Uploaded August 2010 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
"I met [Stefan] Wolpe in Darmstadt, where I went from 1956 to 1959. Josef Rufer invited Wolpe into his class at the Berlin Hochschule, and Wolpe began to speak about fish, so Rufer did not invite Wolpe to give an official lecture at the Hochschule. Rufer was very astonished that I visit Wolpe, and I noticed that he sometimes didn't take Wolpe seriously. I think it's wonderful to speak about fish with music, because for me the most important thing in music is not to have an a, b, and c -- a fixed structure, the principal thing is movement. [Wolpe] opened my mind about the idea of register. It was really interesting for me, because before Xenakis Wolpe was very concerned with this idea of register and pitch. He explained to me his idea of taking in the middle a pitch, and after, two, four, five [pitches], and so on, like a tree. For me this great sense of register is Wolpe, and I owe him my own path. This is my tribute to Wolpe. We discussed [Schoenberg's String] Trio and Wolpe was very interested about the idea of building the piece around timbre and register. I have a word, scale-harmony, and for each piece we must have a color which is given by the beginning. When you fix the register, you fix also the scale-harmony. Wolpe said, 'one should know about all the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structure.' He is for me the example of freedom of structure and not mathematics, how to bring the human, physical impulse into a real composition, with the brain, with intelligence, and with the ear."
Claude Ballif, excerpted from a tribute to Stefan Wolpe
The real world -- what Sir Paul McCartney once referred to as "the world in which we live in" -- illuminated by an intense spirituality. Not in a static pose, or visualized nostalgically from the composer's lofty nook, but in a tracking shot à la Alain Resnais or Godard in "Le Mepris." Serial or quasiserial cosmic events explode fractally on the periphery. Sour arteries of contrapuntal polyphony, eloquently dissonant, flow subcutaneously beneath the focus of out attention (as in "Haut les rêves"). Christian Metz (if memory serves me well -- and it often does not!) coined the expression "cosmophainic" -- showing everything (even the cosmos)-- to describe the quest of the Nouvelle Vague. As I take a step back and consider Claude Ballif's œuvre, what strikes me is a composer engaged in a similar quest. But again, it is the spiritual illumination of both perception and thought that is key -- and it need not matter to us that the lens focusing the light of Ballif's spirituality was Catholic (and not something else).
A wonderful thing about Ballif is that he was quite prolific, composing continuously from 1945 until shortly before his death in 2004. It is profoundly to be hoped that more of his works will soon be recorded. Many of the titles are more than intriguing -- his symphony"La vie du monde qui vient," for example. Meanwhile there are sound snippets of a few additional pieces at
http://www.musiquecontemporaine.fr/fr/search?disp=all&query=Claude+Ballif&exp_inl=on&exp_aud=on&so=ta
Listening to the three minute excerpt from Ballif's partially microtonal Fifth String Quartet is perhaps the most moving musical experience I have had since the fragments of Schoenberg's fifth. And the selection from Ballif's "Quintette pour bassoon" inspires me to drag my Buffet out of the closet. This could well be the best composition for bassoon (in this case, bassoon) and strings since Adolph Weiss' "Concerto for Bassoon and String Quartet." In any event, do not miss the opportunity to listen to these excerpts!
"I met [Stefan] Wolpe in Darmstadt, where I went from 1956 to 1959. Josef Rufer invited Wolpe into his class at the Berlin Hochschule, and Wolpe began to speak about fish, so Rufer did not invite Wolpe to give an official lecture at the Hochschule. Rufer was very astonished that I visit Wolpe, and I noticed that he sometimes didn't take Wolpe seriously. I think it's wonderful to speak about fish with music, because for me the most important thing in music is not to have an a, b, and c -- a fixed structure, the principal thing is movement. [Wolpe] opened my mind about the idea of register. It was really interesting for me, because before Xenakis Wolpe was very concerned with this idea of register and pitch. He explained to me his idea of taking in the middle a pitch, and after, two, four, five [pitches], and so on, like a tree. For me this great sense of register is Wolpe, and I owe him my own path. This is my tribute to Wolpe. We discussed [Schoenberg's String] Trio and Wolpe was very interested about the idea of building the piece around timbre and register. I have a word, scale-harmony, and for each piece we must have a color which is given by the beginning. When you fix the register, you fix also the scale-harmony. Wolpe said, 'one should know about all the structures of fantasy and all the fantasies of structure.' He is for me the example of freedom of structure and not mathematics, how to bring the human, physical impulse into a real composition, with the brain, with intelligence, and with the ear."
Claude Ballif, excerpted from a tribute to Stefan Wolpe
The real world -- what Sir Paul McCartney once referred to as "the world in which we live in" -- illuminated by an intense spirituality. Not in a static pose, or visualized nostalgically from the composer's lofty nook, but in a tracking shot à la Alain Resnais or Godard in "Le Mepris." Serial or quasiserial cosmic events explode fractally on the periphery. Sour arteries of contrapuntal polyphony, eloquently dissonant, flow subcutaneously beneath the focus of out attention (as in "Haut les rêves"). Christian Metz (if memory serves me well -- and it often does not!) coined the expression "cosmophainic" -- showing everything (even the cosmos)-- to describe the quest of the Nouvelle Vague. As I take a step back and consider Claude Ballif's œuvre, what strikes me is a composer engaged in a similar quest. But again, it is the spiritual illumination of both perception and thought that is key -- and it need not matter to us that the lens focusing the light of Ballif's spirituality was Catholic (and not something else).
A wonderful thing about Ballif is that he was quite prolific, composing continuously from 1945 until shortly before his death in 2004. It is profoundly to be hoped that more of his works will soon be recorded. Many of the titles are more than intriguing -- his symphony"La vie du monde qui vient," for example. Meanwhile there are sound snippets of a few additional pieces at
http://www.musiquecontemporaine.fr/fr/search?disp=all&query=Claude+Ballif&exp_inl=on&exp_aud=on&so=ta
Listening to the three minute excerpt from Ballif's partially microtonal Fifth String Quartet is perhaps the most moving musical experience I have had since the fragments of Schoenberg's fifth. And the selection from Ballif's "Quintette pour bassoon" inspires me to drag my Buffet out of the closet. This could well be the best composition for bassoon (in this case, bassoon) and strings since Adolph Weiss' "Concerto for Bassoon and String Quartet." In any event, do not miss the opportunity to listen to these excerpts!
