Weekly Playlist: Scott Wollschleger

by Ted Gordon on Aug. 4, 2020, 1:36 p.m.

Scott Wollschleger has long been interested in the end of the world—or a world. The processes of ending, transformation, and becoming are enacted in many of his works, which often bear witness to the subtle transmutation of musical material through slow, meditative interactions between musician and instrument. In a recent interview with Steve Smith about his longstanding collaboration with pianist Karl Larson, Wollschleger says: 

But world is a created idea, and I get inspiration from the feeling of not holding onto this idea of the past, in a certain way. So when I say I write music for the end of the world, it’s more of a letting go of these things, that structure, the world that we hold onto from the past. I’m looking for a way to make a structure of the world that’s not determined on something from the past. 

Some of Wollschleger's works are more explicit about this new structuring, such as 2015's Bring Something Incomprehensible Into This World!—whose title is excerpted from an essay by Heinrich von Kleist. But others are more mutable in their worldmaking. This week, we celebrate recent performances of Wollschleger's works that investigate such sonic possible worlds. 

1. Lost Anthems, Wollschleger's 2019 work for viola and piano, composed for violist Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti's multifaceted 20/19 commissioning project. The UK premiere performance, at the Turner Contemporary (alongside commissions by Andrew Norman and Anna Thorvaldsdottir), was filmed by Will Dutta, and is now available to stream:

2. Dark Days, a 2017 work for solo piano written during the early tenure of America's current president. This work was recently performed by pianist/composer Timo Andres, paired with Aaron Copland's Story of Our Town, for the Metropolis Ensemble's House Music Series, which feature intimate performances at home during our current dark days. 

3. American Dream (for piano, contrabass, and percussion, 2017). This work, commissioned and premiered by the trio Bearthoven, was recorded and released in 2019 on Canteloupe Music, and was more recently performed at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute. Wollschleger and the members of Bearthoven (Karl Larson, Pat Swoboda, and Matt Evans) were interviewed by Avaloch's Michael Compitello, and their discussion of this work can be seen here.

4. We Have Taken and Eaten, a 2015 monodrama for solo percussionist. This heterodox work places a percussionist—Kevin Sims—as the protagonist of an operatic work, in which, Wollschleger writes, "I tried to construct a musical language that was composed of sound materials that might have been left over in the dustbin of history." As featured on NPR's "Arts & Letters" program, We Have Taken and Eaten "attempts to create a new narrative for ourselves as we move into an uncertain future." 

Scott Wollschleger: New Works and Performances

by Ted Gordon on July 12, 2016, 4:20 p.m.

"What kind of music would we create after everything was over?" Scott Wollschleger asks this crucial question in an interview on Arts & Letters, produced by the University of Arkansas' KUAR. In his monodrama for solo percussionist, We Have Taken and Eaten, Wollschleger creates music using a sonic language from "the dustbin of history." Wollschleger's music often theorizes and sonifies the presence of the not-quite-real, playing with time, gesture, and semiotic codes of tonality to evoke absence, silence, or non-being—what he often calls "dust." Two new works and two high-profile performances of Wollschleger's work in the coming weeks prove that more and more musicians are beginning to wonder about what happens "after". 

(above score excert from "The Heart is No Place for War") 

Ethan Iverson (of the noted trio The Bad Plus) recently wrote that "Wollschleger has become one of my favorite contemporary composers". On July 15th, from 5-10pm, he will perform a program in New York's Bryant Park, including Wollschleger's solo piano work, Music Without Metaphor, which has been recently published on PSNY. Wollschleger dedicated this piece to pianist Ivan Illić, who premiered it in 2013, calling it "beguiling" and "improvisatory". Check out Illić's recording below: 

The very next day, pianist Karl Larson will perform Wollschleger's piano concerto Meditation on Dust at Mass MoCA, as a part of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival. Commissioned and premeired by Larson and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn in 2015, this piece imagines what a Strausian tone-poem would sound like after drying out in the desert for a thousand years. In this piece, tonality is granulated, rendered simultaneously present and absent, ephemeral. Check out a video of the premiere below: 

Indeed, as Alex Ross writes, this weekend will be a "Wollschleger Moment". Wollschleger's The Heart is No Place for War, for two pianos and two vibraphones, asks the instrumentalists to time the work to their heartbeats; after hearing this piece, Ross wrote that Wollschleger has "become a formidable, individual presence." Check out the recording from the premiere at Brooklyn's Firehouse Space below: