hcmf// 2014 interview: Petr Kotik

Wolff notes:

Petr Kotik celebrates with hcmf// Interview : Abi Bliss

The composer and Ostravskรก banda founder on selecting delights old and new for Christian Wolff's 80th birthday tribute On Friday 21 November, this year's Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival opens with a concert celebrating the 80th birthday of one of modern music's key figures, Christian Wolff. Performed by Ostravskรก banda, making their first visit to the festival, A Tribute to Christian Wolff has been programmed and will be conducted by the Czech chamber orchestra's founder, director and longtime Wolff associate Petr Kotik.

Wolff himself is represented by the UK premieres of two new works and one rediscovered gem from the archives, presented alongside works by Czech composers Petr Cigler and Martin Smolka, American Alex Mincek and a new work by Kotik himself..

I would say that his importance is simply in his presence as a composer and an artist - that is, his contribution to the discussion about what we are doing and to some degree why are we doing it What you won't hear from these younger composers, according to Kotik, is imitations of Wolff's own work. Instead, he says, it is more about identifying a common sensibility and direction in the music. And, according to him, Wolff's overall contribution to contemporary music is similarly intangible.

'I would say that his importance is simply in his presence as a composer and an artist - that is, his contribution to the discussion about what we are doing and to some degree why are we doing it,' he says. 'One works in an environment that is created by the effort of others and Wolff has always been an example, a presence of a true artist, a true 'jester', going straight to the point.'

Born in 1942 and educated in Prague and Vienna - studying flute from the age of 14 and taking up composition when he was 19 - Kotik moved to the USA in 1969 to join the University of Buffalo's Center for Creative and Performing Arts, and founded the S.E.M. Ensemble in 1970. But his association with Christian Wolff stretches back further, as shown by For Six or Seven Players, a Wolff piece from 1959 that came into Kotik's hands via John Cage. Wolff had composed music for the dance

company of Merce Cunningham which Cage, Cunningham's partner and musical director, was having trouble turning into a successful performance.

'I can imagine, in 1959, how much resistance among the musicians, with some exception, of course, there must have been to perform scores that Christian Wolff composed at that time,' Kotik explains. 'His free-flowing notation requires the understanding of navigating within the given material and a very keen sense of time. Time, a sense of time (which can be altered by saying rhythm, a sense of rhythm) is the basis for music - any kind of music - and not understanding what to do completely ruins it.'

Cage's solution was to add some temporal moorings. 'What Cage did was translating, with the help of chance operations, the open time element of Wolff's notation into an exactly notated score, thus ensuring the right proportions, which makes the music what it is. Cage's notated score needs a conductor in contrast to the Wolff's original, which cannot be conducted.'

Wolff notes: Petr Kotik celebrates with hcmf//

Cage left the score with Wolff after a failed attempt to perform it in Warsaw in 1964. So what effect will his compositional intervention have upon the performance of For Six or Seven Players at hcmf//? 'The end effect of both versions should be the same, musically speaking. However, music is not just sounds to be listened to, it is equally a spectacle of the a live performance and here the difference is obvious; while in the original version by Wolff, the listener is pulled into the joint effort by the ensemble, Cage's version demonstrates the striving for precision by both, the musicians and the conductor.'

Whilst For Six or Seven Players represents Wolff's early period, the composer's continuing vitality in the 21st century is shown by 37 Haiku (2005), a setting of John Ashbery's poems written for the baritone Thomas Bruckner, who guests at the concert, and 2012's Trust, both receiving their UK premieres at hcmf//.

Trust was composed specially for Ostravskรก banda, reflecting the orchestra's origins in Ostrava Days, a biennial festival and institute for musicians taking place in the Czech town, which Wolff co-founded along with Kotik, Alvin Lucier and Earle Brown, and which provided the impetus for the creation of several of his orchestral works, including Ordinary Matter for 3 Orchestras and Rhapsody for 3 Orchestras.

Kotik's own piece in the Wolff tribute is Nine + 1, whose title reflects the fact that he originally set out to compose for nine of Ostravskรก banda's musicians, but forgot his original intention and ended up scoring it for 10. Like much of his work, it alternates between a coordinated and uncoordinated score, an approach which, he explains, derives from his rebellious approach to conventional harmony.

'Music is a set of sounds, one after another, alone or simultaneous, one with another.' he says. 'The simultaneities are what we call 'harmony', if they unfold in an orderly and logical manner. I myself have a handicap by not having an

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intuitive understanding of harmony, something that I share not only with Christian Wolff, but also with Cage - and I am sure with many others. My thinking as a composer has always been linear and my harmonies are sometimes derived by combining individual layers of pitches. They are usually unpredictable and it takes a while to get used to them. Separating various lines in time, i.e. making them independent of one another; i.e. combining simultaneously different tempos; i.e. having the musicians perform in an uncoordinated way are just a few steps one can take in this linear musical thinking.'

Beyond the Wolff celebrations, Kotik's next major project will be S.E.M.'s staging in the USA of Master-Pieces, a new chamber opera which sees him return to the work of modernist author Gertrude Stein, whose repetition-based experiments with form and meaning ('A rose is a rose is a rose' being one of her more quotable lines) have provided inspiration for several of his pieces.

Nearly 40 years after the creation of his six-hour opera Many Many Women, his enthusiasm for Stein is undimmed.

'Stein's writings are a prime example of an artwork that will continue to live forever, or as long as people will continue to read. What is the reason? It is the liveliness of the work. After encountering an idea expressed by Stein that I read, say 40 years ago, coming back to it now brings new discoveries and this is happening to me again and again.' He concludes, 'You think you know it, but you really don't and contiguously discover something new. That is what makes it alive. That is why we continue to listen to Beethoven and continue to read Gertrude Stein.'

Petr Kotik @

2014

Friday 21 November | Ostravskรก banda: A Tribute to Christian Wolff

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Fri 21 - Sun 30 November 2014