Christian Wolff: Ten Exercises

When this recording was released, composer Christian Wolff was the last man standing among the former members of the "New York School." Cage, Feldman, Tudor, and Earle Brown were all gone, their unique innovations in scoring and facilitating improvisation having passed into the hands of following generations. However, Wolff has never thought of himself that way, and although he shared the same formal concerns as his fellow composers in the New York School, his music has, and has always had, a considerably different character from that of his colleagues. New World Records' Christian Wolff: Ten Exercises takes an all-star cast through 12 performances derived from his open scores published as Exercises 1-14 (1973-1974) and Exercises 15-18 (1975), works that, played end to end, might last a little over two hours. To arrive at the arrangement represented on the New World disc, the ensemble, whose ranks include Wolff's old friend Frederic Rzewski, trombonist Garrett List, composer Larry Polansky, and Wolff himself, made multiple takes of the whole set of 14 and picked the items that fit best together on the CD. Therefore, Ten Exercises includes two versions of Exercise 18, two of Exercise 10, and Exercises 7, 8, 3, 1, 15, and 11. Exercise 14a, which is an adjunct to Exercise 14, was deemed worthy of inclusion, whereas the work to which it is attached is not. Such a quirky method of assemblage may not satisfy listeners who emphasize absolute comprehension in recordings as they relate to the original scores, but it is not out of character for Wolff's easygoing, nonchalant, and non-confrontational experimental music-making.
Although expert improvisers usually play Wolff's music, much of it is playable by almost anyone capable of following Wolff's instructions for it. The group here is especially well suited to interpreting Wolff, and Rzewski is a particularly a strong participant, given his gorgeous solo reading of the Satie-esque Exercise 15 and his excellent liner notes for the disc, reprinted from the preface for Wolff's book Cues: Writings and Conversations. The inclusion of Exercise 14b as a separate item, a duet with Wolff and Robyn Schulkowsky on percussion, was a good call -- it is a standout track. As Rzewski states it, "These scores do not de/prescribe the final resulting sound picture, but provide a map along which the players may travel." The result is vaguely jazzy, loose, unpretentious music that celebrates the little things in life, and the acoustic of the old barn suits Wolff's music to a "T."