Hungry, Not Unlike the Woolf

It is quite an exciting time here at the T.A.Z. Mahal! As you know, on a purely theoretical level, we value all our readers equally. But realistically, we all know what happens when a person of artistic merit visits our humble home in the blogosphere. We fawn all over them!

What am I talking about? Check out the following comment:

randy woolf said:
June 28th, 2007 at 12:02 am e
hi

hello to pilp, whoever you may be. i am very happily surprised to hear that you have some of my music on your iPod. thanks! say hello at my myspace page.

: )

I now realize that not all of my readers are also avid readers of Nina and Kiki’s blog. If they were, they would know that Pilp has been revealed to be none other than Pepper Weckelsby! New readers can read about my first meeting with the charming Pepper here. Hope that clears things up, Maestro Woolf!

While Maestro Woolf, or ‘Randy’, as his friends call him, may be surprised that Pepper has his music on her iPod, it does not surprise me in the least. That is because it was I who gave Pepper the recording of his ballet Where the Wild Things Are. A few years back, I was in charge of distributing the freebie spoken word recordings we received from various labels to give out at Poetry-Con. Apparantly, the recording of this ballet was mistakenly thrown in. On seeing this disc, I immediately thought, “This is something Pepper would like!” After the con, we got together with Sol, Serious, Marcel and perhaps a few others for my homemade beef stew and some red wine. At Serious’ suggestion, we listened to the ballet as we watched Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with the sound off. A memorable night.

While I am quite fond of this ballet, I am ashamed to admit I knew very little else about this wonderful composer. So, I went to check out his website and myspace page to learn more.

He has studied with David Del Tredici, a fabulous composer whose obsession with Alice in Wonderland rivals that of Rich Sauces. Maestro Woolf’s music has been performed by Bang On a Can, California EAR Unit, Jennifer Choi, the American Composers Orchestra and many others. He has also worked with John Cale and Siouxsie Sioux, so he has some goth cred. He recently premiered his work “Everything is Green” based on the short story of the same name by the T.A.Z. Mahal’s good friend and friend to dogs everywhere, David Foster (Dave) Wallace.

I hope Randall Woolf would not be terribly offended if I classified him in the Totalist, or Maximalist school.

I was also very excited to discover that Mr. Woolf is married to the wonderful pianist Kathleen Supové Ms. Supové has recorded to the works of Nick Didkovsky, Robert Carl, Lukas Ligeti and many others including the charming Marti Epstein, best known for her soft Morton Feldman-esque music and her short, tight skirts.

I recall one Halloween party where Marti was playing Kathleen Supové’s recording of her work Waterbowls. Marti writes out her own scores by hand in a very detailed fashion. In a master class, the great composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein noticed this and remarked “Isn’t that precious.” As if the great Bernstein was one to cast aspersions on someone for overdoing anything.

Hmm, I seemed to have digressed.

Oh yes, Mr. Woolf has had his work Action Potential performed by the marimba-violin duo Marimolin. I recall spending a long train journey with the husband of Marimolin’s Sharan Leventhal. Perhaps his name was Steve. I don’t really remember. To make things less confusing, I’ll simply call him Edmondo. Anyway, Edmondo, an ethnomusicologist and percussionist of some renown, regaled me with story after story of his field work. Inevitably, each story ended with one of the subjects of his study angrily asking him “who the &^#$* he thought he was!” The coffee on that journey was delightful.

Mr. Woolf has also written a keyboard work Spineless Dog that is 24 hours in duration! If that work is ever performed in our fair city, you know Serious Dogstar will be front and center at the end of the piece to yell “Encore!”

I’m so glad to have had this excuse to become reaquainted with Mr. Woolf’s music. I encourage you to check it out for yourselves.