Christian Wolff
b. 1934
American
Summary
Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France, but has lived mostly in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, associations with John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Earle Brown, Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew have been important for him. A particular feature of his music has been to allow performers various degrees of freedom and interaction at the actual time of performance. His music is published by C.F. Peters, New York, and a good portion of it has been recorded. A number of pieces have been used by Merce Cunningham and the Cunningham Dance Company, starting in 1953.
Biography
Christian Wolff was born in 1934 in Nice, France, but has lived mostly in the U.S. since 1941. He studied piano with Grete Sultan and, briefly, composition with John Cage. Though mostly self-taught as a composer, associations with John Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Earle Brown, Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew have been important for him. A particular feature of his music has been to allow performers various degrees of freedom and interaction at the actual time of performance. His music is published by C.F. Peters, New York, and a good portion of it has been recorded. A number of pieces have been used by Merce Cunningham and the Cunningham Dance Company, starting in 1953.
Wolff has also been active as a performer and as an improviser - with, among others, Takehisa Kosugi, Steve Lacey, Keith Rowe, William Winant, Kui Dong, Larry Polansky and the group AMM. His writings on music, up to 1998, are collected in the book Cues: Writings and Conversations, published by MusikTexte, Cologne. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Cultural Council, the Fromm Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award for music) and the Mellon Foundation. He is a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and has received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Academically trained at Harvard as a classicist, Wolff has taught classics at Harvard and from 1971 to 1999 was professor of Classics and Music at Dartmouth College.
Performances
Features
- Christian Wolff at 90
- As fellow Edition Peters composer George Lewis observes, “Christian Wolff has lived more lifetimes in music than even his date of birth would suggest.” Self-taught but for composition lessons with John Cage, Wolff was a key member of the post-WWII New York experimental music scene that included Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and pianist David Tudor, among others. For the majority of Wolff’s adult life, he served as a professor of classics at Harvard and later Dartmouth, with waves of musical productivity supplementing his career as an academic.
- Independent Repertoire: Engaging with American Musical Traditions
- Aspirations to craft a uniquely “American” classical sound, nostalgia for the music of our childhoods, desire to imagine the sounds of our past, and attempts to honor the influence of musical colleagues: these are some of the motives behind the following works, which pay tribute to the musical heritage of the United States.