Wolff, a celebrated composer of experimental music and a former music, classics and comparative literature professor at Dartmouth, received the Walter Cerf Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Lea, a poet and former English professor at the College, was named the poet laureate of Vermont, the seventh in the state's history.
Though Wolff began his exploration of experimental music in New York City, he said his Newbury, Vt., house overlooking the White River "out in the boondocks" has most inspired the natural sound and space used in his recent musical compositions.
"When you walk out in the springtime, you hear peepers and all sorts of natural sounds in that setting," Wolff said. "That's had an effect on my work, no question. It's not that I write some kind of spring symphony, but it's more about listening and paying attention to sounds and the rhythm and the feeling of sound outdoors in space."
Wolff, who said he was "basically self-taught," completed his formal musical education in six weeks by studying under New York-based composer and music theorist John Cage when he was 16 years old. In that short period, Cage introduced Wolff to fellow avant-garde artist Merce Cunningham, the founder of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which performed at the Hopkins Center in July as part of its final tour. Wolff has composed for and collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on several occasions, and currently plays piano for its music ensemble.
Along with Cage, Cunningham and other experimental composers, Wolff created original compositions, later labeled as the New York School of music. Wolff referenced Cage's famous song "4'33"," composed of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, to describe the movement.
For composers of the New York School, sound matters "more than anything else," Wolff said.
"Another feature, especially of time, was considerable use of silence sound being isolated by virtue of silence."
Because his radical music did not guarantee a steady income, Wolff also pursued his collegiate interest in classics for steadier work.
"When I started in the '50s, what we were doing was regarded as completely far-out, and by traditional music standards, completely unacceptable," Wolff said. "I had to find a day job, so to speak."
After completing an eight-year stint in the Harvard University classics department, Wolff came to Dartmouth in 1971 to teach classics and comparative literature. Fellow composer and Dartmouth professor John Appleton also recruited Wolff to the music department, which at that time housed the first music studio in the Ivy League. Wolff taught in all three departments until his retirement in 1999.
"My music has a kind of teaching dimension to it," Wolff said. "A lot of it is written for people to play who are not necessarily professional musicians, and a lot of it is about learning the music."
Wolff said his favorite class to teach at Dartmouth was "A Workshop in Experimental Music," which he designed to include any interested stduents. The course had no prerequisites and relied upon unconventional, prose-oriented composition and instruction.
Lea's time at the College was more disjointed than Wolff's decades-long career. A prolific writer who has published nine volumes of poetry, a novel and an essay collection, Lea laughed that his Dartmouth career was fractured by the "publish or perish" mentality in the English department when he arrived in 1969.
"I decided to go full bore for poetry and I was denied tenure," he said.
After leaving Dartmouth in 1976, Lea taught in the burgeoning creative writing department at Middlebury College for 15 years and founded the prestigious New England Review, a literary magazine that he edited until 1989. He returned to Dartmouth in 2000 to teach creative writing in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and periodically taught at the undergraduate level until earlier this year.
"I was always energized by the students," Lea said. "I was excited to see the best of them and their writing. That seemed to charge me up to keep at it myself."
Though honored as the poet laureate in Vermont, Lea writes in several other genres, most commonly essays.
"I find an almost perfect continuity between lyrical poetry and lyrical essays," Lea said. "Those modes allow me to operate in a non-rational, unplotted way to record the ways in which my mind comprehends things."
Lea's lyrical writing, which delves into the American Northeast's natural environment and inhabitants, has been compared to the work of Robert Frost, who was Vermont's first poet laureate. Though Lea conjectured that Frost would not approve of his frequent use of first-person narration, he said that Frost heavily influences his writing
"It feels to me that Frost, writing about everyday characters and situations in a very natural and unaffected way, was a model for me," Lea said. "I have a sort of enabling fiction when I write, [so] that the most rudimentarily educated neighbor would be able to come to my poetry and get something."
Though Frost remains a poetic precedent and guiding figure, Lea is primarily inspired by the people he has met in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine over the course of almost 50 years.
"I'm old enough to have known men and women in the north country like we'll never see again, people who lived in this region before the arrival of electricity in the woods, people who preceded the television industry and made their own entertainment," Lea said. "They were wonderful storytellers and wonderful poets."
As poet laureate, Lea said he will visit community libraries to read and promote discussion with "smart people out there who don't necessarily have Ivy League educations." He will also write a monthly column to be published in five Vermont newspapers.
"I'm a guy who lives in the woods," Lea said. "The natural world of New England is very much what I'm about."
