"This music is drawn from the interaction of the people playing it," Christian Wolff says of his work, and Bread and Roses takes him at his word. The violinist Malcolm Goldstein and the percussionist Matthias Kaul play four open scores from 1964 to 1988, with ten versions of For 1, 2 or 3 People threaded through the programme.
Wolff was born in Nice on 8 March 1934 and moved to the United States at the age of seven. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage, who took him under his wing at sixteen, alongside Morton Feldman and Earle Brown. Otherwise he is largely self-taught as a composer. Goldstein and Kaul first met at a milk bar in Frankfurt's main train station and decided there to play concerts as a duo, concentrating on improvisation and on compositions that leave the players a great deal of freedom. Here Goldstein plays violin and uses his voice, and Kaul plays percussion, hurdy-gurdy and voice. The recordings were made at Hessischer Rundfunk in Frankfurt on 7 October 1999 and on 1 and 2 June 2002, produced by Bernd Leukert.
For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), for any instruments, is one of the pieces in which Wolff explored collective improvisation, notating situations rather than fixed entries or durations. It appears here as violin and percussion, voice and hurdy-gurdy, violin with hurdy-gurdy, solo violin, solo percussion and a duo for voice and body. Exercise 27 (Snare Drum Peace March 2) dates from 1988 and joins two of his long series, the Exercises and the Peace Marches. Bread and Roses (1976) is an eleven-minute piece for violin solo. Edges (1968), for any number of players on any instruments, closes the disc in a fifteen-minute version for violin and percussion.
Group decision-making in these scores matches the political commitment that runs through Wolff's work, which he shared with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew. He worked with Merce Cunningham's dance company from 1953 and joined the improvising group AMM in 1968. In his liner notes Peter Niklas Wilson writes that it is impossible to imagine anyone but Goldstein and Kaul playing this recording, "with their very personal vocabularies." The booklet also includes an interview with Wolff by Christoph Wagner. The production received the quarterly German Record Critics' Award.
CD, Wergo WER 6658 2, released in 2003, a coproduction with Hessischer Rundfunk, 75 minutes.
