Harmonies and counterpoints between Germany and America run through the history of music on both sides of the Atlantic, writes Austin Clarkson, director of the Stefan Wolpe Archives, in the booklet. In the nineteenth century musical life in the United States and Canada was often in the hands of musicians and conductors trained in Germany, and American-born musicians completed their education at the conservatories in Leipzig and Berlin. At the beginning of the twentieth century many North American composers sought to free themselves from the European tradition — which meant rebelling against the hegemony of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner.
They succeeded to varying degrees, and they did so where they engaged with the American soundscape. The American tradition of experiment founded by Charles Ives created an aesthetic fundamentally different from current European music; an ever-widening circle followed his example and broadened the horizons: Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Harry Partch, Colin McPhee, John Cage, Henry Brant and Lou Harrison. They offered an extraordinary spectrum of alternatives to the prevailing bourgeois musical culture by challenging European principles of form, tonality, instrumentation, melodic and harmonic coherence and the cultural function of music.
Stefan Wolpe grew up in Berlin, where he came into contact with Ferruccio Busoni, the Dadaists, the left-wing Expressionists of the Melos circle around Hermann Scherchen and the Bauhaus artists in Weimar. In 1933 he fled Germany for Palestine, where he lived from 1934 to 1938 with the pianist Irma Schoenberg Wolpe, before both emigrated to the United States and taught at several schools in Philadelphia, New York and North Carolina. In 1956 David Tudor — who had come to Philadelphia in 1943 to study piano with Irma and composition with Stefan — accompanied Wolpe to Europe, where they appeared at the Darmstadt summer courses and Wolpe spoke about current developments in America.
That lecture marked the return of the German avant-gardist to his homeland, while at the same time he brought news from the New World. Wolpe’s own music revealed his connection with the abstract expressionism of the New York school of poets and painters; but through his return to Europe the composer living in exile was inspired, by way of the young composers there, to a new departure within his own work. From that late phase comes the Trio in two parts for flute, cello and piano of 1963/64, the heart of this programme.
The Wolpe-Trio, itself a product of German-American collaboration, sets beside it works that sum up the interaction since the Second World War: Dietrich Hahne’s two-part Fourtunes of 1992, Erik Lund’s eleven-minute Raccontini of 1996, the Trio Set of 1993 by the cellist Scott Roller with its movements Gazes, Metabop, Warlocks and Stages, and Manfred Stahnke’s Ritus of 1979 in five terse sections. That the musicians were able to prompt important composers to write for their ensemble testifies to their bond with avant-garde musical thinking — the counterpoints and harmonies play on. The recording was made in April and May 1998 in the Erholungshaus of Bayer AG in Leverkusen; the CD runs to 62:25. Wolpe’s papers are held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, and the Stefan Wolpe Society, founded in 1981, promotes the dissemination of his music.