ABSTRACT
The author focuses on Christian Wolff's experiences at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in 1972 and 1974 is interspersed with edited and annotated excerpts from an interview he conducted with the composer on 26 June 1997. Wolff arrived in Darmstadt amidst a storm of ideological discourse that lingered in response to the unstable political atmosphere of the early 1970s in Western Europe. Wolff also drew emphatic connections between American composers' engagement with environmental issues and the natural world and their ahistorical and atemporal compositional attitudes. During the plenary session of his first seminar, Wolff characterized American experimental music as detached from economic concerns and therefore free to experiment uninhibitedly. Wolff focused much of his second seminar on sound production and ensemble interaction through compositions that used only stones. To start his third and final seminar of 1972, Wolff introduced three ideas that currently concerned him: music and nature, Cardew's Maoist critique of Cage, and music's social usefulness.
