[This year marks the centennial of the birth of Stefan Wolpe. The lasting value of the Berlin-born composer’s music may be a debatable issue, but he was unquestionably a trend-setter, and any composer who has attracted such a multitude of adherents the way Wolpe has must be seen as a force to be reckoned with.]
by Martin Brody
"[T]hat was what gave a very special strength to one’s feeling about Stefan, that it was in a sense a privilege to be aware of him, since it was like being privy to an important secret." — John Cage
In the early 1950s, Stefan Wolpe’s "important secret" spread throughout the New York music scene. "[Wolpe’s apartment] was always filled with students who were absolutely devoted to him," Cage recalled: [O]ne had the feeling being there that one was at the true center of New York… almost an unknown center of New York." Musicians of all sorts—Schoenbergians, jazzers, downtown experimentalists, film composers, performers—all flocked to this "unknown center," drawn by the wild logic of Wolpe’s music and his voracious, cantankerous desire to engage with every aspect of musical experience. For his student, Morton Feldman, the totality of his vision and the dialectical turn of his mind were key: "Wolpe was the kind of man who used all eighty-eight notes of his personality. He loved what was on the opposite side of the coin." Even more lyrically, Elliott Carter spoke of the "[c]omet-like radiance, conviction, fervent intensity, penetrating thought on many levels of seriousness and humor, combined with breathtaking adventurousness and originality [that] marked the inner and outer life of Stefan Wolpe, as they do his compositions." The jazz composer George Russell "just wanted to absorb as much not only of the music but of the man" as he could—as did Gil Evans and John Carisi, who could hardly submit a composition or arrangement to Miles Davis or Woody Herman without running it past Wolpe. The film composer, Elmer Bernstein, succinctly summed it up: "No individual had a more profound impact on my life and music than Stefan Wolpe." Wolpe’s music—at once explosive, sardonic, imperious, cerebral, hyperdramatic, patrician, and populist—projects one of the most compelling and original artistic imaginations of the 20th century. Wolpe’s musical universe was all-inclusive; however, it was not, as for Ives, made up of bits and pieces of fully assembled musical styles or familiar tunes, but rather of a profusion of musical atoms (gesture types, speeds, pitch configurations and densities), colliding with maximum dramatic impact. His theories could be arcane, but his mission bold and assured: to release the life force in musical materials. "Some pounding natural force brings it forth and gives it reality," Aaron Copland observed, and, as Wolpe himself put it, "the [musical] ideas live within a multidimensional space and [they] behave that way, behave discontinuous [sic], behave abrupt, behave collapsing, behave cohering, coalescing."
Perhaps
more than any other composer of his generation, Wolpe encoded each of the cultural
phenomena he experienced in his music. And he had a sixth sense for social and
cultural ferment. As a young composer in Berlin, he embraced dadaism and leftist
politics, joined the Novembergruppe, and—alongside the radical composer,
Hanns Eisler—wrote innumerable anthems for the labor movement and music
for agit-prop theater. Between 1920-23, he studied at the Weimar Bauhaus and
was deeply influenced by its faculty: Klee and Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes
Itten, and Lionel Feininger, among others. During his Berlin years, Wolpe not
only assimilated avant-garde techniques and proletarian music but found vivid
musical analogs to the visual arts concepts he studied at the Bauhaus. Fleeing
the Nazi regime in 1933, he studied briefly with Webern in Vienna, before emigrating
first to Palestine (1934-38) and then New York, where he was centered for the
rest of his life. In Vienna, he incorporated the methods of twelve-tone music;
in Palestine, he absorbed the modal systems of classical Arabic music. In New
York, he taught a stunning range of younger musicians (from Mike Stoller, co-author
of the Elvis Presley hit, "Hound Dog" to Charles Wuorinen. And Wolpe became
a vocal participant in the "Eighth Street Club" scene, befriending such artists
as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Estéban Vicente. His New York
music often demonstrates a relationship between music and abstract expressionism;
the connection with Kline’s work is especially strong. In the early 1950s,
he also taught for several years at Black Mountain College, where he became
strongly aligned with the poet, Charles Olson. Wolpe’s ideas developed
in parallel with Olson—not only his sense of a deep, intuitive relationship
between the senses and the arts, but his musical conjuring of what Olson called
the "split second act" and the "push": the inner energy that animates the substance
of art.
Paradoxically, however, as Wolpe incorporated each new artistic experience and influence, his music became more distinctive and exhilarating. It also became more challenging. He believed that art was sanctioned to make demands on the performer and creator as well as the composer. But for many or his colleagues, performers and composer alike, accepting his challenge would prove transforming. "Compromise was a word that he just didn’t work with. He didn’t know what it meant," the pianist, David Tudor declared. "That kind of challenge is, I think, most what I learned from." And so, his music lives on, robustly, in the committed performances of his champions. And thus, we redeem an epoch-defining sensibility. "His music was, and is, passionately and singularly his life," as Milton Babbitt has suggested: The character of the idea at the kernel of the work, the character of the man at the heart of the work: his musical imagination, his musical intelligence, his musical courage"…
Wolpe’s secret is out. The Stefan Wolpe Centennial will be celebrated with a series of concerts during the 2002-2003 concert season. The Festival will begin with two weekends events in October Oct 12th & 13th, at Merkin Hall and Oct 26th & 27th, at the 92nd Street Y. For more information please check our website, www.wolpe.org.
[Mr. Brody is a Professor of Music at Wellesley College, Mass.]