Christian Wolff (composer) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Christian G. Wolff is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

of experimental classical music

Experimental music

Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...

Biography

Wolff was born in Nice

Nice

Nice is the fifth most populous city in France, after Paris, Marseille, Lyon and Toulouse, with a population of 348,721 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Nice extends beyond the administrative city limits with a population of more than 955,000 on an area of...

in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff

Kurt Wolff

Kurt Wolff was a German publisher, editor, writer and journalist.Wolff was born in Bonn, Rhenish Prussia. Together with Ernst Rowohlt he began to work in publishing in Leipzig in 1908. He was the first to promote and publish the authors Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel...

, who had published works by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

, Robert Musil

Robert Musil

Robert Musil was an Austrian writer. His unfinished long novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels...

, and Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...

. After relocating to the U.S. in 1941, they helped found Pantheon Books

Pantheon Books

Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.-Overview:...

along with other European intellectuals who had fled Europe during the rise of fascism

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

. The Wolffs published a series of notable English translations of mostly European literature, as well as an edition of the I Ching
I Ching
The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...

that would prove influential upon John Cage

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer, music theorist, writer, philosopher and artist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde...

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

Grete Sultan

Grete Sultan was a German-American pianist.Born in Berlin into a musical family, she studied piano from an early age with American pianist Richard Buhlig, and later with Leonid Kreutzer and Edwin Fischer...

for lessons in composition with new music

Contemporary classical music

Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s with the retreat of modernism. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 modern musical forms.-Categorization:...

composer John Cage

John Cage

and quickly became a close associate of Cage and his artistic circle, which included fellow composers Earle Brown

Earle Brown

Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems...

and Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman

Morton Feldman was an American composer, born in New York City.A major figure in 20th century music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown...

, pianist David Tudor

David Tudor

David Eugene Tudor was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.- Biography :Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He studied piano with Irma Wolpe and composition with Stefan Wolpe and became known as one of the leading performers of avant garde piano music. He gave the...

, and dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham

Merce Cunningham

Mercier "Merce" Philip Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of the American avant-garde for more than 50 years. Throughout much of his life, Cunningham was considered one of the greatest creative forces in American dance...

. Cage relates several anecdotes about Wolff in his one-minute Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy
Indeterminacy or underdeterminacy may refer to:* Indeterminacy in computation * aleatoric music and indeterminacy in music.* Statically indeterminate*Indeterminacy a literary term...

pieces.

Almost completely self-taught as composer, Wolff studied music under Sultan and Cage, and later studied classics at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

(BA, PhD), becoming an expert on Euripides

Euripides

Euripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...

. He taught there until 1970, when he started teaching classics, comparative literature

Comparative literature

Comparative literature is an academic field dealing with the literature of two or more different linguistic, cultural or national groups...

, and music at Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

. 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

California Institute of the Arts

The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...

. 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

Schema

The word schema comes from the Greek word "σχήμα" , which means shape, or more generally, plan. The plural is "σχήματα"...

, 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

Frederic Rzewski

Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...

and Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...

who spurred each other on in their respective explorations of experimental composition techniques and musical improvisation

Musical improvisation

Musical improvisation is the creative activity of immediate musical composition, which combines performance with communication of emotions and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to other musicians...

, 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

Harry Braverman

Harry Braverman was an American Socialist, economist and political writer. He sometimes used the pseudonym Harry Frankel.Braverman was born on the 9th December 1920 in New York City...

), and the series of pieces entitled Peace March (1983–2005) have an explicit political

Politics

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...

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." http://www.ocnmh.cz/s_i.php?a=143

Wolff's music reached a new audience when Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth is an American alternative rock band from New York City, formed in 1981. The current lineup consists of Thurston Moore , Kim Gordon , Lee Ranaldo , Steve Shelley , and Mark Ibold .In their early career, Sonic Youth was associated with the No Wave art and music scene in New York City...

's "Goodbye, 20th Century

SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century

SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century is a double album of covers of avant-garde recordings by Sonic Youth and collaborators.SYR4 features 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...

" featured works by avant-garde classical composers such as John Cage

John Cage

, Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono

is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her marriage to John Lennon...

, Steve Reich

Steve Reich

Stephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...

, and Christian Wolff played by Sonic Youth along with several collaborators from the modern avant-garde music scene, such as Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay

Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...

, William Winant

William Winant

William Winant is an American percussionist.In addition to his work in contemporary classical music -- notably performing Lou Harrison's compositions—Winant has worked in a variety of genres, including noise rock, free improvisation and jazz. Notable collaborators include Glenn Spearman, Thurston...

, Wharton Tiers

Wharton Tiers

Wharton Tiers is an American audio engineer, record producer, drummer and percussionist.- Biography :Diplomed from Villanova University , he moved to New York City in 1976 and was part of the No Wave scene.As an audio engineer and record producer, he has worked on projects such as Sonic Youth,...

, Takehisa Kosugi

Takehisa Kosugi

is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement.Kosugi studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1962....

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
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; (1820 – 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves...

(1985)
Piano Trio (Greenham-Seneca-Camiso) (1985) Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was a peace camp established to protest at nuclear weapons being sited at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. The camp began in September 1981 after a Welsh group, Women for Life on Earth, arrived at Greenham to protest against the decision of the British...

The Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice
The Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice
The Seneca Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice has also been referred to as: the Encampment, the Women’s Encampment, the Women's Peace Camp, the Peace Camp, the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, "the girls at the ladies' camp," [by some people in the local...
Percussionist Songs (1994–95)
Ordinary Matter (2001–04)
John Heartfield
John Heartfield
John Heartfield is the anglicized name of the German photomontage artist Helmut Herzfeld...

(Peace March 10) (2002)
Microexercises (2006)

External links

Art of the States: Christian Wolff
Works
Interview
Two pieces
http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~larry/trio/trio_sounds.htmlImprovisations with Kui Dong
Kui Dong
Kui Dong is a Chinese-American composer, musician, and teacher. She is known for her music which has often incorporated traditional Chinese music into contemporary contexts, and is currently Professor of Music at Dartmouth College - Background in China :Kui Dong claims she was forced into...

and Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky
Larry Polansky is a composer, guitarist, mandolinist, and a professor at Dartmouth College. He is a founding member and co-director of . He co-wrote HMSL with Phil Burk and David Rosenboom....

]
John Heartfield

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Biography

Music

Some major pieces

Further reading

External links