SICPP: Cage, Wolff

Open your ears and your mind at theSummer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP). It's a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in hearing where new music has been going, and to understand where it might be going next.

Legendary artists are in residence for this week of intensive musical study and performance, alongside seminar participants who are here for the sheer thrill of the avant garde. NEC's Stephen Drury is artistic director for this institute, and guest artists this year include Louis Goldstein, Joseph Kubera, and Steffen Schleiermacher.

Cage Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, Music for 17
Wolff Hay una mujer desaparecida and world premiere of Overture
performed by Stephen Drury, Yukiko Takagi, and Callithumpian Consort

As a continuation of NEC's celebration of John Cage, SICPP focuses this year on Cage's music as well as that of his colleague and friend Christian Wolff, who is SICPP composer-in-residence this year. Wolff was previously in residence at NEC in 2010.

Cage

Composer John Cage (1912–1992) paid attention to the 99% of sound that was not previously called "music." This even led him to explore what was previously thought of as "silence." Because he challenged existing notions of music in such a fundamental way, his ideas still provoke and inspire.

Cage called his Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra (1950–51) "a drama between the piano, which remains romantic, expressive, and the orchestra, which itself follows the principles of oriental philosophy."

The much later Music for __ (1984–87) creates the opportunity to fill in the blank in the title with the number of performers, though 17 parts are provided—and no overall score connecting them. The (up to) four percussionists are expected to construct an array of 50 instruments apiece, giving this work an orchestral scope regardless of how many or few players assemble.

Wolff

Christian Wolff is the last surviving member of the New York School of composers who revolutionized music in the 20th century. Along with Cage, Morton Feldman, and Earle Brown, Wolff has changed the way musicians across the spectrum think about composition and performance.

Hay una mujer desaparecida is Wolff's set of piano variations on Holly Near's 1978 song dedicated to the Chilean women who were "disappeared" (i.e. murdered without trace) during the Pinochet junta in the 1970s. It continues a thread of variation sets based on political songs initiated by Frederic Rzewski in 1975 with The People United Will Never Be Defeated.