Daniel James Wolf

Daniel James Wolf (born September 13, 1961 in Upland, California) is an American composer of serious music and a music scholar.

Wolf studied composition study with Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, and La Monte Young, as well as musical tunings with Erv Wilson and Douglas Leedy and ethnomusicology. BA University of California Santa Cruz, MA, PhD, Wesleyan University. Important contacts with Lou Harrison, John Cage, Walter Zimmermann. Managing Editor of Xenharmonikon, 1985-89. Based in Europe from 1989, he is known as a member of the "Material" group of composers, along with Hauke Harder, Markus Trunk.

Wolf's compositions apply an experimental approach to musical materials, with a special interest in intonation, yet often display a surface that playfully - if accidentally - recalls historical musics. Major works include The White Canoe, an opera seria for handpuppets to the libretto by Edward Gorey and four string quartets.

Three distinct streams combine to form Wolf's oeuvre. Wolf makes sound installations, experimental concert works based on sound structures mostly free from historical associations, and experimental concert works based on reifying the tradition of European art music (or other world musics, particular Javanese gamelan) and then performing operations on its internal principles. The following remarks pertain to this last body of work.

Composer Wolf identifies with the experimental music tradition--especially its American West Coast manifestation-- spiritually, intellectually and personally. Nevertheless, in that portion of his work where his choice of musical materials and forms derive from common practice harmony and counterpoint, he might, to some, suggest a conservative neoclassicist. Where neoclassicism means pursuing classical ideals with novel sonic resources, Wolf's actually employs the reverse tactic -- he virtuosically explores reasonably familiar classical or neoclassical materials with no a priori commitment to received ideals.

He jokingly calls his method "dysfunctional harmony." A metaphor might help explain his meaning. Imagine the principles of common practice music as carried by some genetic code subject to mutations. Either intuitively or methodically, Wolf mutates certain genes and produces harmony or counterpoint that systematically engages our historical understanding but still undermines our expectations. In the long run biological mutations either prove adaptive (and proliferate) or maladaptive (and disappear), but when the sport first appears, it holds only its strangeness, orthogonal to any world of value.

In this respect Wolf has deeply internalized the experimental ethos. Typical composers employ trial and error as they search for some effect, while strict aleatoric composers, after Cage, perform trials and simply accept the effect. Wolf performs Cageian experiments, mostly in his head, with or without the aid of chance procedures, but in doing so nevertheless engages musical functionality though without making a fetish of it.

While Wolf's tendency towards small forms and quiescent gestures often tickles a listener's notions of the musically elegant, his mutated materials make for music that must fall just shy of received standards of elegance. Much of the power of his music derives from a tension that dwells in the negative space between the forms Wolf actually achieves and the engaged listener's induced desire for a perfectly elegant idealization.

Rather than a post-modernist's theatrical pastiche and cold irony, Wolf's detente with the great tradition has a tragic aspect. One might compare Wolf's engagement with the past to that of the uncompromising realist in literature, drama or the visual arts, one who takes on the practices of the great tradition but rejects the hegeomonic repression encoded in naive heroicism and idealization.

He has written extensively about modern and experimental music, systematic musicology, and speculative music theory.

External links

• Daniel James Wolf composer's own webpage with list of works, sample scores, articles
• Material Press publisher
• Renewable Music blog by Daniel Wolf