- Christian Wolff (composer)
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Not to be confused with Hellmuth Christian Wolff or Christian Wolff (baroque composer).
Christian Wolff at his prepared piano performance, 2007.
Christian G. Wolff (born March 8, 1934) is an American composer of experimental classical music.
Contents
Biography
Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S. in 1941, they helped found Pantheon Books along with other European intellectuals who had fled Europe during the rise of fascism. The Wolffs published a series of notable English translations of mostly European literature, as well as an edition of the I Ching that would prove influential upon John Cage after Wolff gave it to him as a present.
After the family moved to the United States in 1941, Wolff became an American citizen in 1946. At the age of sixteen he was sent by his piano teacher Grete Sultan for lessons in composition with new music composer John Cage and quickly became a close associate of Cage and his artistic circle, which included fellow composers Earle Brown and Morton Feldman, pianist David Tudor, and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage relates several anecdotes about Wolff in his one-minute Indeterminacy pieces.[1]
Almost completely self-taught as composer, Wolff studied music under Sultan and Cage, and later studied classics at Harvard University (BA, PhD), becoming an expert on Euripides. He taught there until 1970, when he started teaching classics, comparative literature, and music at Dartmouth College. After nine years, he became Strauss Professor of Music there. He stopped teaching at Dartmouth in 1999. In 2004 he received an honorary degree from the California Institute of the Arts. With his wife Holly, Wolff has four children: Hew, a computer programmer living in Oakland, CA; Tamsen, a professor of Drama and English at Princeton University; Nicholas, a graduate student in Archaeology at Boston University; and Tristram, a graduate student in Comparative Literature at University of California Berkeley.
Music
Wolff's early compositional work included a lot of silence and was based initially on complicated rhythmic schema[disambiguation needed
], and later on a system of aural cues. He innovated unique notational methods in his early scores and found creative ways of dealing with improvisation within his written music. During the 1960s he developed associations with the composers Frederic Rzewski and Cornelius Cardew who spurred each other on in their respective explorations of experimental composition techniques and musical improvisation, and then from the early 1970s in their respective attempts to engage with political matters in their music. For Wolff this often involved the use of music and texts associated with protest and political movements such as the Wobblies. His later pieces often give a degree of freedom to the performers such as the sequence of pieces entitled Exercises (1973-). Some works, such as Changing the System (1973), Braverman Music (1978, after Harry Braverman), and the series of pieces entitled Peace March (1983–2005) have an explicit political dimension responding to contemporary world events and broader political ideals.Wolff recently said of his work that it is motivated by his desire "to turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity (performer into composer into listener into composer into performer, etc.), the cooperative character of the activity to the exact source of the music. To stir up, through the production of the music, a sense of social conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed." [1]
Wolff's music reached a new audience when Sonic Youth's "Goodbye, 20th Century" featured works by avant-garde classical composers such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Steve Reich, and Christian Wolff played by Sonic Youth along with several collaborators from the modern avant-garde music scene, such as Christian Marclay, William Winant, Wharton Tiers, Takehisa Kosugi and others.
Some major pieces
- Duo for Pianists I (1957)
- For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964)
- Edges (1968)
- Prose Collection (1968–71)
- Burdocks (1970–71)
- Exercises (1973- )
- Wobbly Music (1975–76)
- I Like to Think of Harriet Tubman (1985)
- Piano Trio (Greenham-Seneca-Camiso) (1985) Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp The Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice
- Percussionist Songs (1994–95)
- Ordinary Matter (2001–04)
- John Heartfield (Peace March 10) (2002)
- Microexercises (2006)
Further reading
- (1998) Cues: Writings & Conversations/Hinweise: Schriften und Gespräche, Köln: Musiktexte (eds.) G. Gronemeyer & R.Oehlschagel.
- (2001) Robert Carl, Christian Wolff: On tunes, politics, and mystery, in Contemporary Music Review. Issue 4, pp. 61–69.
- (2002) Frank J. Oteri, A chance encounter with Christian Wolff, in NewMusicBox [United States]; 3/11:35; Mar. http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=35fp00
- (2004) Stephen Chase & Clemens Gresser, 'Ordinary Matters: Christian Wolff on his Recent Music', in Tempo 58/229 (July), pp. 19–27.
- (2006) Rzewski, Frederic "The Algebra of Everyday Life". Liner note essay on Christian Wolff. New World Records.
- (2009) Steenhuisen, Paul. "Interview with Christian Wolff". In Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0888644749
- (2009) Tilbury, John "Christian Wolff and the Politics of Music". Liner note essay. New World Records.
- (2010) Chase, Stephen & Thomas, Philip (editors), "Changing the System: the Music of Christian Wolff" Ashgate, 2010
References
External links
Categories:- 1934 births
- Living people
- 20th-century classical composers
- 21st-century classical composers
- American composers
- French emigrants to the United States
- American people of French descent
- Harvard University alumni
- Lowell House alumni
- American people of German descent
- French people of German descent
- American musicians of German descent
- Dartmouth College faculty
- Experimental composers
- Industrial Workers of the World
- Tzadik Records artists
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