...next to these spartanic contributions, the compositions of the
Californian Daniel Wolf seemed positively flowery: he opened up the first
emblems of the very same association spaces that the other composers of
this evening steadfastly rejected... or led into error. What he appeared
therefore able to secure, without having to resort to populist actions,
was the undivided attention of the public. The tension-filled oscillation
between attraction and construction is the qualitative feature of his pieces:
they grab through harmonic (Planxty) or timbral and gestural stimulus (Field
Study) without allowing these features to dominate the musical events.
Thomas Kahlcke, Kieler Nachrichten 19/8/91
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...But clearly so with the third in the group, Daniel Wolf. The Frankfurt-based Californian is namely a highly intelligent tightrope walker, who understands how to maintain balance with instinctive sureness. Wolf prefers to work with stylistic citations, which he infiltrates structurally. And out of the oft only hair-thin break between the citated and the deviated arises the "sense" of his music. In the pseudo-romantic duo, In Bregalia, for example, violin and piano follow one another in tiny displacements.
Or in the string trio Figure & Ground, a commission of the Land Schleswig-Holstein sponsored by the Gesellschaft für Akustischen Lebenshilfe: it is a kind of suite, a loose series of five movements, each with one theme. There is, for example, a lamento, whose target is -- intentionally -- only so slightly missed through the prescribed intonational impurities. Or a Passacaglia, that somehow sounds out of the Rennaissance, but whose single voices slip by one another a bit and whose ostinato varies "against the rules" in length and range.
Thomas Kahlcke, Kieler Nachrichten 17/10/94
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Few do in all
A wild felon
and foe will
fain do well
if olden law
fail on lewd
and low life.
Allow fiend?
No idle flaw!
If we all nod,
fade on will
(in all, few do!)
O and if... we'll
all find woe.
-- Clarence Barlow