Wednesday, March 04, 2015

A Transitional Operation: an interview with Christian Wolff

My interview with / essay on Christian Wolff, A Transitional Operation, is now up at Academia.edu. You can find it by following this link. The piece was written for the collection Aesthetic Justice, published by Valiz: Amsterdam, 2015. Discussing the relations between music and justice, in composition and teaching, linking Cage to Plato and examining what the political importance of experimental music could be today, forty years after the activism of the seventies.

SV Do you still feel this has a kind of political – well, I won’t use the word impact, but importance? 
CW I think so, just by the fact that it’s there. I still like to talk about experimental music, even though many people would say that it’s a non-category now. These days, the formula that I come up with is that experimental music, quite apart from its actual technical procedures and all that, is a kind of music which suggests to people the possibility of change. That things don’t have to be the way they are, to the extent that the way they are is no good. So you kind of make a model, if you will.

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