Exploring the role of Village composer Stefan Wolpe, his connection to the Bauhaus and Josef Albers, and work by his students Morton Feldman and Leo Brouwer. Featuring guitar soloists Daniel Conant, Matt Kaplan, Angel Blanco, and The Village Trip Guitar Orchestra.

Stefan Wolpe -- selections from Music for Any Instruments
Leo Brouwer -- Cuban Landscape with Rain
and various of Brouwer's iconic guitar solos
Morton Feldman -- "The Possibility of a new work for Electric Guitar" will be performed by Angel Blanco
Shoko Suzuki -- "at the cliff, mermaid and turtle" for guitar orchestra and electric guitar, featuring Kyle Miller, e-guitar

Morton Feldman talks about his electric guitar solo.

TVT Guitar Orchestra

Guitar 1

Daniel Conant, Rianne Mision
Ram Loste, Neil Beckman

Guitar 2

Pascual Araujo, Sean Ferguson
Matt Zlotkin, Jackie Ward
Ricardo Arias

Guitar 3

Kyle Miller, Ryan Bagg
Adam Negrin, Whitney Hall

Guitar 4

Chris Rispoli, John Chang
Delilah Higgins, Angel Blanco
Jack Bergin, Maggie Craig

Daniel Conant studied with William Anderson at Sarah Lawrence College, and later at Eastman and with Raphalla Smits at the Lemmens Institute / LUCA School of Arts in Leuven, Belgium. He has performed at the Staunton Festival in Staunton, VA, for the Ekmelic Festival in Salzburg, Interharmony Festival in Aqua Terme, and others.

Hika — Leo Brouwer

Presentimiento (Habanero) - Agustin Castilla-Avila

View From Bayonne Bridge at Night — David Saperstein

How the Grass Sounds — new solo for me by Kyle Miller

Poemas Armónico I, II, III

Wolpe: A Double Irony

Are you taking the daimon coming or going?
(Do you see powerful and vital forces accumlating and coalescing or dissipating? It requires the empathy see in Vico's studies of ancient civilizations.)

Like Schoenberg, I see the daimon coming, manifesting manifold. If in Brahms’ work you feel the daimon going, then Brahms will be the musty old blankets.

I must google the musty old blanket meme. A Brit, I think it was, who planted that insidious seed.

“A free society itself can subsist only with the aid of conventions, of beliefs tacitly held in common, whether or not they jibe with individual perceptions and preferences. When they do not, they must be respected under social pressure—lip service is as good as belief; from which it follows that because the mind works as it does, society cannot endure without customary and beneficial hypocrisy.” (Jacques Barzun speaking in the mannoer of William James)

This is where I am with Wolpe and my other modernists. In Wolpe I recognize the emergent powers (the daimon approaching), while the Rockwell coup has succeeded to a degree in sending the likes of me underground.

Terry Eagleton—

When enough people are stranded, their value system re dared a stranded asset, in diverse spheres including music, Eagleton calls that the postmodern condition. (Look up the exact wording.)

Wolpe makes an end run through Leo Brouwer, a darling of the very conservative classical guitar community. Brouwer does broken symmetries and I have little doubt that his teacher Wolpe taught him how to work with those musical streams of disparate viscosities, colors, lusters. This needs breaking down, but it is something that Brouwer and Feldman both learned from Wolpe. Feldman was much more systematic about it than Brouwer.

Wolpe persists in a world that grew weary of his thing; Wolpe is alive & well in Brouwer’s work.

The cultural center of gravity of the moment does not have hard borders. Feldman is perhaps on a different island of lost toys than Wolpe.

Now, in my universe, I see Wolpe’s little interval studies as immediately attractive, but not with the range of Schoenberg's music, not the almost Brahmsian range achieved in Babbitt’s Swan Song No. 1.

Moreover, I see Wolpe’s interval studies as an act of getting real. He left Germany beause Gernany was entrenched in empty values solely in support of power for power’s sake, becoming a sham.

See Hermann Broch’s essay “Hugo Von Hoffmansthal and his time.

Joseph Albers’ color studies are another important artiact. Albers was getting real. Robert Pollock did a study of musical analogies to Joseph Albers' color studies. They will be posted here shortly.

As a Bauhaus figure Wolpe is cleaning house (getting real), but he was certainly aware of Expressionism, that which the fascists were purging. He must have thought it a most wonderful joke on the world to transition from the German Expressionist universe, banned where it emerged, to the American Abstract Expressionist world. He embraced Anerican jazz at its height. He befriended Charlie Parker. He befreinded Abstract Expressionust painters, who channelled the energy of the jazz artists.

Wolpe would be sad to see the US now, but leas sad if we all recognize the irony heaped posthumously upon his sly irony.

Contact the host of The Village Trip Pre-festival events at Loft 393: Wolpe, Brouwer & Feldman