Department of Music

• Thursday, April 7, 2011
• Old Cabell Hall
• 8:00 p.m.
• Free

On April 7, the New Music Ensemble, co-directed by I-Jen Fang and Ted Coffey, will present a concert of works by leading American composer Christian Wolff.  The NME will be joined in several performances by students in "MUSI 4520: Musical Avant-Gardes," and in the graduate seminar, “MUSI 7532: Musical Analysis” on Wolff's music -- as well as by Wolff himself!  The program surveys work from sharply distinct periods of Wolff's 60 year oeuvre, as the ensemble forms worlds of sound with instruments traditional to Western music, sticks and stones, and crackling electronics.  In turns of the most rarefied beauty -- or risking all and sounding it, Wolff's music is bound to enchant new and veteran listeners alike!

Christian Wolff is a key composer in the American Experimental tradition.  Moving to the U.S. in 1941, Wolff (b. France, 1934) studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition, briefly, with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, the ideas of fellow "New York School" composers John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and David Tudor have informed his work, as have long associations with Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski.  From the early 1950s, Wolff has collaborated with celebrated innovators throughout the arts, including Robert Rauschenberg, Bruce Nauman and Merce Cunningham.  In the '60s, Wolff received a doctorate in Classics from Harvard University, where he subsequently taught before accepting a joint appointment in Classics and Music at Dartmouth College.

Much of his music is "indeterminate" in its performance, characterized by qualities of "openness" -- as various innovations in musical notation allow performers freedoms great and small at the moment of the music's realization.  Wolff said recently of his work that it is motivated by a desire "to turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity (performer into composer into listener into composer into performer, etc.) . . .To stir up, through the production of the music, a sense of social conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed."

The UVa New Music Ensemble is a venue in which performers and audiences alike explore the newest music by today’s best composers, as well as by those of the recent past.  The style of music ranges from the classics of High Modernism to the eclectic and energetic works of Postmodernism. Encompassing the full range and variety of contemporary concert music, from acoustic to electronic to electro-acoustic to the uncategorizable, one will discover music that can be serious, often sublime and sometimes even silly.  A forum for all that is fresh and daring in today’s music, the New Music Ensemble offers a variety of riches for the inquisitive ear.  Current members of the ensemble are Wren Curtis, Kevin Davis, Aurie Hsu, Elizabeth Lindau, Chris Peck, Lanier Sammons, and Braxton Sherouse.