UbuWeb ResourcesThe Wolf Fifth Collection
From Kenneth Goldsmith, Duchamp is My Lawyer: The Polemics,Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (Columbia University Press, 2020)
Listen to the Wolf Fifth Collection Here
The instability of blogs and file-sharing lockers is heartbreaking. People spend years of their lives and expend tremendous effort sharing what they love with others, only to have the product of their efforts ripped down by cease-and-desist notices from labels. This is what happened to Wolf Fifth, a blog dedicated to preserving out-of-print avant-garde classical works on vinyl that was shuttered due to copyright threats in 2012. The blog had just posted its 151st album, a selection of string pieces by Arnold Schoenberg and Mel Powell on the Nonesuch label. The preceding 150 discs were a trove of rare vinyl records, such as the box set Music Before Revolution (1972), featuring difficult works by avant-garde New York School composers and their European counterparts.
When the blog went down, there was the typical and sadly predictable comment stream from readers, consisting of thanks, sympathy, sorrow, and anger. I was one of those commenters: “I am the owner of UbuWeb and would like to preserve the Wolf Fifth blog. Please contact me and we can arrange something.” In late 2012, I received an email from a Canadian architecture student named Justin Lacko, who had been reading the comments. He wrote, “I was a visitor of the Wolf Fifth blog and I saved almost every release, save one or two that I missed due to removal because of copyright claims. I am a big fan of UbuWeb and would like to offer my assistance with providing my copies of the music for you. They have all been tagged to great detail. Let me know if I can assist.”8 Naturally, I responded with great enthusiasm, and we immediately began to work together to rebuild and stabilize the vast archive, and within a few years the blog in its entirety was preserved on Ubu.
Vast and various like most blogs, Wolf Fifth seemed to be put together not according to any system but by passion and whim, narrowly focused on sharing obscure avant-garde classical LPs from the 1950s to the 1980s, with titles such as Polish Modern Music, Computer Music, and Musica cubana contemporanea. Housed within the Wolf archive are huge sublibraries, such as the nearly complete run of Deutsche Grammophon’s rainbow-colored series Avant-Garde from 1968 to 1971, more than two dozen solo and compilation LPs by important experimental European composers. There are also a number of the Prospective 21e Siecle series curated by François Bayle and Pierre Henry and released by Philips from 1966 to 1972, featuring futuristic metallic-ink covers and focusing on musique concrète, electroacoustic music, and electronic music. The series had an international bent, in particular with a four-LP set called Electronic Panorama, in which each disc was devoted to a single city—Paris, Tokyo, Utrecht, Warsaw.
Wolf Fifth was curated by a classically trained percussionist named Luuk de Weert, who lives in Utrecht, Holland. While studying at a Dutch music academy in the 1970s, he had a professor who encouraged his students to listen to difficult contemporary music. Feeling his students were lacking delicacy, he had them listen to pieces such as Boulez’s “Le marteau sans maître” in order to teach them how to be more sensitive percussionists. De Weert became obsessed with modern music and began collecting as much vinyl as he could, which he later ended up digitally encoding so he could listen in his car or share them with his friends. When blogging happened, it was natural for him to share his rips with others. De Weert says, “Most of these LPs were not ever released as CDs and are out of print now. This incredible situation puzzled me. Why was all this important and groundbreaking music neglected? These compositions certainly were not intended for easy listening or background music … but it seems that nobody was interested in publishing this important material anymore.”9
He began posting high-quality transfers along with scans of the front and back covers of his LP collection. He had a few guiding rules for the blog. First, everything had to be free. Second, he wanted the blog to be simple and functional, with no information other than the title of the album, a track list, a scan of the cover, and a link to the album. Third, he limited his sharing to experimental and avant-garde “composed” LPs from 1960 to 1985. Last, he insisted on providing the best-quality transfers possible.
The blog was successful, at least by his standards, drawing more than a thousand visitors a day, but he began to run into copyright troubles. The Dutch publishing house Donemus accused him of copyright infringement and ordered him to stop his posts of its Composers’ Voice series after a complaint by a composer. Around the same time, he had problems with Schott-Music in Germany, which demanded €10,000 per posted album. In response, de Weert says, “I accused them of kidnapping cultural heritage, trying to kill a mosquito with a cannon. They see this material only in terms of copyrights and (legal) property, as if it were cars or houses or whatever. But music (and of course also literature, fine-art, etc.) is much more than a commercial product; it is a reflection of who we are and who we were; in this sense, it belongs to us all.”10 Although these companies never followed up on their threats, de Weert was rattled, finally surrendering in 2012, after only a year of posting. The acquisition of this archive extended the narrative UbuWeb had already been building with the History of Electronic/Electroacoustic Music and Women in Electronic Music, once more expanding and complicating our notion of the avant-garde in new directions.