Christian Wolff: "For Trumpet Player" Performed by Nate Wooley

Friday, September 29th, ISSUE is pleased to present FOR, the first evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions with some of America’s most iconoclastic composers and performers. A celebration of individual languages and the spirit of collaboration, the evening opens the series with the premiere of For Trumpet Player by Christian Wolff, a performance of Ashley Fure’s Shiver Lung 2, the debut duo encounter between Michael Pisaro and Christian Wolff, and a performance of Annea Lockwood’s Bayou-Borne, for Pauline.

Organized by performer, composer and former ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers.

Christian Wolff’s For Trumpet Player was the first piece Nate Wooley received after undertaking the commissioning series. Wooley describes the impetus of commissioning these works as coming from a desire to add music to the solo trumpet repertoire that met a certain aesthetic that felt lacking in the contemporary literature: music with an attention to non-linear forms, an attention to sound and timbre over technical flash, and music that was personal not only within the language of the composer but the player as well. This initial premise prompted the expansion of the series into thematic celebration of the composer's’ work, methods and approaches.

New York-based American trumpeter Nate Wooley (b. 1974) has performed on over 100 recordings. Increasingly acknowledged internationally, Wooley’s specific style is part of a burgeoning revolution in experimental trumpet technique. His own compositions expand conceptions of linguistic based embouchure manipulation and utilize the trumpet to control amplified feedback. He has performed regularly with such icons as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker, and Yoshi Wada, as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation like Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson.

Christian Wolff (born 1934, Nice, France) is a composer, teacher and sometime performer. Since 1941 he has lived in the United States. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition briefly with John Cage, in whose company, along with Morton Feldman, then David Tudor and Earle Brown, his work found encouragement and support, as it did subsequently from association with Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew, and with Merce Cunningham and his dance company. As an improviser he has played with the English group AMM, Christian Marclay, Takehisa Kosugi, Keith Rowe, Steve Lacy, Larry Polansky and Kui Dong. From 1971 to 1999 he taught classics, comparative literature and music at Dartmouth College.