For Pianist: The Solo Piano Music

This chapter provides a detailed account of the six movements of Instrumental Exercises with Peace March 4 for a number of reasons. It demonstrates the narrative trajectory of the work as a whole. The Exercises present various constituent groupings within the ensemble. First winds and cello, then keyboards with occasional support from the others; next everyone plays around one, then two, melodic lines; then everyone has an individual part but with only rhythms notated; finally everyone plays their own material but in rhythmic unanimity. Once the ensemble has been assembled the Peace March can begin, and one can imagine a politicized defence of the work which would argue that only after the collective organization which takes place in the Exercises is the concerted political resistance of the Peace March possible. Compared to the post-minimalist aesthetic which informed the Fox and Johnson works and the collage of pastiche in the Robinson, the Wolff was uneasy territory for some of the ensemble.