Review: Paul Bowles on Music

Review: Paul Bowles on Music

Abstract

As Adorno had perceived as early as 1940, there is something about Wolpe’s work that sets it apart from even the most advanced compositions of the preceding generation. If, in late serial Schoenberg, as Adorno suggests, a subjective (read: espressivo) quality is heroically regained, by means of the imposition of old forms on an alien musical material (see GS, xii. 113–14), in late Wolpe there is none of this effortfulness, and none of the accompanying Angst either. But nor is there a flight into total organization. This is music that, while remaining strictly composed at the level of pitch-class and intervallic content, seems happy at the level of gesture to let itself be blown about at whim, and in the complete absence of traditional patterns of phrasing and metre. Most commentators in the latter half of this volume make reference to Wolpe’s reliance on intuition: what he called his ‘fantasy’. But only Brody shows himself alive to the important philosophical/aesthetic issues raised here. As he puts it, Wolpe’s ‘startling, compositionally-implosive rejection of development (and beyond that, it seems, of the entire technology of Auskomponierung, structural unfolding)’ not only creates a situation where ‘the entire apparatus of middleground structure’