Morton Feldman + Stefan Wolpe – For Stefan Wolpe
February 24th, 2010For Stefan Wolpe is a CD full of works for chorus (very lightly peppered with an instrument or two) from a couple of prominent composers from the second half of the 20th Century, Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972) and his student Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Stefan fled Germany during Hitler’s reign, only to become a prominent fixture in the New York School, where he befriended abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline in the 1940s, as well as teaching from 1952-1956 at Black Mountain College when John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham and Lou Harrison hung out there. Stefan’s works tend toward the tonal and melodic, occasionally fired up with dissonance: “Wolpe enjoyed watching fish in an aquarium to get his inspirations, which helps explain why his notes shimmer, freeze, then dart in a new direction with such spontaneity.”—Kyle Gann