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The next piece on the program is Feldman’sStructures. Clarkson, for one, doesn’t buy Feldman’scomment to Cage that he (Feldman)“didn’t know” how he made the piece. “In factI brought it if you want to see it,” Clarkson says.“Actually Morty knew pretty much what he wascomposing, because I have analyzed it and I cansee how he was adapting Wolpe’s way of workingwith shapes for his own imagination. Sothen ... Feldman really became a member of theCage circle, but he said Wolpe was totally okaywith that.”It was by no means a “given” that Wolpewould have been comfortable with Feldmanbecoming part of Cage’s circle. “Cage andWolpe — they had real arguments, in public,”Clarkson explains. “They were famous fortheir shouting matches and they happened onthe streets of New York, and conferences, andDarmstadt, and it was ... yeah. But the argumentwas never over whether music was purethought in itself. For Cage, it had to be a pieceof ... the nature out there, which is exactly whatWebern said. ‘Art is an expression of nature, butas seen through human nature.’ ... To that extentthey both agreed, Cageand Wolpe. It’s justthat they had differentnatures. AndFeldman.so their musiccame out totallydifferently.”And so it wasthat Feldmanmoved into Cage’scircle without acrimonyfrom Wolpe. “He [Wolpe] was totally open, hedidn’t feel aggrieved or somehow that Feldmanhad let him down, so Feldman then workedwith Cage ... not worked with him, but kindof was in his circle with the artists and goingto the artist’s club downtown on 8th St. anddeveloping his unique imagination in a waythat Wolpe hadn’t yet been able to support. Andthe curious thing is that in the later 50s, Wolpecame to see the virtue of the kind of music thatFeldman was writing, and developed his ownnotion of what he called the ‘discontinuum.’And so the final piece on the program is goingto be this Wolpe piece for chamber orchestra,Chamber Piece No.1, in Wolpe’s late style,which is like moment form, each moment iskind of unto itself.”The work is from a period in Wolpe’s life,post-war Germany at Darmstadt in the summer,where Wolpe, according to Clarkson, wasable to close some important circles: “He founda new life,” Clarkson says. “Because he broughtAmerican expressionism [back to Europe], andthere he found Webernian structuralism, andhe returned to Webern in a way that he hadn’tbeen connected for 20 years — it was a marvellousrediscovery for him. And in fact this piece,the Chamber Piece No.1 that you will hear onthe concert, is an homageto Webern. And ituses the same pitchset from Webern’sConcertoand it starts withthe same forminterval that thethird movement ofthe concerto beginswith. And then later inWebern.the score, he’s written ‘Oh, ... Webern!’ on themanuscript. So it is really very touching tosee that the journey is now somehow closedand that he’s come to a new understandingof Webern where he can put Webern into thismoment-form environment and still have himlive and breathe.”One senses that the October 6 concert closessome circles for Clarkson too. “Exactly 20years ago, we did a four-day festival of Wolpe’smusic,” he says, “where we had symposiums,seminars, concerts, workshops; we had a galleryof marvellous performers, Peter Serkincame up, we had performers coming from allover. And out of that we produced a book andthere were recordings so it was a major event.But since then, not so much.”For a musical generalist like me, theOctober 6 concert promises to be a journeythrough a lot of unfamiliar territory, somewhatakin, perhaps, to Clarkson’s own first encounterwith Wolpe’s music back in 1956 at Sam’son College St. But there’s considerable comfortin now having a clearer sense of the individualbehind the concert’s curatorial steeringwheel. “I knew Morton Feldman very well,”says Clarkson, “and John Cage I knew also. Hewould often visit York University where I taughtfor 25 years. And David Tudor, also, who wasthe pianist who actually was like the linchpinbetween the Cage and Wolpe groups, becausehe played all their music.”“It’s very interesting: what Feldman says isof most importance to him (and this is a wayto prepare for this concert) is listening. He’sconcerned only [with] what happens whenyou listen. And that there is a different kindof listening that happens in different kindsof music. And his kind of music demands themost extreme listening because he maybe hasa sound here, and then nothing for a while,and then another sound, and you have to figureout, well, what’s happeninghere? What’sin between? So Wolpe.that listening toa Feldman pieceis a totally differentexperiencethan listening toa Wolpe piece. Butif you play Feldmanvery fast, and Wolpe veryslow, actually you’ll hear a connection.”You can link to Austin Clarkson’srecommended recordings of theworks referenced in this article byreading the story on our website;and you can also view a video ofthis entire conversation, or listen to apodcast of it, by visiting our website:thewholenote.com.thewholenote.com September 1 – October 7, 2013 | 13