), he consistently shunned the mainstream, with his own kind of 'positive response to some of the twentieth-century's most radical technical developments' - serialism, in particular - embodied in projects that seemed to welcome incompletion out of deep personal necessity. The new books about them all need to explain why their subjects matter as composers, but the ways in which they go about that task could hardly be more different. The Clarkson is a heterogeneous symposium in which life and work, context and content, all play prominent parts: the Fearn is a doggedly conventional account of the music, primarily technical, striving not to lose sight of matters aesthetic, but tending always to the impersonal, with only the most basic biographical seasoning: the Griffiths balances life, contexts and work more evenly, providing an unusually personal celebration of its troubled subject.

The 20 authors who contribute to Austin Clarkson's volume offer colourful snapshots of Wolpe's remarkably diverse life, in Berlin, Weimar (the Bauhaus), Israel and America, and of his work as teacher (Black Mountain College, Darmstadt) as well as composer. Clarkson's citation of Wolpe's wish to 'mix surprise and enigma, magic and shock, intelligence and abandon, Form and Antiform' (p.25) encapsulates the modernist instincts of someone who counted Dadaism and the i2-note method among his resources, and the best chapters in the book manage to indicate how a distinctive musical manner might be forged from these fruitfully warring elements - in order, as Wolpe is quoted as saying, 'to coordinate multiplicities' (p. 147). After early, Busoni-influenced attempts to 'reconcile expressionism with new classicality' (Zoltan Roman, p-47), Wolpe's music took a more political turn during the early 19305. His career trajectory proved to be quite different from that of his friend Hanns Eisler, however, and his move from Berlin to Palestine in T934 (via contact with Webern in Vienna) brought the conflicting elements within his musical personality to a head. In one of the best contributions, about his time in Palestine, Jehoash Hirshberg concludes that 'the communal, folk-like choral songs and the modernist instrumental music represented for Wolpe's colleagues two irreconcilable traits, and yet they originated deep inside the personality of Wolpe, the committed socialist and aggressive iconoclast' (p.8y).

In America, as Dick Leutscher recalls, Wolpe shunned the extremes represented by Cage and Babbitt: 'he was open, wide and never one-sided. He was the most dialectical person I ever met in my whole life' (p.i33). But did Wolpe's compositional embrace of 'the dialectic between liberty and organized form' (p. 134) create problems which he never fully resolved? Only a more comprehensive and more detached study of the music than that given here might begin to answer that question.

Wolpe 's postwar trips to Europe included stints at Darmstadt, and Leutscher believes that Adorno's ideas about 'musique informelle ' owed something to discussions with Wolpe. The focus on compositional technique in the second part of the book does little to bring such wider topics into focus. Nevertheless, it is rich in music examples, and gives close attention to the three works included on the accompanying oy-minute CD. Pride of place goes to two performances - by David Tudor and David Holzman of Rattle piece (1943-47), and Holzman gives a riveting account of his approach to this rather sprawling manifestation of aggressive iconoclasm as performer and analyst. Other writers detail the concern with symmetries which Wolpe shared with Webern and Varèse, while Edward Levy outlines some important contrasts between Wolpe and Babbitt:

while Babbitt's writing is informative, Wolpe's is evocative. The temptation is to say that Babbitt's usage is scientific and Wolpe 's is poetic; but from what we know and are learning about mental processes, I would suggest that neither manner nor usage is more creative than the other. Each of us may prefer one, neither, or a combination of these two approaches, but both can be equally creative (pp.236-37).

Even in context, this suggests blatant fence-sitting, and although Levy's paper is well illustrated, I found it less engaging than Martin Brody's all-too-brief discussion of Wolpe 's music in alignment with both Bauhaus aesthetics and abstract-expressionist painting.